The Book Fiend Info Center

One of the keys to a profitable web site is analyzing your hits to visitor ratio. What does it mean if you have a low hit to visitor ratio? This article provides the answer

No Depth

An effective means for analyzing web site traffic is to look at the number of hits per visitor for a time period. To do this, you simply divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for the time period in question. Time periods can be a day, week, month or quarter of a year. Don’t look at any time smaller than a day as the data may not create an accurate picture of the traffic.

Assume you have the best damn dang hair net site on the net. You have over 1,000 hair nets of every variation, color, material and weave. For those of you not “in the know”, a hair net is one of those things people working in fast food places have to wear. I have no idea why, but I am sure there was a lawsuit once that makes complete and total sense.

Anyway, a site with over 1,000 hair nets should have a massive number of pages. Logically, every visitor to the site should click through more than a few pages while looking for the perfect specimen. Unfortunately, you find the server stats tell a different story.

In reviewing server stats, you learn that on average the site receives 5,000 visitors a day and 10,000 hits. Dividing hits by visitors, you discover to your dismay each visitor is looking at only two pages on average. This information is supported by the fact you’re only averaging a few sales a day. Aye, Carumba!

There are a few possible reasons for this poor performance:

1. Slow Site: A site with 1,000 products is going to require a very careful database design. I would guess 70 percent of database sites are fatally slow. By fatally, I mean they load so slowly that most dial-up users can’t navigate in the site. We are talking 30 to 40 second page load times. If you have this problem, you are immediately losing the 45 percent of people using dial-up.

2. Click Fraud: If you are running a PPC campaign, you must track the clicks in the campaign. A low hit to visitor ratio can often mean your PPC ads are being artificially clicked as such clickers rarely venture into the internal pages of a site.

3. Poor Advertising: This one is purely your fault. Your advertising must focus on keywords that are relevant to your site. If you are selling hair nets, don’t place ads under “hair styling.” If you do, people will click your ad, see hair nets and immediately leave. Know your limitations!

There can be a variety of reasons for low hit to visitor ratios. More often than not, slow load times are the answer. If the site is fast, then you need to dig deeper so you can figure out a way to make your visitors do the same.

Comments Off

With so many website traffic plans to choose from it is really hard for a person to get a grip on the world of sending traffic to the perfect deal. You know that you have the products that will change a buyer’s outlook on life, but how do you push this potential customer to your web page? There are many things that can change the way you look at buying traffic. Some people feel that it is best to create a perfect balance of pay per click and links connecting to their website. You are looking for the magic key and there is a long journey ahead of you my friend, but many have been on the same road that you travel. Just be cautious in your travels, there are dark shadows all around you and the road may become narrow at times.

First you need a road map or a business plan to chart out the direction that you wish for your new business or web page to go. There is no doubt that you are wishing for the best but don’t let a couple little bumps in the road throw you off course. You are here for a reason and the Internet is the vessel that you wish to sail. Now that you know where you are going you need to make a statement of where you have been. How you have gotten to the spot that you are in right now. You need to get on your computer and type in www.pr.com. Here you will create a press release to let the world know that you have arrived. Once your press release is complete you will click the submit button and send the release on its way. Then the people at www.pr.com will submit your press release to thousands upon thousands of web sites, news and media and serves providers worldwide were your press release will be displayed for a short time and archived off on to backup storage and databases. Just a reminder to pay the extra twenty-nine dollars to have you link add to the press release. This will come in handy in the future once you submit your web site to search engines and directories. There are other places to create a press release but this seems to be one of the better places I have found on the Internet.

Ok, now that the world knows you have a product to offer they will start beating down your door. No, it will take a little more effort than that. Now, you need to submit your web page to all the search engines and directories for their spiders to crawl your site to create an index of your page on their databases. This can take some time to submit your site to the providers that you feel are worthy of including your web site in their database. There are two types of search engines that you will want to utilize in doing your submissions. The first of the two are the free search engines and directories. These sites will except your web site and may even list it at the top of their listings for a short time, until the web page moves down the list by the thousands of other web sites submitted. Most search engines and directories have a free submission process and are easy to submit your site. Some may request a fee after you have entered your site to their service to keep it on their database. If you receive this e-mail do not pay for this service. To submit you web site there are many places that you can go on the Internet and buy programs to submit to thousands of search engines. Two of these programs can be found at www.godaddy.com (traffic blazer) and www.coffeecup.com (submit fire). Both of these programs will help you submit to thousands of search engines. If you do not wish to pay for the service you can go to www.webmastertechniques.com and enter the words (searchengines.html). Here you will find a list of search engines and directories to manually submit your site.

