Small Business: 3 Ways to Build Website Traffic

Posted on Feb 19, 2011 by DeAnna to SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing

Many small businesses struggle with increasing traffic to their websites. Building traffic to your website does not have to be a large monetary investment, just a bit of your time and effort.

1. Establish Relationships with Other Websites
Get to know the key players in your market. Try to reach out to these sites for placing links back to your page, advertising through their page, or allow them to place links on your page as well; however keep outbound links to a minimum. The more pages that link to your page the more direct traffic you will have. Search engine spiders will see these links and immediately index your site. As a result, this will not only increase your traffic but may also increase your page rank and create a higher visibility online.

2. Blogging
Yes, you will need to create a blog and be actively involved in content updates. This is a very effective way to not only build website traffic, but let customers get to know you and your company. You do not need to post everyday; however a few times a week will keep users interested. Besides posting on your own blog, get to know others in the blogging community, specifically those that relate to your business. This will help in your quest for more website traffic as well as promote your credibility. Websites such as WordPress or Blogger provide you with all the tools to create your own blog for free.

3. Social Media
It’s time to jump on the Facebook bandwagon! If you have not created a Facebook Fan Page I suggest you do so. Utilizing a Fan Page will give you the opportunity to interact with your customers, promote specials, offer coupons, showcase testimonials and reviews, etc. Most importantly, utilizing social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, is a great way to connect with other businesses or consumers within the same niche. Be sure to link your website and blog to these accounts, and don’t forget to keep-up with these accounts a few times a week to retain customer interest. One more reason to use social media: It can improve your rankings in search engines and is most likely to appear in results. In other words, your website may not be in the top 10 results, but your Facebook Page may be.

Tags: blogging, link building, Small Business, Social Media

Finding the Words to Blog (Pt. 3)

Posted on Feb 28, 2008 by Jonathan to Copywriting

You found your niche and words are beginning to coagulate into sentences and, hopefully, sentences into paragraphs. But crossing your fingers and wishing really, really, really hard won’t bring people to your blog. You have to be willing to put forth an extra effort to cultivate a following. Doing otherwise is like fishing without bait or being the world’s second fastest man—neither guarantee that anyone will take notice.

In this two-part installment, I provide a nightcap to earlier discussion on finding and maintaining blog content; the second confronts the uphill battle of summoning an audience.

No one expects you to be a constant wealth of creativity, but your audience is going to thrive on its consistency. To combat and prevent blogger-burnout, you’ll want to troll for ideas when your mind is most ripe.

Develop a writing schedule.

Allot specific times throughout your week to write. Adhere to them. Convince yourself that you must meet the deadlines you’ve made. This will give your blog consistency and condition readers to expect your latest creative outpours on a schedule.

Wake early.

This meshes into the above. You’re rejuvenated in the morning. Ideas are stifling and ready to overflow from your pen and onto a pad of paper, so try and make the effort to wake up a little earlier than usual; which segues into my final tip that is more of a personal preference, but has helped me with my own writing.

Write everything down.

Word processors are convenient, maybe even too convenient. They allow you to second-guess word choices and sentence structure. Every grammatical error is painfully underlined with red squiggles, so you feel the need to constantly edit yourself. Editing, mind you, is a completely separate process from writing.

What I find is that by scribbling everything down first, I am able to transcribe concrete ideas without being reminded of where I mess up; this, in turn, makes for output that is pure, and prime for editing.

With all the cogs churning and creative juices flowing, getting the spotlight cast over your blog extends a bit farther than what the infamous “content is king” saying implies; off-site interaction becomes the new focus.

Exchange links with other similar blogs.

This is helpful for when Google indexes your site and will elevate your exposure to an audience outside, but within close proximity, of your niche.

Guest blog.

Guest blogging lends you a voice of authority; because you would have never been invited if you weren’t one, right? See where I’m getting at? It makes you look good, the blog you’re writing for look good, and is forum for shameless self-promotion.

Provide a message board for your blog, and participate on other boards.

It’s all about creating interaction. A message board on your blog builds a community and communities interact—cause and effect.

Participating on other boards is a cheap form of advertising and if you’re an active member, you establish yourself as a reliable source of information, which does miracles for traffic.

Tags: blogging

Finding the Words to Blog (Pt. 2)

Posted on Feb 26, 2008 by Jonathan to Copywriting

In my last blog, I proposed a manifesto. They were a set of values that I felt every writer should conscientiously exercise, as to produce effective content. But what good is content without direction? In this blog, I slip on my kids’ gloves and guide you to authority-status of a niche.

In hindsight, I suppose I went about this series all wrong. To the neophyte blogger, I apologize; I took you under my direction and just sort of dropped you in the middle of a forest without your compass.

So to gain some grounding, we must first define who you are writing for and, more importantly, what you are writing.

Find a subject that interests you and don’t write about it.

If vegetables are your thing, writing about the whole lot of them will be exhausting and lacks consistency. Instead, focus your blog on something more specific; like butternut squash, for example, the “bulbous and misunderstood vegetable.”

