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7 Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion
Web Site promotion should be the major part of your web site marketing plan. It's not enough just to design a beautiful web site and put in on the Net. Promoting your web site has to be done constantly if you want to get a continuous stream of...
7 Things You Can Do to Build an Effective and Responsive Opt-In Mailing List
We're assuming that the primary goal of any Internet marketing effort is to earn money consistently over a long period of time. It doesn't serve us well to look only at short term goals. 'Flash-in-the-pan' success does happen for some people,...
Affiliate Income Booster Techniques
The biggest source of my online income continues to be from participating in and promoting Affiliate programs. They provide a steady flow of checks to the mail box. Some of these checks are for just a few dollars, and some of them are for several...
If you Sell a Product, Use Online Marketing, Part 2
If you Sell a Product, Use Online Marketing, Part 2 Judy Cullins ©2003 All Rights Reserved. When you offer your products via an email campaign to get people to visit your Web site, or sell direct through email, you reap many rewards--you...
New Medium, New Rules
Life is thought to have begun on Earth somewhere around three billion years ago, and of all the species, only an estimated one in a thousand is still alive today. Academics continue to debate over whether this is a natural part of the...
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Web Statistics for Dummies (part 2: Referrers)
Do you know how to use referrers to increase your traffic? How
to increase your conversions? This article is the second in our
series on learning how to analyse and understand your web site's
statistics. The goal of this series is to help you increase your
site's revenue.
Part one was about using your sales statistics to enhance your
web business (part one can be found here: ww
w.redcarpetweb.com/promotion/0509.html#feature). Part two is
about using your referrer statistics to increase traffic,
ranking, and conversions.
Part 2: Referrers
A referrer is a website that directly sends you traffic. The
bulk of your traffic is referred by search engines, but other
sites send you traffic as well. These referring sites will help
you increase your position in search engines because by linking
to you, they are essentially "voting" for your site. The search
engines take these "votes", and count them towards how popular
your site is. The more popular the site, the higher the site
will rank on a search. Of course it is not that simple; content
actually plays a more important role, but everything should be
taken into consideration when fighting for your hard-earned
placement within the search engines.
Referring domains
So to get back to our main point: How can you use referring
sites to help you make more money? Simple. By looking at your
statistics, and finding out who is linking to you, you can see
trends or patterns and capitalize on your site's strengths. For
example, if you sell real estate, who is linking to you? Local
businesses? Government sites? Other real estate sites? Is it
only sites you have swapped links with or are there a pleasant
amount of unexpected sites linking to you as well?
If you do not have many sites linking to you, than maybe you
should consider posting more useful information on your site.
Try to make your site useful for anyone who wants to know about
your industry (not just potential customers) by writing new
informational pages. This will do two things:
1. Your potential customers can find out about your industry
without leaving your site, thus increasing your site's
professionalism and usefulness.
2. Other sites in your industry will start seeing your site as
a useful resource to link to. You will become a leader in
sharing information about the industry online.
This can only lead to more links, more traffic, and ultimately
more people talking about your site.
Exchanging links is a good idea too, but it should only be done
if the site is appropriate to link to. Do not link to sites that
are unprofessional, or sites that are just a gathering of links
(link farms); it will make your site lose its authority.
Finally, there are directories. Directories like www.dmoz.org will link to you if
you have good useful content on your site. Even if people
do not
actually search for your site on those directories the links
from them tend to propagate your site throughout the web. Take
your time and read the directory's instructions carefully before
submitting. If you submit to them haphazardly, they will simply
ignore you.
Search Engine Referrers
Looking at your site's statistics, you can find out which search
engines are sending you the most traffic. Usually the search
engines that show up in statistics are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and
Ask Jeeves. Find out with search engine sends you the most
traffic, then take a look at what keyphrases the surfers are
using to find you. These keyphrases will tell you what your
clients are looking for. For example, here at Red Carpet Web Promotion,
we get a lot of searches for carpets. Obviously we do not want
or need this traffic, but due to our name it cannot be avoided.
For us, it is important to keep track of this "carpet" traffic
because it skews our numbers. If traffic doubles one month, is
that because our position for "carpets" went up, or is it
because our position for "web promotion" went up? It is
important for us to figure this out, because if our position for
"web promotion" went up but we did not get more sales, than we
would need to update our web site to convert these potential
clients into paying customers.
By verifying the keyphrases that people are finding you with,
you will better understand why people are coming to your site.
If you are a plumber and most people find you with the keyphrase
"sump pumps", you'd do best to make sure your site, or the
section of your site they are arriving at, offers them sump
pumps! Likewise, if they are coming from a site that is
referring you as a great deep well repair man, than make sure
that that section of your site promotes your deep well repairing
skills.
Conclusion
Look at your stats regularly, see where your traffic is coming
from, and make sure your site caters to these people. If they
are coming looking for sump pumps and you do not sell sump
pumps, either start selling them, or sell something of value to
these people. If you do offer the product that these people are
looking for, but they are not buying, than figure out why. Is it
your price? Is the shopping cart too complicated? Do people not
see the "Buy a Sump Pump Here" link? Figure it out and fix it
fast, because the Internet is so fickle that your "sump pump"
traffic might be gone next week, and you would have missed out
on the easy jackpot.
About the author:
Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce
marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion,
Inc. He has been researching and developing marketing
strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine
results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the
search engine
optimization field.
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