The second type of search engine is the pay per click service providers. This is a service that you will wish to pay for to receive. Some of the biggest and best search engines offer this service and will allow you to create an account. This is not the same account that you have used to submit your web site. Two of the pay per click search engines that you will want to create an account with are www.overture.com and www.google.com. These are two of the biggest and widest known search engines. They are also third party suppliers for other search engines like www.msn.com, www.askjeeves.com, and www.aol.com. This means that if you pay the highest bid to be in the top position on www.overture.com or www.google.com you will also be the top positions on some of the other search engines. The top position is not the position you want to be for reasons that really do not make much since. The best way to place your ad in a position is to look for the gap. If the highest bid is 89 cents and the following bids are 82 cents, 72 cents and 39 cents place your ad in at the bid of 40 cents. This puts your ad right in above the gap. There are many ways to pick the keywords that you will use to generate you ad. If you go to www.jimtools.com you will find tools to generate keyword list and will also find tools to find the highest bid for a keyword.

There are companies that will sell you a number of hits for price. This is like taking your money and stacking it up, then with a can of gasoline dumping just enough fuel on it to burn every dollar. Most of these companies use pop up to offer the user a look at your page and we all know what we do when we see a pop up window. That’s right the big X in the corner. Don’t get me wrong! There is a time and a type of page that this would be useful. If your site offers jokes or graphics to its users then using untargeted traffic will work great. That is if your site can catch attention for long enough to keep them interested in what you have to offer. Targeted traffic can be used for the same type of pages but make sure that you can catch the users attention with your graphic layout. Offering free e-books, wallpapers and graphics will help to get their interest. I am not going to say that targeted and untargeted traffic will not work in the form of a pop up but if you try this method once or twice with no response you can save some money by marking it off your list of things to do. A few of the sites that I have used with better outcomes are www.blazingtraffic.com and www.2muchtraffic.com.

Link exchanges and traffic exchanges offer a toolbar view of page with a 20 or 30 second counter to count the seconds until you can go on to the next page. This is a simple way to get people to your web page. The object is for you to put a small piece of html or java in to the body of your web page with a banner back to the exchange. For the amount of people you send to the exchange you will receive a visitor to your page. You can also surf the exchange pages for credits to receive visitors to your page. This is normally set up on a two too one bases. This means that for every two people you send to the exchange or for every two pages you view, you will receive one person to your web page. This is a good way to get your page noticed by the public. These pages are usually set up with some type of pyramid that allows you to sign people up under you to help in the promotion of your web page. Some of the better sites that offer this service are www.startblaster.com and www.goneclicking.com.

To buy text links seems to be a very good way getting people to your web page. This gives you the chance to get in to see where you ad will be placed. This will also give you the ability to see what type of page your ad will show up and how many visitors you will receive for the cost of the text link. When buying text links make sure that the area is what you need. If you have a product that will only be shipped to the United States then it would not help to buy a text link on a site with all Asian users. Here are two of the places on the Internet I have found to buy text links www.adbrite.com and www.textlinkbrokers.com.

There are a few methods to create links on the Internet that I would not recommend. The uses of free for all blaster are NOT recommended. Free for all blaster are a type of program that you can download for a price from sites on the Internet and run as a service on your computer. This type of program promises to add your link or ad to thousands of web pages, classified ad pages and forums or blogs. This type of program is used as a way to harvest e-mail address and create a window for hundreds of e-mail marketing campaigns. They will create links on the Internet but you may get a lot of spam in your inbox.

Michael R Robinson
http://www.flyxnite2001.com/
12/27/2005

Please feel free to add this to web page, e-mail or e-zine.
You can also link to this page at http://www.whatsthehooplaa.com/Buildingabettertrafficforyourwebsite.doc/ or http://www.whatsthehooplaa.com/Buildingabettertrafficforyourwebsite.pdf/

Comments Off

So what is this all important secret? It can generate you 1000’s of free visitors to your site plus hundreds of links and sales.

