Archive for February, 2009

You have created a brilliant website and are looking for steady increase in traffic. There are many creative ways to drive more traffic to your site. The following seven step guide can give you some idea to boost traffic.
1. Press release submission
2. Article submission
3. Social book marking
4. Banner advertising
5. Email marketing
6. Blogging
7. Forum posting

Let us talk about each step in detail below:
1. Press release submission:
Press release is the best way to announce new releases, business milestones and build brand awareness. By posting news or articles about your business in other search engines or Google News, you can receive quality back-links which can lead to increase in targeted traffic to your site.

2. Article submission:
Nowadays posting informative articles in popular article directories is easy as it can be done through the use of article submission software or with the help of the article marketing services. Using article submission software is considered to be less expensive and time consuming than the second one. After submitting articles, you will begin to notice flow of the targeted traffic to your site. Keep in mind; people are looking for fresh content as well as valuable information. If you want to develop a name for your website and the products /services that you are offering, article marketing is the best and most efficient way to do it.

3. Social book marking:
There are a number of exceptional benefits that you can reap by working with social bookmarking sites. You can bookmark your site in social bookmarking sites like digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc. It will bring you a massive volume of traffic to your site. This in turn will make your site popular and increase your page rank.

4. Banner advertising:
Banner advertising is another efficient way of promoting your products and services to drive customers to your site. It attracts more visitors to your site.

5. Email marketing:
Email marketing is a personal, interactive and extremely cost effective method to distribute your advertisements via email. It allows you to stay in touch with your prospective customers on a regular basis. Once you initiate your email marketing method, you can gain targeted traffic to your site.

6. Blogging:
It really helps webmasters who are struggling to generate sufficient traffic. Blogs give you an opportunity to connect with a larger audience and share your knowledge. By posting valuable articles on popular blogs under corresponding niches, site traffic will automatically increase.

7. Forum posting:
A forum allows you to exchange ideas and information with a wider audience. Actively participating in popular forums related to your niche will help build trust among forum members. This plays an important role in attracting traffic to your site.

Use the above steps effectively to get targeted traffic to your site.

Social bookmarking is one of the recent trends, to store and organize needed items in public websites, and place individuals’ bookmarks as public or private. Site users can simply select a social bookmarking site, choose the category or tag that matches their interest, and bookmark the items. It is very useful when collecting a set of resources that site users may want to share with others. Users can access their bookmarks anytime and anywhere they can get access to the internet from.

Users can store their favourite websites, and look at what other people have bookmarked under various categories like sports, politics, shopping, news, latest technology and so on.

Going into search engines, typing something in, and searching for the right stuff can be boring, annoying, and take a lot of time. Social bookmarking saves site users’ precious time, and a lot of searching. They can also find interesting things that they may not have heard of before, by accessing others’ bookmarked lists.

Some social bookmarking sites allow site users to subscribe to the content. If they find users with similar thoughts and interests, they can subscribe to those users, and receive links bookmarked by them. Users can also comment on others’ popular bookmarked items. Commenting on bookmarks enables others to find about links easily and know what others think about the link. Apart from URL; they can also share photos with their friends or public in general. They can also maintain private photos and access them from anywhere through the net.

Social bookmarking is sure to bring targeted traffic and increase page ranks. After a site is launched, webmasters need not update it frequently. Site members will do that for them, by bookmarking favorite links and tagging keywords. In turn, it leads to making your presence felt across the internet.

What’s more? There are hundreds of social bookmarking scripts available in the market but we cannot guarantee how good they are. Remember the right use of social bookmarking software can keep customers returning to your website over and over. Make sure you pick the right one for instant success

Step 1: Goal

Decide what type of website you need to launch, it may be a personal website, commercial website or non-profit organization website. Websites can be developed for anything like sharing ideas/thoughts, reviewing books, products or games, promoting products/services or offering information about a city, event, historical place, etc.

Step 2: Domain registration

In order to start a website, you need to register for a domain and get it hosted through a hosting company.

