Generate Free Web Traffic by understanding Web Advertising

More money is wasted on advertising than any other business function. That is not to say businesses shouldn’t advertise but rather people should understand how advertising works. There are many ways to characterize ads, but for our purposes let’s make it simple and separate advertising into two distinct approaches: saturation and emotional.

One of the things I’ve learned over a long career is that business folk invariably take their lead from the wrong sources. Small and medium size businesses look to the mega corporations to learn their tricks and adopt their attitudes when they have little in common – advertising being no exception. Since our clients are mostly medium or small size companies we try to help put some of these issues into perspective.

If you’re big enough and have the money available, there are all kinds of marketing initiatives you can invest in, but if you have a limited marketing budget you need to be smart about how and on what you spend your advertising dollars. And the most effective and cost efficient place to spend those dollars is on your website. Yes you need to attract people to your site, but if once they arrive they find it lacks intriguing, engaging content, then you’ve wasted your money. So what tactical approach should you take to deliver your marketing message?

Saturation Advertising

The first approach is saturation advertising like you see on television. Anyone who has spent an evening sitting in front of the TV set is familiar with what I am talking about: the constant repetition of the same commercials over and over until the ads become an unwelcome irritation. The fact is no matter what you do to avoid commercials they eventually seep into your head. Even fast forwarding through commercials on a recorded program has an effect. Saturation advertising depends on repetition not quality, which is why some of the worst and/or stupidest commercials can still be effective.

There are some great commercials on television that do engage the audience with an entertaining, memorable, marketing message that enhances the brand and generates leads, but when push comes to shove, television advertising is all about repetition not quality.

Does Saturation Advertising Work?

Does saturation advertising work? The short answer is yes it does, at least for a television audience it does. Most people believe that it works on others but not on them, a phenomenon, psychologists call the Third Party Effect. The fact is, repeating something automatically makes it appear more believable.

The majority of people will respond that they don’t pay attention to commercials, but inattention does not protect you from the influence of repeated messaging. In fact bad commercials work better if the audience isn’t really paying attention, and fail when the audience is actually listening carefully. Careful attention brings to light all a message’s conceptual, technical and performance issues.

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Internet Marketing:Understanding Web Advertising

6 Easy Tips to Improved Facebook Marketing

Here's 6 Easy Tips to Improved Facebook Marketing you can learn and practice to get massive web traffic.

When it comes to social networking there’s little doubt that Facebook is the largest and most influential of the social networks online. It has more than 500 million registered user and, at the time of writing this, the average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. For businesses this means that a Facebook page or other piece of Facebook real estate is a serious way to generate social and viral traffic, but only if it is done well.

There are 900 million objects that people interact with which means, first and foremost, yours needs to stand out. It either needs to provide something that others don’t (unlikely given the amount of competition) or it needs to do what it does better than the competition. One of the most common mistakes by small businesses is believing that Facebook traffic is a quick hit; it can take months to build up a decent sized list of fans that avidly read your content, but there are some steps you can take to help attract greater numbers.

The Facebook Platform

Fortunately, there is an extensive platform on which you can build unique Facebook pages and interact with existing and potential readers and your business needs to make the most of these in order to generate the best possible results.

1. Be Unique Not Generic – There is a lot of competition on Facebook, regardless of the type and topic of content that you’re providing. Ensure your Facebook page really stands out by creating a unique design. You don’t have to have the standard Facebook page design and you can implement all sorts of features that help your visitors recognize you as a leader in your field.

You can also serve different landing pages to different visitors. For example, fans and first time visitors to your page do not need to see the same thing and Facebook offers the functionality to change these settings. Show a page that encourages non-followers to fan your page, and show the main content to those that have already done so. Provide incentives such as coupons for your products or services, or free resources like Ebooks and other giveaways, to members that have not yet clicked to follow your page.

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Internet Marketing: 6 Tips to Improved Facebook Marketing

Five Simple and Powerful Ways to Use Google Analytics

If you haven't started using Google Analytics on your website(s) or blogs, I highly highly recommend it. If you've set up an account but rarely look at it - I recommend you start looking.