The experts have been using it for years though chances are you haven’t thought much about it.

Well, the answer is….

**Drum Roll Please**

“Posting On Popular Forums and Discussion Boards”

I kid you not, I routinely use this method to rack up 1000-2000 visitors a month for free to my website of choice.

There’s an art though, here are a few ways for you to maximize your returns when posting for traffic that very few people ever use:

1. The Title

Think about it – Just like the subject of an e-mail gets you to read it, the title of a post or response can make or break your efforts.

Use something to evoke curiosity in the reader and get the all important click when 100’s of other posts are competeing for attention.

2. Give value

I think this is a no brainer but some people (you’ll see them) don’t get this point yet. Don’t be afraid to answer someones question if you know or share a helpful resource with the group.

You’ll reap the rewards doing this extra step I promise.

3. The Signature

If you don’t know what a signature is, it’s a little ad at the bottom of every single post you make or respond to and is the key to getting traffic to your site.

Every forum has a way to set this up, use good ad copy and if you’re stuck read over some other peoples sigs to get ideas.

Copyright © 2005 John Stafford

John Stafford is the author of: Laser Guided Traffic Tactics – Discover How to Instantly Get Multiple Streams of Targeted Traffic to Your Website Starting Today

Comments Off

Once again I used my wacky test marketing strategy to announce a new project and
once again it worked – but on this occasion I had another motive about which I will tell you more in a moment.

Downloads and confirmed sales are lower than last time around but this does not dismay me because I am addressing a looser, less well defined niche.

What did please me though was confirmation that my reasoning for engaging in a second wacky test marketing run was justified.

You see both of these projects have an inherent element of website optimization about them; a strategy I have been working on for some considerable time; a strategy I have put to the test in small ways but never tried out before in full measure.

I wasn’t so much concerned with consumer reaction to the second project as I was with the reaction of the search engine spiders to the optimization of my website.

Here is how matters have panned out so far with regard to major SE positioning.

More importantly both sets of results were obtained within hours of submitting the URLs.

PROJECT NO.2

Yahoo! No.2 out of 4,500,000 competitive pages
AltaVista No.2 out of 4,460,000 competitive pages
All The Web No.2 out of 4,040,000 competitive pages
MSN No.1 out of 0,786,970 competitive pages

As apposed to…

PROJECT NO.1

Yahoo! No.1 out of 8,570,000 competitive pages
AltaVista No.1 out of 6,493,000 competitive pages
All The Web No.1 out of 7,040,000 competitive pages
MSN No.1 out of 0,804,114 competitive pages

Clearly Google is not impressed with my website optimization strategy and also you might reasonably remark that it appears to be going backwards on the other SEs listed – but hey, I would settle for any ranking between 1 and 10 anytime, and let Google go…

Will I try for a hat trick with my wacky marketing?

I might – but I would be more interested to learn if anyone else is prepared to give it a go.

If so, here is what to do:

1. Set up a temporary website for a product you have yet to develop
2. Concentrate on the sales pitch
3. Rack up new end consumer benefits that emerge as you write
4. Put your mind into freefall on product development
5. Include a form instead of a price link on your page
6. Ask viewers what they think of your embryo innovation
7. Give them price options
8. Give them something free for participating in your survey
9. Ask them to join your newsletter
10. Send them a thank-you email for helping you out

If you do decide on some wacky marketing, please let me know the results.

You can contact me via the website in the resource box.

Jim Green is an online enthusiast and bestselling author with an ever-growing string of traditionally published niche non-fiction hard copy titles to his credit. View his second test marketing experiment at this website:
http://websiteoptimization.howtoproducts-xl.com

Comments Off

But a mere increase in the volume of website traffic is not the end all and be all of a successful marketing campaign online. There are countless instances of sites garnering thousands of visitors a day, with not a single sale to speak of. Surely, there would be something wrong if a marketing strategy is purely focused to increase website traffic.

Enter target trafficking.