Just select a domain name that appropriately suits your website and check its availability with domain registrars like namecheap.com, sedo.com, godaddy.com etc. Most registrars charge around $ 15 – 35/year for registration and take one – three days for registration, and some of them offer hosting services at reasonable costs to place the domain on the internet.

You can choose a domain registrar that offers both domain registration and web hosting services, or register a domain with a registrar and choose any web hosting company for hosting the registered domain.

Step 3: Web development

In the past, developing a web site was a big thing which could be done only by developers having knowledge of HTML and programming. But this is not the case anymore; the current web design industry offers open source software and ready-made scripts to develop a website easily, even without any knowledge on HTML.

If you want to run a site like popular websites YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc, you can chose a clone software of those popular sites available in the market. When you have decided to get a clone script, check its features and reliability by viewing its demo, review content and testimonials and then buy it.

Start your dream website by following these three steps. Don’t stop with the web development alone, you have to maintain and promote it to survive in the web world. This can be done easily by outsourcing web maintenance and promotion to a well-experienced web development company.

Do you want to stay in touch with your existing customers? Then you have landed on the right page. Today business people are more focused on attracting new customers, than maintaining a healthy relationship with their current and past customers. They are hence missing out on the opportunity to cultivate long term interactions with them. Plus, annoying old customers isn’t exactly the best thing you can do for your business.

Sending frequent email newsletters to customers is one of the best ways to maintain healthy relationships, promote your business, sell your products, updates your potential customers, and retain existing customers.

When developing an email news letter, it’s important to take good decisions. Purpose of the letter or who it is written for, etc. are some of the things that you need to give attention to, so that it will connect you with the right group of people (loyal clients) from all over the world.

Creating a newsletter is very successful and inexpensive way to maintain contact with your clients on a continuous basis. Here are some tips to make an ideal news letter:

• Review other professionals’ newsletters. You can simply look at quality newsletters on the internet, and that gives you the chance to get new ideas that include writing style, how to impress readers, and so on.

• Many websites offer free readymade newsletter templates. You can use them to prepare your own newsletters and save time.

• Know the purpose of your e- newsletter. New and informative content relevant to products/services should be the main feature of your news letter. It is better to keep your content as short as people don’t have enough time to read a long newsletter.

• Distributing newsletters are supposed to be scheduled on a regular basis. Whether you intend to send a weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter, you should keep your promises.

• People love receiving gifts – try to send some special offers for them on special occasions.

• Include high quality photos related to your products and services. It is sure to impress readers and help them know what your products are about.

Using a newsletter could be an effective internet marketing tool, if used correctly. It gives you the enough opportunity to maximize the effect of your marketing campaigns and start making money.

Bored of watching the same stuff on TV? Here’s something you could try – get to a computer that is connected to the internet, key in what you would like to watch, and voila, a list of websites that are going to interest you pops up. Remember to type the phrase “+video” along with whatever else you’re keying in. For example, if you are searching for videos on yoga exercises, type “yoga exercises + video”. This will make sure the results show only those pages that have videos of yoga.

Here we have listed some recent reports about online videos, gleaned from various sources.

“Online clips were watched more than four billion times by over 30 million people,” according to internet monitor comScore.

“YouTube was the big winner though, pulling in almost 24 million unique users, meaning it reached 77% of everyone who watched videos online” – BBC.

Another statistical report from comScore states that “over 150 million Americans (80 per cent of the entire U.S. internet audience) watched over 14 billion videos online in December.”

So how have online videos reached this position within a fairly short period of time? It’s actually quite simple. Anyone can find videos on absolutely anything, gardening, exercises, mobile phones, healthcare, lectures, arts, cultures, history, animals are just some of them. The best part is that these videos are free. The availability of TV shows online is another big reason for the popularity of online videos.

Even if you can’t find the videos you’re looking for, all you have to do is ask for it on forums, and within a few minutes, an unknown face will tell you where to find it. You might either get links to the video, or somebody might even upload it for you if they have it.