First of all - what is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free analysis tool which gives you information on where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and a lot more. There are plenty of paid stat counters available which present data in different ways, but Google Analytics is one of the best, and it's free.

One can over-analyze or under-analyze any website. Some people spend too much time checking stats, analyzing, and planning, and don't spend enough time writing good content and getting new readers to their blogs.

On the other side of the pendulum, you could go on week after week, blindly publishing content and flailing along with offsite promotion, without seeing what results your campaigns are getting, which types of content is the most popular for your visitors, and which traffic-generation techniques are getting the best results.

The first is like tuning your car's engine every day without ever turning on the ignition, the second is like driving in the dark.

In between, we have a happy balance.

I find that the best times to check stats are when I don't have a lot of time to do a more intense project, or when I am a bit too tired to do anything more "heavy." Sometimes just before I go to bed at night is a good time to check into what has been happening between my visitors and my websites' pages. I can browse and poke around in my Analytics account and learn quite a lot - even with minimal energy.

Here are five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics:

1. Find out which of your website's pages are getting the most traffic, and optimize those pages.

If you are running ads on the pages, make sure they are properly placed and updated. If you are linking to affiliate products, make sure your links are up-to-date and that you aren't missing any links or new products which should be there. If you are using that page for some other purpose, such as to generate subscriptions or what-have-you, make sure that the page is laid out as well as possible.This can be helpful if you have a large website which has a long "to do" list and many things to optimize or tweak. By just starting with the most heavily-trafficked pages, you will get the maximum results from your efforts and also know where to start.

2. Find out which referrers are generating the most traffic, and continue to generate traffic from those referrers.For example, if you see that Twitter is generating a large amount of targeted traffic, you can increase your activity on Twitter. If you see that your article submissions are getting new visitors from article directories, you can remember not to drop those out - or possibly increase them. Conversely, if you see that you have been spending time/money on a traffic-generation method which is not getting very far, you can stop wasting your time on it (presuming you have given it time to take effect).

3. Find out which keywords you are ranking the best for, and see which ones you can "push to the top."

If you had a website on dogs, for example, and found that you were ranking at #30-#40 on Google for many keywords, but ranking #11 for, lets say, "dog chew toys," you might want to work on increasing your rankings on dog chew toys and focus more of your SEO efforts on this term (of course there are other factors you would consider as well, such as the searches and competition for this term). Climbing from position #31 to #20 will generally not get you a huge increase of traffic. But climbing from position #11 to position #3 almost certainly will. Focus first on keywords or key phrases that have the best chance of ranking high in the near future, and then move on to the others.

4. Find out which pages keep your visitors' attention for the longest.

If the average visitor on Page A stays for 5 seconds, while the average visitor to Page B stays for 150 seconds, the likelihood is that your visitors find Page B's content more interesting than Page A's.



5. Look at the graph of your bounce rate.


This tells you how many people left your site without visiting a second page. Depending on the website and the page, this may be a good or bad thing. But if you have a blog or a content site, it is usually a good sign when people stick around to view more of your posts and content before they leave.If your bounce rate increased or decreased after you made a certain change, you can opt to revert that change (if bounce rate increased) or keep it (if bounce rate decreased). For example, if I changed the theme of my Wordpress blog and then noticed a date-co-incident increase in my bounce rate, I might consider changing it back :) This statistic can be used in many ways - it will depend on the nature of your blog.

There are many, many other ways to use Google Analytics. The above are a few great ways to start, when you aren't familiar with or used to using this tracking system. Google Analytics can give you a far greater understanding of what's happening on your site and can guide you to continue on successful actions and drop the unsuccessful.


For more information on how to use Google Analytics, including video tutorials, and links to free information including a free eBook download on this subject, visit Anna's blog, at http://buildingfromnothing.com/understanding-google-analytics-how-to-use-it/

Five Crucial Components of Web Design

Professional website developers know the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful.

Designing a successful website is no easy task, especially for someone who is new to the world of web development. With the help of web development applications many people can and do create decent websites. But decent in most cases is not good enough to make a site successful from a traffic or financial standpoint.

There are five crucial components of web design that you must focus on in order to make a site valuable to its visitors and successful for you.

- SEO -
Getting free traffic to your site.