Target trafficking allows you to pinpoint the visitors who really matter, those who have the highest possibility of purchasing your products. Now, how are you to separate them from the rest?

Here are some fantastic strategies you could employ:

• The easiest way is to concentrate on a particular niche from the start. A niche is a highly specialized market consisting of people who have a strong passion for a certain area of interest. This segment of the market is tightly specified that the demand outnumbers the supply, more often than not. Product loyalty is almost a given in this area, considering that the number of providers are quite few, if there are any at all. Once you’ve decided on a niche and have verified its profitability, it’s time to target its members and increase website traffic.

1. Select some keywords that are relevant to that segment of the market. You could use the powerful tools found in www.inventory.overture.com and www.nichebot.com to help you find the right ones.

2. Create an appropriate site with rich content that caters to the niche you have chosen. Populate that site with the keywords you have found.

3. Submit your site to as many search engines as you can, so that its pages can be indexed.

4. Wait for the increase of website traffic that would surely come your way.

• You could also try article marketing. Article marketing is a popular way to increase website traffic, but unlike other strategies, this method generates more quality visitors, simply because it is mostly accessible to those who make a dedicated search.
1. Quality traffic consists of people who are looking to satisfy a particular want. Try to determine what this desire is, and write an article about it. Your article should be informative, and it should answer particular questions about the subject. Don’t make it too long. 350-600 words would be enough. Strategically place keywords throughout the body of your work. These keywords should be relevant to the topic.

2. Include a resource box at the end of your article. A resource box should contain your name, a brief description of yourself, and a link to your website.

3. Allow your readers to reproduce the article provided that they keep it intact and that the resource box is maintained.

4. Submit your article to as many free articles directory that you could find. For starters, you could try www.goarticles.com and www.articlesfactory.com .

5. With article marketing, your readers would view you as an expert with the topic you discussed, and this would make them trust you enough to purchase the products that you would offer. You will certainly achieve an increase in website traffic, with quality visitors at that!

• Perhaps the most efficient and simplest way to garner the traffic that really counts is by employing a website traffic expert. I could only recommend one company for this, www.traffic-plus.com . Their features are highly innovative, and they are focused not only on perpetrating an increase in your website traffic, but also in inviting visitors who are very much willing to spend. Consider these amazing features:

1. It could allow you to acquire visitors from widely popular theme sites by automatically generating a popup browser containing your website. This would deliver an amount of website traffic that is proportional to that of the more established theme site!

2. It could redirect users who visit an expired or abandoned domain to your site. The potential for this is enormous! Imagine, if your competitor would leave or change its domain name, then its past visitors would automatically be yours!

3. Best of all, www.traffic-plus.com guarantees high quality signups for your mailing list or RSS feeds (which are excellent ways to maintain recurring traffic). They even verify each new user by calling them up over the phone! This would instantly build good client relationship even before the said client can visit your site!

This can easily be dismissed as a sales pitch, but it’s not. There is no better traffic expert service out there that could assure an increase of quality traffic for your website than www.traffic-plus.com . It’s actually a must if you desire that edge to compete in the online marketing arena.

• You could also try other less conventional techniques of targeting quality visitors. Here are some examples:

1. Advertise in dedicated online communities, or forums, by applying for a membership, including your link in the signature box, and posting regularly.

2. Exchanging links with other sites of a similar nature to yours. However, please bear in mind that some search engines penalize sites that contain reciprocal links.

3. Viral marketing campaigns such as free product distribution or trial offers have been proven to be successful in producing an increase in website traffic.

The strategies we have discussed will surely generate more visitors for your site, and most of these people have a higher probability of buying what you have to sell. An increase in website traffic is great, but an increase in the number of visitors who are willing to make a purchase is always better!

Increse online traffic by http://www.traffic-plus.com

Comments Off

Building a website is only half of the battle. The other half is the tough part, getting people to visit. A quality website is worthless without a steady stream of people that can make use of the information (and possibly make you money, depending on the type of website in question).

Never fear though, because we have some great ways to bring traffic to your website. Before you know it, you’ll have more visitors than you know what to do with!

The first point is the obvious one. You’ve got to have a website worth visiting. Quality content that is updated consistently is the key. Ask yourself, if you were just a normal visitor, would you want to visit this website? Is there anything you would find of use? If the answer is no, start by changing that first.

