Driving Traffic To Your Website Using Twitter

Recently, I conducted an experiment by using twitter heavily to drive people to my website. When I say heavily, I mean really heavily. I got over 900 followers in 5 days and posted over 170 posts, many of contained links to fun content on my website.

To do this, I simply searched for random people and b2b companies that focus on contact management for small businesses, and added them to the people I was following. In turn, about 50% of them followed me back. It was pretty easy, but very time consuming.

What I found was people were eager to follow tweats and become my friend, even sending private messages to chat, but when push came to shove it didn’t drive many people to the website. Furthermore, the traffic it did create wasn’t good traffic. It drove a small amount of people to the site that viewed the page I posted to them and no other pages.

The problem with Twitter when it comes to driving traffic is you cannot easily target people who would be interested in your website. By not having a way to target people based on interests it is simply not worth the time to use Twitter as a traffic driver. In fact, like every online trend that has SEO implications, I was flooded by messages of marketing people trying to do the same thing as me. This obviously dilutes the market place.

My suggestion is to wait for the next Twitter to come along and be one of the first people involved. The traditional ways of driving traffic to your website; word of mouth, forums, advertising, blogs and SEO give you more bang for your time.

A Step-by-step Guide to Online Marketing

As companies seek to find more effective, and less expensive, marketing methods, online marketing stands to see the biggest increase. Businesses already spend more on online marketing than they do on Radio and is set to surpass magazines by 2010 (ZenithOptmedia, 2007). However, you can do many things to make sure your website is not lost in the clutter. Below are the top actions your business can take to increase your website exposure and increase your ROI.

1) Maintain and improve your website

Unless your business has an endless marketing budget then you need to rely on your website’s quality to drive traffic to your site. This is the basic of search engine optimization (SEO). A high-quality website doesn’t just mean something that looks pretty. It means that you have text that engages the reader, contains your keywords, and can be found by Google and other search engines. Simply put, your website needs to be designed to current industry standards with special attention to the basics like page titles, meta descriptions, accessibility, and navigation.

2) Build web presence

Once your website has the basics down you can concentrate on promoting it. Depending on your product you may want to utilize viral media sources like YouTube, MySpace or Twitter. These can be great for B2C type product lines if used in conjunction with directory placements, online press releases, online trade publications, forums and article submissions. The key is to get as many quality links to your website as possible; this will increase your search rankings. The higher your rankings are, the more traffic you will get.

3) PPC advertising

There are several PayPerClick options to choose from. The largest network consists of Google AdWords. You may have noticed these ads when you search for a product on Google and there are “sponsored links.” Adverisers pay to see their advertisement there when you search for certain keywords. This can be a very effective method to drive traffic to your website.

Note: PPC advertising is getting more expensive because of the dramatic increase in competition over the years. This could also reduce the effectiveness of your campaign if it is not monitored closely.

4) eNewsletters

Sending out eNewsletters can be a very effective way of staying in front of leads and existing clients. There are a couple of basic guidelines when sending an eNewsletter.

• a) Frequency – Choose a frequency that makes sense. If you email them too much it will reduce the effectiveness of all the newsletters


• b) Content – Don’t send a newsletter for the sake of doing it. Provide your mailing list with something of interest and they will thank you for it.


• c) Unsubscribe – Make sure your newsletter has an Unsubscribe option. It will help you maintain an email list that is of the highest quality and reduce bad feedback.


• d) Compatibility—There are countless email programs. You need to make sure that your eNewsletter looks acceptable in the major ones like Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.

5) Campaign evaluation

One of the most important part of making an online marketing campaign is measuring its results. Keeping track of keyword rankings, incoming leads, new website traffic, and sales are among the most important indicators to a successful campaign. Since online media is usually fast moving and contains many traceable activities you should be able to track the success of your campaign with much greater detail than any other media.

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Improving Google Adwords Keyword Quality Index

Whether you realize it or not, the amount you are paying per click with your Google Adwords campaign is not what everyone else is paying. The higher your Keyword Quality Index (KQI) score the less you have to pay for your keywords and the higher your position will be.

Your KQI is a somewhat direct correlation to how relevant that keyword is to your site, and more importantly, the page that your ads take the user to. So this brings up the top ways to increase your score.

1)Create landing pages for your advertisements. Don’t send every user to the same page. Send them to a variety of pages that have to do with those particular keywords. The more relevant the landing page is to your keyword the better your KQI score will be.

2)Create ad groups in order to separate your keywords. Don’t group all your keywords together if they are targeting different things.

For instance, one of my clients Logicbright CRM has two markets. One is CRM for small business and one is large corporations. The keywords that are important to each group happen to be different which means the ads that each market should see would be different. So in this case you would want to make two ad groups and have one ad group go to one landing page and the other one to a different landing page.

3)Use your keywords on your landing page and make sure they appear in the meta descriptions of those pages.

Don’t get too discouraged. It may take a while for things to happen the way you want, if you remove the keywords and start over it may take even longer since Google remembers your activity for old keywords and campaigns. So be patient, if you do it right results will come.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

SEO is a big topic that comes up all the time with my clients. Everyone wants to be the number one website on Google, but don’t know how to achieve this. This article is NOT saying you are going to be able to get to number one, but it will give you some guide lines on how to increase your chances greatly.

The most important item relating to SEO is to remember that CONTENT IS KING. Without endless amounts of fresh and interesting content you will never get to the top. But it isn’t just the quality of content that counts; it is how the content is written. For example if you are selling cell phones you want to make sure your keywords appear in your text over and over again. It may seem repetitive but this is the best way to get Google, MSN and Yahoo! to notice you.

The next tips are in no particular order because they all play a similar small role, but together make all the difference.

• Use meta tags and descriptions – This is an older html technology that is considered dead by some but is still being used. Your meta description is often the description that a search engine will use when displaying your website.
  
  
• Wrap text in paragraph and headline tags. Using the proper tags will tell a search engine that your text is indeed content. Headline tags are given a higher priority by search engines.
  
  
  
• No Frames – stay away from frames, it makes it impossible for a search engine to appropriately link to your site. In-turn a user may find your site but it may not have all the page elements attached to it.
  
  
• Links – Using your keywords in your links is a great way to emphasize those words to a search engine. Never use “Click here” it is a wasted link.
  
  
• Backlinks – Backlinks are links from other sites that point to your site. Backlinks are one of the primary things that Google looks for in determining rank. The best way to build backlinks is with your content. You can syndicate your content over blogs, rss feeds and general article submissions. Each time you submit an article make sure it has your link on it. Joining forums and social networks are also great ways of building backlinks but many of them frown on blatant advertisements so you have to do this wisely.
  
  
• Use Text – It may sound simple, but actually using text instead of images allows a google bot or yahoo crawler to read you site.
  
  
• No Flash – Flash sites are bad for SEO plain and simple. Even newer Flash techniques that allow crawlers to read the site still won’t end up at the number one spot simply because of lack of perceived content since your website is only one page.
  
• Web maps – Creating and submitting a web map notifies the search engines of which pages are the most important and how often they change.Time – SEO is slow, be patient.

There are many other things you can do to increase you rank naturally, just remember do not cheat and pay for a service to do this for you.