Taking this approach may not be part of your original plan, but it will make you exact and relevant and elevate your search engine ranking; in turn, commanding a larger following.

Stalk your competition.

Now that you identified your niche, find out who your competition is and where they are slacking. This will help you establish a fresh angle to your content and make you unique—a commodity, even.

Write about what you know.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times teachers accosted me with this vital nugget of guidance. It may seem that “what you know” is boring and could never interest another person, but that is only because “what you know” has become so familiar and absent of that initial zeal.

By writing beyond your grasp on a subject, you run the risk of botching your message and sounding stupid.

Find your voice.

You don’t want to come across as a technical writer authoring a manual for ‘Efficient Energy Amplification in Subcritical Reactor Applications’, but shooting for Gonzo journalism could be perceived as pretentious; or wont’ be perceived at all.

A voice unique to you is going to determine how engaging your content is and whether any of it will stick.

Tags: blogging

Finding the Words to Blog (Pt. 1)

Posted on Feb 25, 2008 by Jonathan to Copywriting

There’s this scene from a movie, and I can’t bring myself to remember the title, but the plot had reached its climax and one of the actors turns to the other and begins to mouth something snarky, and almost immediately, that other actor interjects, “You better choose those next words carefully,” he says, “because they just might be your last.”

I’m pretty sure the scene fleshes out with the wrong words being said and a gunshot or two. The issue I’m stressing is that exact words—words that precisely relate a message, no filler, no fluff—separate books that are read from books that go unread; blogs that succeed from blogs that decay to inactivity. The right words are paramount to developing a readership and effective SEO.

The picking and choosing of words extends beyond strategizing for search engine ranking, they allow you to understand who you’re writing for, what’s going to grab their attention and ignite their curiosity until it becomes so paralyzing that the only means of extinguishing it is by clicking on your headline and soaking in your words.

I’ve composed a brief manifesto of sorts for the effective copywriter; a set of guidelines that you should actively practice until it becomes routine.

An effective copywriter…

• Knows how and when to use the results of keyword research to be perceived as an authority.
• Creates headlines that are unavoidable and seemingly the only clickable link on the page.
• Uses vibrant language in place of the bland, the overused, and the cliché.
• Filters out every tired metaphor and expression; they lost the power to their meaning a long time ago and fail to satisfy a reader’s appetite for hearty, satisfying content.

An example I’d like to use is a bit extreme and wouldn’t necessarily make for good copy, but it exercises a few of the above concepts, stripping a description of unnecessary language and keeping only what is necessary to convey meaning.

Among the rain/ and lights/ I saw the figure 5/ in gold/ on a red/ fire truck/ moving/ with weight and urgency/ tense/ unheeded/ to gong clangs/ siren howls/ and wheels rumbling/ through the dark city.

A lot of colorful imagery, right? This is a poem by William Carlos Williams titled ‘The Great Figure’. He could have just said…

I saw a fire engine the other night. It was red and had the number ’5′ painted in gold on its side. It was going really fast and was really noisy, so I can only assume that there was a fire or some other emergency that demanded their presence.

But then the raw visuals of the original become diluted by all the unnecessary language of the latter. Instead of assembling content and headlines that force the reader to wade through thick, entangling filler, just to extract something of substance, cut out the fat and you will warrant an audience.

Keyword researching allows you to better understand who you are writing for and hone in to a niche. This, in turn, will increase your relevance, and decrease the likelihood of someone escaping the hypnotizing allure of your words.

Tags: blogging

So Many Blogs, So Little Time

Posted on Feb 18, 2008 by Jonathan to Copywriting

Anyone can blog—and they do. Too many people share an undeserved confidence in their opinions and expertise; that it’s their voice that carries the most weight and is justified in its gusto. As a result, the blogosphere has become saturated to a discouraging level for many anxious and baby-faced newcomers.

To prove my point—that anyone and everyone blogs—I conducted a simple test. It was to see how fast I could register an account with WordPress and make my first post—a base set of goals, but by definition, a blog…

Palms resting on my desk, I stared into a blank screen cleared of any windows. When the little clock on my computer reached 9:31, I was off. I lunged for the mouse, super-anxious to start my new blog; a blog about dog-sweater knitting because, surely, it is a harbored affinity of many. I started up Firefox and made my way to the signup page, filled in 3 or 4 fields of required information and prayed that they would accept me as a member. What luck, for as soon as I checked my Gmail, I had an email from WordPress informing me of my acceptance and inviting me to make a post—and I did. I titled it ‘Why Dog Sweaters are The Best. Ever.’

“Because dressing up an animal like a human is hilarious.”

A quality post for the world to reflect over. Total Time: 1 minute 30 seconds.

But how do we veer from the mundane and monotony of, what is essentially, most blogs on the web? It’s a matter of persistence, to keep pumping out quality content on a regular basis. But it’s that kind of advice has been tired out, profusely. It’s understood that the thoughts and opinions you spill into your keyboard should be ones of merit and benefit to your audience. To establish and maintain presence, there are a number of rules that you should consider living your life by while taking residence in the blogosphere.

Your reason for blogging is not for money.