-Linking Up-

Getting links to your site is a great way to achieve quick, quality traffic. It can also be quite difficult, since you have to convince a webmaster that your site is good enough to show their visitors. An easy way, without dealing directly with humans, is to go around and submit your website to free directories. A simple Google search, with some creativity, will uncover thousands of free directories that have categories for nearly everything. These directories are awesome ways to get traffic to your site, as well as influence the search engines a little bit.

The other way to get links is the old fashioned way. Fire up your email client, and send out some emails to the owners of websites you feel would be willing to link to you. Don’t spam sites, but write quality emails to the owners asking if they would be interested in linking to your site. The best kind of websites to email are those with “links” pages, as they are the most likely to add you, since there is already a place for your site to go.

-The Search Engines-

By far the number one tool that people use to find information, search engines are definitely something you want to have on your site. Focus on the big three – Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Forget the rest. The others won’t bring you enough traffic to make it worth while.

The best way to tame a search engine is to get it to see plenty of links to your site. Not spammy ones, because they will discount your site for that, but direct links to your site from high quality websites. Remember, if you want to rank high in search engines, you have to start by going out and gathering links. There is no other legitimate way.

Manually submitting your site to a search engine doesn’t do much, as if you have any number of backlinks at all, the spiders will find your site with no issues. If you don’t have enough links for them to find you, then there is no way you will rank high anyway.

Be sure to have clear titles for your website. Don’t use the same title for every page on your site, make each one a unique, descriptive title for each individual page. This is very important.

Don’t panic if you don’t rank well at first. Most engines, especially Google, have “sandboxes” that they put new websites in for the first few months. You probably won’t rank well until after that period is over.

-Your PR Rating-

Google uses a system of rating websites called PR, short for Page Rank. PR is a score, between 1 and 10, that is given to an individual page based upon the number and quality of links pointing to that web page. When a page with a PR rating links to another page, it “passes on” some of its PR to that page. For example, if I have a new web page, with no PR rating, and a PR 6 page links to it, that page may eventually have a PR rating of, say, 4 or 5. Google uses the PR rating of a page to help decide where to place it on search results for a particular keyword. Keep in mind, however, that PR is not the only factor used in deciding where you will rank with search engines, it is just one of many.

You can view the PR rating of a website by downloading the free Google toolbar.

-Non-Reciprocal Linking-

Webmasters commonly use a form of linking known as reciprocal linking, which is just trading links. Site A links to site B, and site B links back to site A. It’s a good idea in theory, however, search engines have started picking up on it. Link trading is no longer a good thing to do. The best kind of linking is to have a one-way link to your site (you can talk a webmaster into it by being nice, or perhaps by trading services, or maybe even buying a link from him or her), or by finding a webmaster with more than one site to link with.

If you choose the latter, the most common way is for you to link to someone’s site, and for them to link back to your site on a different site of theirs. For example, you have a website (we’ll call it site “B”), and the other person has two websites (we’ll call them site “A” and site “C”). Site A links to site B, which links to site C. Search engines can’t figure this out, and you both get quality links back to your sites. Just be sure that site C doesn’t link to site A to form a ring, other wise it’s just old-fashioned reciprocal linking with a third site thrown in.

-Press Releases-

An easy way to get traffic to your site is to issue press releases. It can be gold when it comes to traffic, but oddly enough, it is often overlooked by webmasters. It doesn’t take much time to set up a press release, and there are plenty of free PR publishing websites on the internet, so set aside some time to issue one. The rewards could quite well be worth your time.

-RSS Feeds-

An RSS news feed on your website is another way to get traffic to your site that is often overlooked. Keep in mind, however, this will be useless unless you update your site with quality content, and often too.

-Gotta Spend Money to Make Money-

If all else fails, there are two sure-fire ways to get traffic to your site, but they will both cost you money. The first is the easiest: Simply hire an SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization) firm. They are pros that specialize in making your website rank well in search engines. They will cost you a pretty penny, but turn your site over to them, and they’ll do all of the work for you.