- Usability -
Ease of navigating around the site and finding desired information quickly.

- Aesthetics -
Visual appeal.

- Content -
Valid, up to date, relevant information.

- Graphics -
Eye candy that relays relevant visual information to the visitor.

SEO

Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic.

The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. Once you select keywords you can then begin the development of your site. Keep in mind keywords are a critical aspect of the design. The keywords you choose will be applied within the design in strategic fashion to benefit the flow of traffic to your site. To understand more on how to implement SEO you should read and learn more about this important subject. If you don't, your website success will be difficult to achieve.

Usability

Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. Visitors will not stay long if it takes more than one or two clicks to get the information they want or if it takes brain power to figure out how to get the information they want. One of the goals of your site design is to keep usability easy, and simple. To do this, apply the following three fundamentals of usability.

* Provide a site search tool.

A visitor in a hurry can quickly find the info they desire then move on to the action they desire.

* Provide simple, intuitive and consistent site navigation.

This provides visitors the tool they need to leisurely explore their way through your site.

* Provide logical and simple to follow content.

The message of a site should start off in a simple and basic fashion with well defined links pointing the way to more detailed information or explanation as needed.

In the cases above the goal is to make it easy for your visitor to find the information they want without frustration or difficulty. Doing this well will have a positive effect on increasing the return of your visitors.

Aesthetics

A website has to look clean, uncomplicated and strike a balance in layout that is pleasant to the visitor. Pleasing aesthetics come about when the colors of a site complement each other, the graphics blend and lend continuation of the theme and the layout brings unity and openness to the page.

Often overlooked by novice designers is the color palette of the site. While you can select color in a willy-nilly fashion and still provide a visually appealing site, a better idea for color selection should be based on an understanding of the color wheel and proven color strategies.

Many web designers often view a web page as an opportunity to blast a visitor with lots of information in hopes this will convince the visitor to take action. Usually this results in a quick exit due to the overwhelming visual effect and complicated look. A better approach is to provide less content and open space (referred to as white space) to allow visitors eyes to scan and explore with ease.

Content

An important feature of any website is the quality of the text content. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value. The content offered at your site must be well-written, without grammatical or spelling errors. It also has to be relevant to the theme of your site, with valid, up to date information for your visitors. Content is King!

Graphics

You can have a functional and usable website without graphic elements. However, if there are similar sites to yours that employ graphics, guess which site will get the most traffic. The necessary companions to any well-designed site are the images and illustrations that grace its pages. The images can't be any willy-nilly graphic that you might think is cool. Graphic imagery has to support your branding, and communicate the message you are trying to convey. Before you incorporate graphic elements into your site, take some time to look around the web. Notice what looks good and how elements are laid out. These same layouts techniques can be used as models for your site.

The Internet is a highly competitive business arena. To be successful with a commercial website, you have to keep these five crucial web design elements in mind. Contrary to what many will tell you, it is rarely possible to have commercial success without the benefit of a professional website. This is not to say that you must hire a professional, however you must implement professional design elements to improve your chances for success.

About the Author: Woody Longacre, Internet Web Design. We invite you to visit the Web Hosting Goods Store for Web Design Services, Web Hosting, and Domain Registration.

5 Things You MUST Check Before You Buy the New SEO Software or Trust a Google Expert

Here's a trick people fall for all the time. It's so common the really scuzzy people have a name for it - it's called "False Proof."

The one that has been chapping my behind is when a supposed search expert will say, "I'm number one out of 33 million results." And you think, really? 33 MILLION?

Then you get their software, ebook, or system, and you find out that even though you're also able to rank number one for a term that gets 33 million results, none of it sent you any sales, or leads - and really, not much traffic either.

Don't get me wrong - it's not that this ranking isn't an achievement for some people. It's just that it HAS to be put into perspective. If someone is telling you - hey, I'm kind of a newbie to search, and I figured out how to do this. Let me share my research with you - that's information to trust.

The same person claiming it makes them an expert? Not so much.

If you don't want to get hustled by this little trick, remember that proof has to be MEANINGFUL.

