Generating Traffic On A Budget

Most webmasters keep their prized web traffic generating systems to themselves or charge an arm and a leg. I am one of the guys in the trenches. Before I share with you the simplest and easiest methods to generate website traffic I will begin with a little background information.

I have several websites and in the past ten years I have worked with gurus that promised to deliver traffic to my sites. In fact I have paid from $200 to over $2,000 for traffic to my sites. I had one person that charged a reasonable fee and my traffic went from 500 visitors to 8,000 visitors. Three years later his fee wasn’t that reasonable, but I decided to go ahead and try another website. After three months and two thousand dollars I saw no results.

As many people know the search engines create algorithms so nobody can beat the system. The gurus figure a way around this and charge lots of money to drive traffic to your site. Then the dance continues and the search engines create new algorithms. Next thing you know you are going back to the guru or searching for someone new.

Many of us have been sold a bill of goods about generating traffic to our websites and the lure of getting on the top ten. I can tell you from personal experience that I have been in the top ten and it wasn’t that big of an impact. The hook the gurus use to charge a higher fee is the number of keywords you need to get in the top ten. After a while you’ll realize that ONE keyword may have over one hundred variations.

Working with gurus creates a roller coaster of traffic to your website. Your traffic and sales are dependent on the gurus and the search engines algorithms. When you stop working with the gurus, or their magic isn’t working, your website traffic and sales hit bottom.

Yes there are rewards working with gurus, but you better have a hot site that sells. Start with methods that cost less and allow your traffic to build. Check your status reports to learn more about your visitors and the keywords they used to find you. A good hosting provider will offer this with your hosting package.

A wise marketer once told me that it was best to get off the roller coaster and put my money into methods that build steady website traffic. As an owner of a website, you learn how to update your own pages so you are not dependent on someone to update your website. The same goes for generating website traffic. When you take the time and invest in building traffic on a regular basis, then you will be free from the gurus and the search engines algorithms.

The simplest and time proven techniques that take very little time are your best answers. One method I know you have heard over and over is submitting articles. Let me give you the WHY submitting articles is important. When you are found in the search engines you are just another listing on all those pages. When submitting articles, I get a loyal audience that reads my articles each week. In fact, when they visit another website and see other articles I have written on other topics, it builds more credibility, rapport, link popularity and traffic.

Generating website traffic is using a combination of methods. Submitting to the search engines is still important, but it is only a part of your overall traffic building strategy. With most search engines it may take one to three months to see results.

Now here is the INSIDE INFORMATION most gurus won’t tell you. I am using a traffic generating system that is available to anyone at no cost. In fact it is simple to implement and takes only ten minutes of your time to set-up. This system is instant and you will see an immediate increase in your traffic and it you can verify your results with your own status reports.


About the author:
Wayne McDonald is the TRAFFIC KING! Get your FREE Special Report "Generating Traffic On A Budget" at http://increase-your-website-traffic.holisticwebdirectory.comand for web hosting solutions visit http://webhosting.holisticwebdirectory.com


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Build and Maintain Websites For Profit

Even with limited knowledge and experience, you can build and maintain websites for profit. Here are just some ways you can do so.

1. Develop Websites for Local Businesses
Approach local business persons and sell them on the necessity and financial benefits of having a professional website. Local advertising may get you started as well, but expect to get a largeportion of your business from referrals.

Charge your clients for the initial design and setup of the website. Work with them to develop a theme for their site based on their unique advantages over the competition. Keep the site simple to start with so that the cost of producing it is not prohibitive to the business and you can complete it profitably in a short time.

In this business, you can also make money on the maintenance and ongoing support of the website. Charge recurring monthly fees for such services needed as web hosting, updates and improvements to the site`s content, search engine optimization and submission, increasing traffic, traffic analysis, mailing list production and maintenance, and much more.

You don`t have to be a master Internet programmer to provide needed, additional services. There are many free and low cost sources of scripts and other resources available to you on the Internet. Offer your clients (and charge extra for) flash introductions, animated graphics, syndicated content, traffic counters, submission forms, chat rooms, pop-up windows,
autoresponders, and more.


2. Sell Websites on the Internet
Build web stores, search engines, shopping portals, and other websites and sell them on the Internet. Some develop sites from templates sold by others. Others build websites from scratch. These websites have been sold on the Internet as turnkey businesses through eBay and other websites.

Another option is to take existing free services and resell them. For example, you could take advantage of free web stores available to you on the Internet.
Register a suitable domain name, obtain free or low cost web space, and host that free store at your domain on your web space. Promote your website and increase traffic. Finally, sell your website to the highest bidder on eBay. Be sure that either your
Reserve Price or Opening Bid is high enough to make it profitable to you. You will need to transfer the domain name to the buyer.


3. Become an Internet Marketer
Build your own unique website based on a niche theme that has a sufficient market. Then tie in your content with appropriate affiliate programs and your own as well as other peoples` products and services.

To increase commissions and sales, you will need to regularly maintain your site by updating content, increasing targeted traffic, adding appropriate products and services, et cetera.

These, then, are just a few ways that you can profit financially from building and maintaining websites.



About the author:
J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc.,
has been helping
clients to earn maximum business profits for over
twenty-five years.

For valuable Work at Home Small Business Ideas, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/

For more information about making money
from building and maintaining websites, please visit
http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/webmstrbus.html


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Advantages and Disadvantages of Having a Reseller Account

Advantages

You can have more flexibility with your web hosting accounts.

You can save money.

You can earn more revenue at little cost to yourself.

You can focus on customer support and leave technical support to your web host.

Your web host, not you, absorbs server maintenance costs.


Disadvantages

Your service is only as good as your upstream provider. If the server is frequently down, for example, you may lose clients.

If you ever have to change web hosts, the move will be an inconvenience for your clients as well as for yourself.


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Design vs. SEO: Can My Site Look Good and Rank Well?

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I'll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it's certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it's the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

DESIGN CAN'T BE IGNORED
If you have an existing site, you've probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you've allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can't simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren't alone if you have this disheartening thought—If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it's so stale and boring I'm even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that's not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB
That's not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer's attention in 5 seconds. It's pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it's not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you're offering.

CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO
Sadly, it's very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You'll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, "pumpkin bread recipe."

From a design standpoint "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn't use CSS. Search engines don't like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that "extra" code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO
In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords "pumpkin bread recipe". Note- why did I use the number 30? It's safe to assume if you're not on the first three results pages of a search, you're not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn't always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.


AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC
Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That's ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.

REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY
If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer's attention. If it's very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it's home made jewelry, the site shouldn't look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community can't find you, you're business will fail. So I'd have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you've got a cool to look at, content rich, well optimized layout.

I'd make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I'd also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you're creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.

PLANNING YOUR SITE
If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren't the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.

About the author:
John Krycek is a creative director at theMouseworks.ca Toronto website design.. Learn more about search engine optimization, internet marketing, web development and graphic design in easy, non-technical, up front English at http://www.themouseworks.ca!


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