The other way is Pay-Per-Click advertising, such as the Google Adwords program. A carefully configured campaign will allow you to pay a few cents per click to your site, and if you have a for-profit website, it is very easy to turn those clicks into profit for yourself, with very little work. It’s definitely worth a shot if you have never tried it before.

Ryan Bauer is a large-scale webmaster who runs a Web Hosting Review website and writes how-to articles for advanced computer users.

Comments Off

I guess everyone will agree if I said that obtaining enough highly targeted traffic is the key to success in affiliate marketing business. This method is proven to be effective if you’re promoting or reselling product or service online. One of the best and most secured marketing strategies that affiliate marketers can employ is the strategy of paying for performance. This means that your investments are used only on results such as additional sales and incomes.

In online marketing business like affiliate marketing, no traffic means no sales. That’s the reason why most affiliates or webmasters easily shell out even big bucks just to get top rankings on the search engines. Once you are promoting a product or service in you web page, you need to have more visitors that can be potential consumers to your products and services. This is one of the fundamental rules to succeed in online marketing business. Here, you just need to start and get it right and you can do some things wrong but still manage to succeed. Don’t ever try to get it wrong because no matter how hard you work, you can never find yourself on the way to success.

Let’s take a practical example. Paying for performance could mean giving a commission to a sales person only when new sale is made. This strategy assures you real profit because you can already compute the amount of money you have to spend for every new sale made. Also, you can avoid spending any marketing bucks because every cent you use up has either come from sale or will generate a sale in the future.

And one of the proven and most efficient ways of acquiring sales in affiliate marketing business is by drawing laser-targeted traffic towards your web site and converting them to sales by means of “Pay-Per-Click” Search Engines (PPCSEs).

PPCSEs like Overture can bring impressive sales because they permit you to pay for performance by means of attracting precisely targeted traffic to your niche. And this means people or site visitors who are actively searching for what precisely you are offering or selling. Overture’s secret is to drive laser-targeted traffic to your website by proposing or bidding on keywords that are related to the product or services that you are offering. And this strategy works this way: the more exact the keyword is, the better results you’ll receive and the less you’ll have to spend for each new sale.

Overture claims to be the Internet’s best pay-per-click search engine. It is the world’s leading resource of Pay-For-Performance search on the web. And what’s more enticing about Overture? When you advertise in Overture Premium Listings, your site will absolutely appear in the leading U.S. search engines like Yahoo, InfoSpace, MSN, Netscape, AltaVista, Lycos and more. Plus, you can get the benefit of reaching more than 80% of active Internet users.

Overture drives targeted traffic by keeping you away from the general keywords that are very common and usually come expensive and by casting a wide net of laser-focused keywords that are more targeted, not so expensive, and with high conversion rate. I’ll tell you, attracting laser-targeted traffic through Overture is nothing but a “Win-Win” Situation.

Overture’s strategy also allows your visitors to respond. And what’s important once you get your visitors to respond? Well, you are given a chance to develop lifetime customers that will patronize your product and will buy from you over an over again. Bear in mind that one-time sales can’t be a key in creating a highly profitable business especially online. You can only achieve this through PPCSEs like Overture, which gets your site visitors to respond. And once it happens, you can constantly market and sell your products to them.

Another tactic that Overture uses in order to gain laser-targeted traffic is to have a “Back-Up Response” for those who “almost bought” your product on the first visit. To successfully realize this, you need to market and advertise to them over and over again until you make them a new customer. Offer them an incentive so that they’ll allow you to advertise to them over a certain time span by means of e-mail or post mail. Here are some of the back-up responses, which you can use: send a free e-mail newsletter, give a free catalog and offer a promo or sweepstakes, which gives them the chance to win free merchandise.

Other things that will surely attract lifetime customers to your site are offering valued customer discounts, giving seasonal and special offers especially to your repeat customers and any other incentives to purchase. Don’t get me wrong with this; the abovementioned strategies can surely develop a trusted relationship between you and your customers. Aside from patronizing your products over their lifetime, they may even refer others to you or to your site.

Publisher: http://www.netmarketer.org

The best home based business ideas and
opportunities so you can work at home.

Comments Off

Welcome to part 2 of “Why Every Artist Needs a Blog”, a series showing how a successful blog can help you sell more art.