It's fine to profit from a JV deal with a friend or colleague, I'm not knocking it. I've done it and when I have, I've slept great, because I make a conscious effort to only promote the highest quality products from my peers.

So I think endorsements are okay.

What's NOT Okay is when the testimonials of friends are the Only testimonials a person has for their product.

What did their peers think?

What did their clients think?

What do people who didn't know them before they tried it think?

If a person selling you an SEO product or search consulting is a layperson, and they figured out how to get results better than the next guy, and they say so, that is completely above board.

But if they're claiming to be a guru or expert in any way, and they're using keyword rankings or number of links generated, or anything else to prove their results, make sure they stand up to closer scrutiny.

Here are some things to look for:

1- The number of results doesn't always tell you how comparatively difficult the keyword is to rank for. A good keyword difficulty check like the one at SEOmoz.org will help you figure this out.

2- If the keyword phrase is 4 or more words long, a monkey could probably rank for it under the right conditions.

3- Even if it is hard for a newbie to rank for, and the software tool/person will help you get to the next level of expertise, if the terms you would rank for are those that don't send any traffic, or won't help you build up to terms that will send traffic, it's a waste of time.

4- If just one keyword ranking is their claim to fame, they aren't an expert if they're saying they are, or that their tool is worth paying for, based on this, be wary.

You do NOT really know what you're doing with search until you have been able to maintain hundreds or thousands of rankings for a few years.

You can get to number one by cheating in the short term - until they catch you and ban your site.

Luck or cheating doesn't make you an expert.

5- If the number one or first page result they got is one of many, and passes all the difficulty and traffic tests - is the result they have in Google or Yahoo for their own site? It if it, and that's all the information they're selling, don't buy it. I'll tell you how to do that for free in a minute.

First let me explain one thing: it's not that it's a bad thing to get to number one using Ezine Articles or Hub Pages. It's that you don't control the ranking when it's not on your site.

It's that you don't need someone to teach you something fancy to get that ranking.

Anyone can get a popular site to rank at the top for an article they've contributed - there are free articles for how to do this around the Net. If I'm not mistaken, Chris Knight wrote about it last year on this blog.

That's not some coveted secret worth the price of a large pizza or a fancy dinner.

How do you do it? You use your keywords in the title of the article you're contributing, and make your article semantically relevant enough to out rank whatever listing is presently number one. It won't work with every keyword, but when it does, that's how it happens.

The real trick is getting that ranking to mean money for you. That ranking doesn't automatically mean they'll click the link to visit your site.

(How do you do make sure they do? That secret takes way more room than one article.)

So again, this Can be a good technique. But knowing that doesn't make you an expert.

Now, I won't sit here and say that every expert trying to get you to buy a search or traffic related product is full of it. There's a lot of good programs out there. But the instant you're being promised outlandish results with a minimum of effort, it's right that your BS radar should go off.

The second you're being peddled a quick fix that is meant to supersede or replace good knowledge, you have to ask yourself if what you're paying and the results you're getting are worth the risk.

It's not that there isn't good stuff out there - it's that you have to really look at whether what you're paying is going to yield results worth your investment.

There are a bunch of great experts and great sites that can help you get better search results in Google and Yahoo. I could name ten off the top of my head. Just remember, in order to see what's worth your money, scrutinize your expert, and investigate the promises of your favorite search tool.

You may be surprised at what you find.
Great product, no traffic? I'll teach you every web site promotion technique from search to social media, all that I've tested and used myself. No hype or unrealistic promises. Just real-world techniques that actually work. Come to http://freetraffictip.com/really to see video proof.

Can Twitter Work For the Small Business

When I started using Twitter I had two objectives. One was to see how Twitter functions as a social media marketplace and the other was to get a sense of how smaller businesses could use it as a channel to market.

Despite the hype around it Twitter still seems to me to be a niche product. That is based on the composition of its members. It reminds me of all those speed networking events that were so popular, their limiting factor was that it was predominantly sellers who attended and what we really need is buyers. I don't pretend to suggest that Twitter will die out as speed networking has but it does suffer from this phenomenon of too many sellers.