However difficult this may be, making a profit should not be a part of your immediate agenda. It comes as a result of time invested into the cultivation of your blog and developing it into an authority that accrues a following.

Be prepared to invest time.

This segues in from the first rule. Chances are, blogging is not your full-time job. Many of the most prolific writers had jobs to support their habit. They wrote on the side, which meant the finished product was not one of an evening’s work. The single most taxing phase of blogging is the development of the blog.

Upgrade and upkeep the visual components of your blog.

The default theme for WordPress, like most blogging tools, is drab and reflects something cold and sterile. To me, the descriptions are comparative to a hospital; a depressing hospital. Do you want visitors to relate visiting your blog to visiting an uncle with a terminal illness? Unless your blog is about Hospice care, then probably not. Spend the time or money into differentiating your blog from the million others.

Try not to only niche blog.

Niches are fine. They are why there is such overwhelming diversity to the blogosphere. But the ones that stand out do so by dabbling in other subjects. I wouldn’t post a review of a toaster-oven on my dog-sweater example-blog, but I might discuss other topics of pertinence.

Don’t be discouraged by slow or inconsistent traffic.

If you are just starting out, this is normal. In fact, it’s expected. The traffic should resemble a rollercoaster, spiking one day, dipping the next, maybe even riding along a plateau for a few. You are new and people are just finding out about you and deciding whether reading your words is worth their time. It may be like this for a few months, but if you follow the above advice, it should pick up. It is only when this inconsistence becomes something terminal that you will need to either address where you’ve been slacking or decide to just call it quits and find something new to blog about.

Tags: blogging

Staying Current and Staying Relevant or How do I increase my Blog Traffic?

Posted on Apr 11, 2007 by Melanie to General

Let me just start by saying how much I dislike the term blogosphere or even the term blog, unfortunately I don’t have much of a say in calling it something else.
Online search is dominated by current events and entertainment. A look at Google Zeitgeist or the even more current Yahoo Buzz will give you a solid look as to what people are searching for on the web.
By using these topics as subject matter in your blog you open yourself to the opportunity of more visitors and increased exposure. Now I really have no interest in who Anna Nicole Smiths baby is or who the father is this week, but it is quite the hot topic out there, albeit irrelevant to SEO.

Or is it?

Personally I would like to know more about what pet foods have been recalled and what pet foods contain wheat gluten so I don’t feed it to my dog. Look 2 search terms in the same sentence; see what I’m getting at? Integrating current search phrases can be beneficial but it also needs to be relevant.
The remarks Don Imus made about the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team and the resulting media frenzy really have no business in this forum, but if you happen to run an entertainment oriented blog, jumping on items like this as soon as they break can shoot your ranking higher and give you the credibility to attract new visitors and retain them.

Speaking of breaking news, this morning Viacom and Yahoo announced an online advertising deal. Considering Viacoms billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against Google (mainly clips of their media showing up on YouTube and Google Video), Yahoo still has the number 2 spot in the search world.
Yahoo is also more user friendly and has an established community to a solid user experience and monetize traffic. Google on the other hand has recently taken up with the Time Warner ran AOL to integrate AdSense ads into AOL search queries. This little deal increased AOL ad revenue by 49 percent last quarter and will continue to see improvement as brand names invest in enhanced placement in AOL search.
Ever having another card up their sleeve, Google is also in the process of brokering a deal to run ads on DirectTV although details are few until an official announcement is made.

Now how many search phrases does my blog entry have?

Tags: blogging

Helpful Blogging Tips

Posted on Dec 27, 2006 by Damien to General

So you’ve set up a blog now what? What do you write about? These are just two of many questions that arise once you or your company set up a blog. Here are a few guidelines I usually follow when writing blog entries.

1. Write as if you’re talking to one person. It’ll be one person reading your entry so make it seem even more personal by addressing them individually. Use “you” and “your” instead of “you guys” or “everybody”.

2. Write about things you know about…. or things you want to. By writing about things you’re either an expert about or very familiar with gives the subject an honest point of view and you’re not just regurgitating something someone else has already written about. Writing about questions or challenges you’ve run into and had to problem solve on is also a great method of spreading online knowledge. If you’ve taken the time to research a problem chances are someone else out there will too and may just hit your blog looking for the same answer.

3. Write like you talk but don’t overdo it. Slang terms and OMG (text shorthand) are primary no-no’s. The best way to convey a story, subject or experience is to write in fist person and let it flow just like a conversations. That is, in fact, what you’re having with your readers.

4. Keep it short. We all have a tendency to overwrite when a subject really interests us. By writing short conversational pieces you’ll engage your readers without making it seem too much like work. If you do need to continue writing put it on another blog page by utilizing the “read more…” aspect of most blogs. This normally opens up a full page for your entire article.

5.Grab their interests. The subject is the first and sometimes the last thing your reader ever sees. Keep them short, snappy and descriptive. Questions in subjects often get the greatest response because the user knows whether or not they care to find the answer.

6. Write as if you’re future or current boss will read it. Refrain from cursing or sticking your foot in your mouth. It can and probably will come back to haunt you.

Tags: blogging