Now that you have successfully published your artist blog and have tested your dedication to frequent blog posting, it’s time to get your blog exposure on the web. Using blog-specific online marketing techniques, you can promote your blog to a target audience and build quality traffic to it – for free.

7 Steps to Build Traffic to your Artist Blog

1. Submit to Blog Directories

• A list of the top 35 blog directories with direct links to submission pages and inclusion requirements is available at The ARTrepreneur. Keep in mind that the process of submitting to directories is always long and tedious, but will absolutely prove its return on the time investment, especially considering that it’s free online promotion for your blog.

• Create a record of submission document for your blog to keep track of submission dates, member registration information, etc. Many of the better blog directory sites require a reciprocal link or tracking script to get listed, so work with your technical support person to place a reciprocal link on the page.

• Make sure that the information you submit to the directories is consistent. Meaning, always submit the same title and description for your blog. The title you submit should be the title tag and meta description for your blog – both written using optimized copy rich with your blog’s keywords.

  (See Part 1 of this series for tips on writing optimized copy for your blog)

2. Ping Blog Services
“Pinging” is a way of letting blog directories and search engines know that you have updated your blog. By sending a ping to each service, you let them know that a new post has been published so they can come check you out.

• Bookmark Ping-O-Matic – a site that lets you ping many blog sites with one click: http://pingomatic.com/

3. Optimize each blog post for search engines
Getting visibility in natural search for a blog post is no different than getting visibility for a web page. The same rules of “writing for search” apply – meaning keyword rich titles, content length, optimized hyperlinks, alt tags, etc. Here are quick tips for optimizing each of your blog posts for higher rankings in natural search results:

• Identify your keyword phrase. Is it something people actually search for? If not – phrase it differently. For example instead of using “The Dorm Diet” for a title, you might consider “Lose the Freshman 15″ since freshman 15 is a very popular searched phrase. (source: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)
• Blog Entries should be at least 300 words long.
• Your targeted keyword phrase should appear 3-5 times in the entry (once in the title, in the summary and throughout the blog)
• Use the keyword phrase in any hyperlinks you have in the blog as well as in any bulleted list.
• Use ALT tags for your images

4. Build Links to Your Blog
A link building campaign is the best way to get quality and relevant traffic to your blog. These methods, although time consuming, are the best ways to get links pointing to your blog.

• Link to your blog from the main page of your site.
• Use your blog as often as possible in the “related links” area of articles published on your site.
• Post legitimate comments on other blogs with related topics and include a link back to your blog with your signature.
• Offer to exchange links with other similarly themed blogs and websites.

5. Promote Bloglet
Bloglet is a free service for people to sign up for an email alert each time their favorite blog publishes a new post. It’s perfect for people who have not jumped on the RSS bandwagon just yet, or for those that never will (sorry mom!).

• Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone to subscribe: http://www.bloglet.com

6. RSS Feeds
Set your blog to display RSS feeds and submit your blog’s RSS feed to the major RSS feed directories online. Go here for a list of the top RSS directories: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

• Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. Test your feed here: http://feedvalidator.org/
• Use the same submission guidelines listed in step 1 above (Blog Directory Submissions) to have consistent results.

7. Email Signature

• Use your mail program to create an email signature file that will be included in every email you send. Keep it short with your name, email address, blog title and URL. This little trick will work wonders!
• Become an active member of a relevant online community forum and add your blog title and URL to your signature line at the bottom of each message you post.

Building traffic to your artist blog is not a scientific process. It takes time, hard work, and persistence to build a loyal audience and create your niche interactive community on the web. Tracking your success is a key motivational tool that will help get you through some guaranteed trying times that come with building a successful blog. Be sure to benchmark the current state of your traffic, your rankings on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and the visitor commenting activity on your blog before implementing these free online marketing techniques.

Kristin Royce is a search engine
optimization and online marketing professional contributing online
marketing and promotional content for artists to The ARTrepreneur E-Zine and newsletter.

The ARTrepreneur offers articles helping artists focus on proven techniques to accomplish any goal. Read More: http://www.theartrepreneur.com

Copyright © 2005 Arctic Mouse, Inc. All rights reserved.

Comments Off