There are some areas where Twitter is well suited. The B2C environment for one, and there is certainly anecdotal evidence that companies have generated real revenue from Twitter and those providing digital products have found it a regular source of new business. It is however fair to say that this is not a quick win, it does take time and effort to build up a reputation and presence on Twitter. Mostly however its time; for those who are involved in delivering digital services, this is not an issue since using online environments is their natural marketplace. For those offering physical products and services it's a more challenging environment. However, if you're selling into the B2B or SoHo markets then it can still be an effective route. Essentially the fact that you can readily communicate with the decision maker and that the sales process is simple and short means that using Social Media Marketing (SMM) works well and having good visibility on twitter will certainly generate interest.

At the other end of the scale major corporates' have the time and resources to dedicate the man hours necessary to regularly insert their message and build that vital link of trust with their customers and prospects. So you can see many of the worlds largest businesses using Twitter including, Dell, Ford, etc. Dells assertion that it obtained $1million in revenue from Twitter has been well publicised. We must however accept that larger businesses already have an advantage since they've built a level of "trust" around their brand long before Twitter came along and they leverage that advantage further now.

One should not forget also that Twitter is more attractive to business because postings are necessarily short and unlike Facebook, You Tube or MySpace are text based. Interestingly this will make it more readily adopted by the professional in a higher age group and therefore more suited to today's decision makers.

The more difficult question is how "Fred Bloggs of Bloggs Joinery" can use Twitter. B2B business is not necessarily well suited to Twitter and many owner managers don't have the time to devote to develop a network, and quality is still as important as quantity. This is ignoring the import question of whether they "get Twitter" which is likely to be a major hurdle in itself. I have spoken to a number of small business owners who just don't "get it" and have subsequently stopped using it before they really had a chance see what it could do for them. So what options are open to them, well firstly assuming there is sufficient marketplace on Twitter for their product (something that is seriously open to question), they could encourage all their staff to join Twitter and use a collection of voices to build up a following or secondly, outsource. This may seem an extreme step or even heresy in Social Marketing, but to me it's an inevitable consequence of how social marketing works. SMM agencies will naturally develop enormous power simply by having several clients each with several users promoting several products. With that infrastructure its becomes almost inevitable that they would harness all the voices from all the clients to cross promote each new product growing in power and effect each time they add new clients. The next logical step is to dispense with real voices and create surrogate voices after all it's relatively easy to create personas which people can use as templates. If true it would completely undermine the concept of Social Media Marketing as we know it.

Laurence Ainsworth is using is founder of Exigent Consulting which provides advice and support for small to medium businesses. Exigent specialises in Business Turnaround, Sales and Marketing and Mentoring &n Coaching.

He can be found on http://twitter.com/laurenceexigent and at http://www.exigent-uk.com
He is a regular contributor of articles on marketing and sales and is a frequent Blogger and Twitter

What is Internet Marketing all about?

Want to know What is Internet Marketing all about?

Internet marketing is still a complete mystery to a large majority of Internet users. For many users, internet marketing is seen as some foreign area of the web, populated with silly get-rich-quick schemes and unsavory characters ready to rip off the innocent and uninformed consumer at the click of a mouse. Continue to read more.. SEO: 5 Most Popular Forms of Internet Marketing

Does Google Support Content Theft?

Everyone seems to hate Google these days. But for different reasons. Aaron Wall says they are in cahoots with the content thieves.

We all know Google isn’t perfect. That’s no question. But is it evil? I think it depends on how you define evil. Content theft is a serious issue, but is Google the problem?

Before we make Google the problem let’s consider that much of the search engine does is based on its algorithm. (This is what determines the positioning of a web page…good to know for your long term search engine optimization efforts:o)

An algorithm is a robot, a machine (or represents the machine). And machines are by nature amoral, not immoral. Amoral. That puts them in neutral territory. But that doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility for condoning content theft - if indeed they do.

The issue involves your robots.txt. If you tell Google not to crawl your content and someone else has scraped it, that isn’t Google’s fault. Google can’t tell that your content is original if it appears on another website while your robots.txt told Google not to crawl your content on your own site. Remember, it’s a machine. It doesn’t think. It just does what it’s told. But Google should still seek a solution for dealing with the content thieves. Perhaps somewhere outside its algorithm!