Archive for August, 2010
3 Steps To Your First Small Business Website
When planning your first small business website, there are three essential questions you should ask yourself:
- Who is your target audience?
- How will your target audience find you?
- How will you convert your visitors into sales?
These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t bother…and then moan that “our website doesn’t bring us any business”.
1) Who is your target audience?
Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something – a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.
Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.
2) How will they find you?
Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.
Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.
Those keywords – or keyphrases to be more accurate – need to be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.
Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 – and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first 3 results pages, you look elsewhere.
The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.
3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?
Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want – not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started.
Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have found you via a search engine.
Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And as we’ve discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly.
Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “blue widgets”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.
Virtual Hosting the perfect option to sites that have outgrown shared hosting.
When a host computer runs multiple web servers simultaneously it is known as “virtual” hosting. This system relies on virtual DNS resolution which permits specific domain names to be assigned to each web server. So, a single computer can then host many independent web sites. Virtual web hosting is either name based or IP based and allows a great degree of manageability, efficiency, and scalability of the infrastructure.
When a web site has outgrown in many ways its hosting solution then the most workable option is “virtual” web hosting. This is cost efficient as compared to setting up your own dedicated server.
In “virtual” hosting, resources are not shared with other web sites. Each website is assigned fixed amounts of available resources. So, a single site cannot utilize disproportionately all the resources.
Each website has its own operating system on the “virtual” hosting server with an isolated segment of disk space and in some cases specific hard drives on the server. So, crashes or technical problems encountered by other sites on the host server will not affect your site. Using this system you the website owner can install changes in the operating system and customize your web pages.
• Do your research well and find the near to perfect virtual host. Be sure to check referrals and blogs as well as forums for complaints.
• Read all the fine print thoroughly and ask any questions you may have before signing up. Most virtual hosting providers offer back ups of your site, technical support, e-mail addresses, a web based GUI for you to manage your settings, and a e-commerce path that will allow shopping carts and customer support as well as loyalty programs.
• Once terms and conditions are agreed upon, the hosting company will give you a login name and password, an IP address for your site, and the name of the “private directory” that is assigned to you. This is where you will upload your pages.
• Register your domain name and be sure to ensure that the DNS record specifies the DNS server of the virtual hosting company. If your site is already registered then complete the required formalities to change the DNS records with your registrar.
• Upload the pages to the virtual hosting directory.
• Test the site after 3-4 days using the IP address. Once the DNS propagates across the web you will be able to access your site using its domain.
Virtual hosting works because with the popularity of the web there exist, a bouquet of customers that need a common set of web services and technical support. So, a company that can efficiently package together several solutions which can be used by a great number of customers becomes profitable as well as popular. They offer websites an economy of costs as well as the advantage of a degree of independence.
Virtual hosting will cost around US$ 35-US$ 99 per month and more. This is much lower than the costs of running a dedicated server and therefore the ideal choice for a small to mid sized web site that has outgrown shared hosting.
3 Secrets To Increasing Traffic In The New Year
Now that 2011 has arrived, it is the habit of many people to make a resolution for the New Year. While many people focus on self-improvement, some opt to make resolutions about their business. Usually this involves a resolution to increase their revenue for their online business.
But did you know that it is actually quite easy to increase your online revenue?
The trick is to drive more traffic to your Internet business(es). As you know by now, more traffic generally means more money.
No matter what type of site you have, your success hinges on getting as much traffic as possible. But like many online business owners, you have probably exhausted many sources for increasing traffic.
Recently I have found three incredible ways to drive more traffic to your site. The good news is that all these methods are not being done by many webmasters.
So if you want to increase traffic for 2006, be sure to use each of the following three traffic-building mechanisms:
1- Data Feeds
Do you like the idea of creating hundreds, even thousand of pages of legitimate content?
With a data feed, this is possible.
Many online businesses utilize data feeds as a way to help their affiliates. If you are not familiar with this concept, a data feed is file that contains a list of products, descriptions and prices for individual items that are sold by a company.
With a data feed, you can create a specific content page for each product. So if an affiliate program has thousands of products, then you can create thousands of pages of quality content. As you probably know, the more content usually leads to more traffic.
Data feeds are great for getting natural search engine traffic because they list specific products that people are looking
for. If you can find a data feed that is related to your specific website, then you can easily generate more natural traffic for your online business.
2- Viral eBooks
Another tool that can dramatically increase your website traffic is a viral ebook or report. Most of the time, a viral ebook is a PDF that people send to their contacts, which contains your marketing message. It is called viral because every person that receives the ebook is given a reason to pass along your material.
Before starting a viral marketing campaign, it is important to create a reason why people will want to pass along your marketing message. Some of the best reasons can include simple greed or a desire to provide entertaining information to their friends. If you can develop a hook that will take advantage of either of these, then it will be easy to create a successful viral marketing campaign.
What I usually do is create a special 5 to 10 page report on a specific topic. Then I find an affiliate program that is related to the topic. Then I create a mechanism where people can easily brand this ebook with their own affiliate link.
This type of viral ebook is valuable because you can place a mini advertisement or sponsorship on every copy. In addition,
you can let the reader know that he or she can make money by offering this viral ebook. As a result, there is a chance that every person that reads the book will click over to your site.
3-Blogs
By now, you have probably heard about the power of blogs. If you haven’t created one, then you should use the New Year to take advantage of this traffic pulling tool
With blogs, you are providing your audience with fresh new content about your topic. People love to read them, because most
blogs contain new information in an entertaining and easy-to-read format.
The best part about blogs is how much they are valued by search engines. The majority of search engines consider any information on a blog to be important current news, so they pay special attention to articles listed there. As a result, you can use blogs to drive a larger portion of traffic to your Internet business.
For 2011 you should make a resolution to get more traffic to your site. By implementing these three tools into your marketing mix, you will discover that your web traffic (and income) will dramatically increase.