Owing to this kind of simplicity in getting desired information at zero cost, online videos have become the most preferred way to learn. Entertainment and advertising are two other fields where online videos are immensely popular. It seems now that online videos are replacing traditional television. Giants like Google have been able to foresee these effects and bought YouTube.com.

In the future, the world will turn more and more to online videos, for almost all of life’s solutions. Even special events like birthday parties, wedding ceremonies, Thanksgiving Day celebrations, inaugural functions etc can be shared with the world through online videos. They have more advantages than the TV any day.

Everyone relies on video sharing sites to share them, and millions of videos are uploaded in popular sites daily. In order to maintain their site’s efficiency, webmasters of popular sites are forced to remove some of them, as has happened recently with YouTube. People are now on the look out for more powerful video sharing sites, to be able to upload an unlimited number of videos.

This would be a good time to start your very own video sharing website. Pick up a readymade script and get to work!

Excellent customer service is the heart beat of any business. Customers are the backbone for any kind of business, so organizations are using latest trends and new technology to constantly improve their services and products to attract new customers and help existing customers with any problems they may have.

Remember that acquiring new customers is vital, but at the same time holding existing customers is also very important. You have to pay an immense amount of attention to satisfy customers by providing strong customer services to them.

The following tips will be helpful, if you’re looking at offering good customer service:

• Communicate with customers frequently by providing latest updates in newsletters and press release. Get their opinion on new releases, products and services through questionnaires to improve your service further.

• Pay special attention to customers’ comments, suggestions and recommendations, and implement them in your products. Keep in mind that paying attention to what customers have to say is one of the essential steps to good customer service.

• Be clear about what you deliver to your consumers. Explain how your products and services can benefit them and how they can meet their needs. A good healthy communication is sure to help form a good relationship with customers, and increase your sales rate as well.

• Offering user manuals and online video tutorials for products will help them use products effectively, even without any knowledge about it.

• Don’t make any promises because nothing annoys customers like a false or broken promise. Apart from this, recorded telephone messages, inflexible delivery times, refusing a refund etc, will also annoy customers.

• Recruit good customer service employees and give them the authority to make some difficult decisions without you. If employees make good decisions, appreciate and reward them to encourage further customer-oriented decision making.

• Customers always have something to say some about your services. Ask for their feedback, so you know where you stand, what you need to improve etc. and make sure you work on those.

Remember, if customers are satisfied with your service the word about your good service will spread, and automatically, your business will grow.

“Team work divides a task and doubles the success”

Coming together, sharing together, working together and succeeding together are what team work is all about. The essence of this statement is that success can be achieved as a team, when everybody on the team works towards it. Team work is a new concept that is being adopted by many companies to achieve their target quickly.

An organization can consist of different teams like top management team, focused task team, products/ services development team, product launch team, quality improvement team, and so on. However not all teams are successful because of fuzzy vision, lack of leadership skills, discouraging culture, lack of initiatives, poor vertical communication, poor idea and knowledge management, and so on.

Here are some effective team building ideas you can implement to manage a team effectively:

1. Make sure that the team’s goals are very clear and understood by each member of your team. Apart from this, team members have to know their roles and responsibilities to achieve targets on time.
2. Be active, not dormant. Each member is responsible for the team’s success. Try to learn the latest technology and see how you can implement it in your project, ask your team members questions, provide feedbacks and information, interact and discuss with others and so on.
3. Share your ideas and your experience, and make sure you complete designated jobs on time.
4. Use effective communication channels between one another. Emails, viral communication, group meetings and so on will enable team members of the group to work together and achieve the team’s purpose and goals.
5. Listen other people’s opinions.
6. Try to be patient. If any problems occur while working, use that as an opportunity to learn and try to overcome the problem rather than blaming others.
7. Treat others with respect, and support their ideas.
8. Keep timelines in mind while working on the project.
9. As a team leader you have to encourage creative thinking and reward your team mates for any innovative ideas they come up with.
10. Conduct training programs like knowledge improvement, personality development and leadership quality improvement, and offer recreation programs on a regular basis, to keep team members active and fresh at all times.

