Archive for the ‘traffic’ Category

If you’re like me, I got really tired of paying for my traffic and striving to get a higher search engine ranking. The competition is getting tougher and tougher. Although I am getting more successful with my Google and Yahoo Marketing campaigns and that’s mainly because I’m getting more experienced at it. But believe me, I’ve wasted a lot of money going through the learning curve.

But I’ve gotten smarter! I’ve found a way to generate a lot more traffic to my website and it’s absolutely free! Yes, I’m going to continue using my adwords, but not as much as I have in the past.

How did I get smarter? I kept hearing how social media was going to be the wave of the future when it comes to internet marketing. So I started setting up a couple of accounts on sites like Facebook, MySpace, UTube and Twitter. Started asking people to be my friends and guess what started to happen. You guessed it! I started getting a lot more traffic to my blog and websites, best of all, it’s free traffic. I don’t have to work at getting ranking anymore. The back links from my media sites helps me to rank even higher in the search engines than I did when I worked at it.

If you use social marketing correctly, it will drive big traffic DIRECTLY to your site from the social media sites that you get involved with…and that’s huge. After all, that is really the holy grail, isn’t it?

We all want more traffic to our site, right?

You may not realize it, but social media sites have more traffic than Google. And if you use the right strategies and tactics to put yourself in front of that traffic, then you don’t have rely on Google to get traffic to your sites. And best of all, you don’t have to worry about expensive AdWords campaigns or other forms of advertising.

Of course, let’s be real here… just because you start getting big traffic directly from the social media sites doesn’t mean you will abandon your Google rankings and stop all advertising. What it means is that you will be getting a lot more traffic, and the average cost of that traffic will plummet down to levels that are from the stone ages when it comes to the internet…. that’s what I call “back to the future”!

In Web 1.0 world, we are using internet banner ads, text ads, email, newsletters as our internet marketing vehicles to drive our marketing message to our potential clients online. Today, internet had been transitioned to web 2.0, new internet marketing strategies are needed to continue be successful in internet world.

With Web 2.0, we need to consider not only the new means of reaching our online audience but also the new nature of the social Web. Weblogs, blogs, and other web 2.0 sites dabbling with social media tools such as wikis, podcasts, videocasting, photo sharing sites, social bookmarking are the key marketing vehicle to drive internet traffic to the targeted websites.

So, as an internet marketer for Web 2.0 world and to be successful in an era where customers are freely discuss your products and services, you should consider the 5 important marketing strategies below:

1. Learn about social media

Social media is one the most important “must know” knowledge in Web 2.0. Thus, the first and foremost, you should participate in and understand social media by learning about it. YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, digg, MySpace, and Technorati are examples of new engines that you need to understand in order to effectively use them to reach your markets.

2. Marketing Plan For Web 2.0

You should factor let your visitors to play a more important role in your new marketing plan for Web 2.0. Let your website visitors to create content on your site and pass it a long. You even can your passionate users to create promotional videos about your sites/products, then use them on your local TV channels and post them online everywhere to get maximum exposure.

3. Join & Participate In The Conversation

Social media applications are two-way streets that conversation happens between two or more parties. To get exposure, you can join and participate to these conversation groups. You can join as members to other social media groups of your niche marketing or you can add social tools and services (such as Weblogs, wikis, tagging, video blogs, etc.) to your library Web sites. Enable comments on blogs and allow users to contribute to wikis.

4. Be Remarkable

Social media is a form of viral marketing where interesting ideas and content get passed along rapidly. Hence, in Web 2.0 world, content is the king. You must have contents that attract your visitors that they can use, bookmark, share online / offline and get your content or message pass along.

5. Get Your Content Travel

Encourage visitors to bookmark and tag your content with a click of a button and allow users to repost booklists, book reviews, photos, podcasts, or videos on their own sites. Post your content on sites like Flickr and YouTube where it’s easy for users to find and share it. Make news feeds for new materials such as books, DVDs, talking books, and video feeds so that these materials can be shared by online users and get your contents spread to the internet world.

6. Be part of the multimedia wave In Web 2.0 world, images and static pictures no enough to attract internet users any more, video is the key driver for Web 2.0. Statistic shows that more than 100 million videos being download daily. So, the effective of video marketing must not be overlooked. Create short videos and post them to YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

In Summary

These are just a few strategies about marketing in a Web 2.0 world. There are still a lot of ideas for social media marketing where you can explore and integrate into your web 2.0 marketing plan.

