The Silent Avatar Speaks

When you have your own business at home, getting into Internet Marketing can quickly raise the status of your business. One of the most important facets to having success with Internet marketing is how you are generating traffic. Without traffic coming to your site it is impossible to have success. Therefore, you must evaluate how you are going to generate a high traffic volume.

The thing about running your own business at home is that you can never have too much traffic. You should always be looking to increase your traffic volume so that you can increase your income. Typically you want to find a few solid marketing techniques and stick to them as opposed to using several different techniques. But you may have to try out several before you find the most effective method for you.

One technique to raising your traffic volume with Online Marketing is submitting a site map to search engines. What this will do is give your site a better chance of being examined by the search engines. With more visits to your site from the search engines spiders, your sites will gradually climb higher on the search engines thus increasing your traffic.

Most people are aware of affiliate programs, but few are familiar with how they can benefit the site they already have. If you set up your own affiliate program for people to sell your product or service, you will have a business within a business. Not only will you have other people selling for you, your traffic will increase as well because of two separate businesses.

Perhaps the easiest method of increasing your traffic volume is posting in forums. There are literally hundreds of thousands of forums to choose from. The key is to post in forums with a lot of people that are all interested in the niche you are involved in. After spitting out some fresh and enticing information, you can reel people in to your website immediately.

The last method is one of the best on the Internet right now: article marketing. Article marketing can do a number of things for your site. First, it allows you to write fresh and enticing content that readers will be astonished by. Second, you can promote or write about whatever people are looking for here. Lastly you can place a bio box with your URL in it to direct customers to your site after submitting the articles to article directories.

Traffic is essential to having success with Online Marketing. It can be difficult having your own business at home, but using a few of these marketing techniques can make life much easier for you.

I’m the silent avatar.. and I have spoken

Any comments? Leave a comment, or ask a question and I will respond with wit and expertise (what a combination)

Tags: Internet Marketing by the silent avatar
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Some people are too tired to do the thinking and will opt to go with the flow whatever is the trend, be it on fashion, sports and even with businesses without even thinking what it is for.

Most businesses find themselves in the need of providing websites for their company and/ or products because everybody else does. If you are one of these people, you may now start knocking your head for a very expensive mistake of not knowing what you do. Websites are being made to support a business and not as mere decoration and attraction, and no matter how dynamic your web design is, it will be useless if you are lost in the conceptualisation.

Now, what you have to do is, since the website ought to support the business and gain earnings, to make sure that the business website is doing well.

There are six critical elements your small business website must have to survive and perform better.

1. Content. Everybody is going crazy with website design and images, however many missed the principle that it is the content that matters. Site visitors browse the web in search of information and not just to look on a website. Therefore, you have to make sure that included in your website design is the principle of content. Information on the website should be relevant to the site that you own or to the niche where you have included your site. This is very vital when a search engine like Google has to crawl your business site. You will be more referred by Google if it sees that you have a good content about your business. More so, to be more effective, several articles of 500 to 1000 words will help the system recognise your business site. If you do not have the time to spend to do the writing, you can have this outsourced through a ghost writer that will make a good article for you.
2. Blog. Some people neglect the value of blogging and sees it as for the “nerds only” and yet, blogging has proven its effectiveness of use to support the sites. This is for the reason that blogging can create a community around your site thereby generating traffic and in the long run will ultimately boost your site’s performance. It should be noted however, that a blog is not a duplicate of the site, hence, you should put new content on it to achieve better ranking and reference from Google.
3. Video. The Internet provides vital information to people, and becomes an effective tool in marketing. However, because of the advertising overload often generated by automated systems, consumers are becoming cautious in browsing the sites to search good content. A video introduction in your site can help attract users that your site is genuine and there are real people behind the website. Additionally, this can be powerful in promoting interactions to generate trust and promote visitor’s loyalty. This means that users will prefer to visit your site often, seeing good information and good users’ interaction, founded on credibility.
4. Email capture. Internet users tend to be cautious of online businesses. It takes time to establish trust and reliability on the target audience. Unless these users become familiar with the site and have encouraged visits, this will be the only time that these people can think of buying any of your product posted on the business site. Hence, making email capture as part of your web design like giving free reports or subscriptions to your newsletter can be a good way, you can have access to them by being bale to acquire their email addresses. You can have their email addresses as means to contact them for product or business promotions and entice them to visit the site most often.
5. Credibility through business details. It is a known fact that users are reluctant to visit a site until they knew that there is a real person behind it. Therefore, it is essential that you provide data or profile of the people behind the business. In addition, an address, phone number and other necessary details are helpful to establish that you are a true human being and not an automated system.

Lay-out of the website design. Lay-out is not as simple as the physical appearance. You can have a dynamic website design with a lot of flash files and yet your business site may not be performing well. The essence of the lay-out of the website design is that you should be able to keep the users involved. This should be user-friendly and easy to be understood. Moreover, if you are selling a particular product, the details should be accessible and easy to find. It is a necessity that your website design’s lay-out is not difficult to navigate. People do not have all the time to browse your site and you should be able to relay your message to them in a single glance.

To sum up, all these key elements of website design and SEO points to a single thing: the user. It is the audience that is the lifeblood of the business site. Make them see your site and expect that your small business site will boost its performance.

I’m the silent avatar.. and I have spoken

Tags: Web Development by the silent avatar
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Evening all,

This post I want to bring you up to speed on what you should be doing when your website is finished,

I’ve always said that a website is nothing more than html code stuck in cyberspace unless you dive traffic to your site.

Given that there are over five and a half billion websites on the Internet and growing at an exponential rate, this figure is enough to scare the pants off any would be Internet merchant, or home entrepreneur.

There’s good reason that Alexa does not rank website unless they are in the top 1000,000 as below this you really aren’t getting enough traffic to warrant being part of their statistics. So unless you are considering throwing a LOT of money at advertising and branding, don’t worry about having a high ranking,

Your goal is to drive a steady stream of people to your website to give you an income, or increase your “authority status”, through your blog, articles and  comments posted back to your website.

To produce a website and not consider how it is to be marketed is just plain stupid.

The time money and effort to produce a website is for naught unless you promote your website.

So how do you promote your website?

This will depend on the type of website (which I will discuss later) but at the least all website owners should be doing the following:

1. Using their web address in all of their emails, along with their tag line.  I wrote about it using email signature sometime back. Review the post “Quick Tip – Using Email Signatures“.
2. Using their web address on all stationary – including business cards, letterheads, with compliment slips, invoices, brochures… In fact anywhere you can put your web address – put it! This includes all electronic stationary as well.
3. If you have a motor vehicle have a magnetic sign made to put on the side of your car (or if you’re really committed get the car sign-written with your website details. Driving around as much as we do this is a great way to advertise your website. Just think of how many people can see your mobile advertisement!
4. If you have a shopfront your web address should be clearly visible from the street.
5. If you have a product tag, your website address should be on the tags, labels, stickers (whatever)

It takes time for something new to sink into people’s consciousness. Repetition is the key. Whether you website name is reinforced through a variety of means doesn’t matter.

Let’s now look at specifics…

[Read more →]

Tags: Advertising, Blogging, Business Tips, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Newsletters, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, Traffic Generation, Web Development by the silent avatar
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