Benefits of teamwork:
1. Team members may come from different areas such as marketing, design, service, purchasing and so on. So more ideas and more creative solutions can be created, leading to better results.
2. Ultimate goals can be achieved faster.
3. Workload can be distributed.
4. Deliver extraordinary results using a wide range of skills.
5. Self confidence can be created.

Remember there is no ‘I’ in teamwork. Understand how it really works, and realize all its benefits, to be able to give it your best.

The human brain responds to images, color and film, better than any kind of text. This is the reason why advertisements on television always do better then print ads. The brain likes movement and responds to sound.

We all like things that please our eye, and the first thing you learn as an advertiser / designer, is to create something that is going to catch attention. It just so happens, that movement, like in a video, alerts the brain, as it processes what is going on, and anticipates what it is to see in the next few seconds. Something in print, on the other hand, is static. Our eyes take it in at one go, and the brain doesn’t need to function any further. It therefore holds attention for fewer moments.

When you visit a website, pretty much the same stuff applies there as well. Nobody really has the time to sit and read through your product’s features and how lovely they are. To make an instant impact, nothing works like a well done flash video. Use the right images, the right colors, the right sound, and customers are attracted to it like nothing else. If you run an online business, it makes it all the more important that your website has good videos of everything you have to offer.

If you own a business otherwise, and own a website to promote it online, good videos are bound to increase your sales, considering the number of people that access the internet today. For example, if you own a shop that sells sports equipment and you have the best equipment from all over the world, if your website is unimpressive, you are losing out on a large number of customers. With powerful and impressive videos of sports champs, and how they can’t do without excellent equipment, everybody who visits your site is inspired to buy something, whether they are into sports or not. You have an edge over all your competitors, and people tend to buy from you, rather than from someone else, even though it might the same equipment. What’s more, if your website is well designed and has a flash video playing motivating videos, you just might be able to expand your business and have people order equipment online. So that means more sales, more money.

Whether your website is about sports, tourism, religion, books, or anything else under the sun, including videos on it attracts more people. When there’s a video player on the website, people are compelled to watch the video out of sheer curiosity. So the next step, after making sure your video is excellent, is to ensure your player is good enough, and has features that people are comfortable working with. There are a very large number of players available, make sure you pick the right one for your website, and watch your sales grow multifold.

For many, the Google Slap has had a major impact. Google slap is nothing but “The Google adwords slap”. It is an outcome of Google AdWords quality score. Basically, there are too many advertisers advertising for the same thing, not all of them are that relevant, and this is why Google Slap was created. If you are promoting a product or a service using Google Adwords, your ads, keywords and landing page must all be relevant to what you are promoting, and above all, the quality of landing is very important. By ensuring your Ads are relevant, Google will reward you and you will pay less and get better results.

Has your site been slapped by Google? No worries, here are the big secrets to getting “unslapped”.
Make sure your landing page is tightly focused on the keywords you are bidding on. If the content on your page is not related to the keyword, it will surely hurt your quality score and you are most likely to get slapped by Google.

Create different landing pages for different keyword groups – for example some people search for ‘cell phones’ others search for ‘mobile phones’ even though they are the same thing, group your keywords in to different ad groups and create two separate pages targeted at the individual keywords.

You should have unique content on site and keep in mind it should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site. Having quality content on your site like articles, reports, news and so forth will help your AdWords listings. In addition, when you add content to your site, make sure you create links directly to your content page from the landing page.

Create a “Site Map” and links to all your content pages directly from the site map.

Stop using bullet points and replace them with full text content – sentences and paragraphs.
Content rich sites are more likely to obtain incoming links from other sites. Add few low key outbound links to high page rank sites. These links will also pull in targeted traffic. Try to put these at the very bottom of page.

Make sure the anchor text on links is well structured from an SEO point of view.
You should promote your site through article & direction submissions, press releases and so on.

Make sure your page is very fast to load – upgrade your host if necessary (link to your recommended hosts page!)

Just take the time to do it right, and save your site from Google slap.