Marketing on Social network sites is not an easy feat. It relies on a lot of user interaction, especially with existing contacts. Know the benefits Social sites can do to your business. Understand how social networking can drive targeted traffic to your website today.

Social network sites are the new breed of online social hubs. More and more users turn to social networking sites to find loved ones, reconnect with old friends, or even host a high school reunion. However, social networking sites offer more than just meeting new and old friends, it can also be an avenue to promote your latest book, show online users about your website and updates, or even use the social sites to promote your views and agendas. Social network sites or User-created content sites like blogs, forums, or dating websites are basically places online where users can congregate to share information, give advice, or work on similar interests. Users flock social network sites, making it a good vantage point for web marketers to launch their products.

There are two types of marketing involved over social networking sites. Different types of individuals who promote their products or skills over social networking sites often employ varying tactics to get their message across. Several online marketers employ the use of the comments system on social marketing sites to post information about their products or use social sites to improve search engine placement for their websites. Though some web marketers would go overboard with the promotion and quite literally spam their target audience with useless data just to lure them to clicking a link which will direct them to the website being promoted. Other types of web marketers employ a subtle technique of social engineering to make users trust them and to make them purchase their products or click on a link to their main website. Other marketers would go as far as using black hat search optimization techniques to force web browsers into redirecting to another site. This type of marketing is not allowed on most social communities, and could get you banned on that social site, if caught.

Taking the different strategies piece by piece we identify different patterns on how web marketers coordinate their efforts to capture a wider scope of online users on a social networking site and achieve better search engine placement for their websites. Web marketers who operate viral marketing strategies often use software tools that will allow them to harvest different user profiles or account numbers, which they would use to send or post messages on. Web marketers meticulously gather user details and interest, and seek out vital social community sections like forums and rant pages where their messages can go around with the least possible chance of getting erased by members. Web marketers usually lace their promotional words with entertaining music or videos. But this can still be the tip of the iceberg on the grand scheme of online promotions. Once you give into the advertising, you will see yourself clicking on different links which will make you download or get redirected to another website which can force you to download a certain application or Trojan which they can then use to either force your browser to redirect to other web pages when you are browsing or quite literally force your computer to accept different ads from their website.

Social engineering on the other hand employs more interaction between the marketer and the end users. Web marketers who employ social engineering often use chatrooms or utilize the email system of social network sites to send messages to users. VoIP or Internet telephoning can also be used to improve marketer and user interaction. This type of online marketing may take awhile to be realized, but is often more successful in landing repeat customers, if done right.

Tip 1: Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is either taken very lightly or taken so consciously that the results are undesirable. Give around 30% of your time to understand what exactly is your business requirements or on what products/services would you get more business. What exactly are you planning to target and what is your Audience? Conduct a market analysis of it and filter our 10 key phrases that best suit your business. If your website is fresh and /or you have just started with your online business, target light-weight (less-researched) key phrases. Go for targeting more of long-tailed key-phrases rather than single key-words. Give proper Title and Meta, appropriate Alt tags. Check your content in relative to your Meta you have kept and see that your page gets easily downloaded.

Tip 2: Link Building

Once you are done with On-page optimization, put your best of efforts to gain as much inbound links you can. There are multiple ways that you can work on to achieve a golden value for your website. At the outset, submit your website URL to 100+ Search Engines and 500+ Quality online directories that give you quality link-backs. Write good relevant articles and submit them into quality Article sites. You may also submit your Press-notes into quality Press-release directories. Put your Ads into free classified directories. You may also go for link-exchange campaigns but Google has stopped giving much weightage to these links.

Tip 3: Social Media

Make a list of quality social networking sites where in you can go and bookmark your important web-pages into these social sites. You may also create your blogs (relevant to your services), post good content on these and make them more interactive for more visitors to visit them. One such good social marketing is posting comments into good blogs or forums and thereby creating a rich link-base. You are sure to get high traction through social media marketing. It may go as high as getting 2000 hits in just 5 days on one single comment posted with a link to our website. It really makes a lot of difference!

Buyers rely heavily upon search and social media for researching products and services.
It is therefore critical that you not only have relevant and detailed content on your website, but you must be showing up where they are searching for you. To do so you must undertake an integrated and comprehensive search and social media marketing effort.
For more information on these and how to rank your website on the top SERPs or if you want us to get your website rank on the top of SERPs, contact us on 201-777-2366 or email your details at kj@semaphore-software.com.