CNY Webmasters

We are starting to add a new concept here at CNY Webmasters, we are allowing some select guest bloggers to give us some new ideas and tips. I think this will help increase our way of thinking about internet businesses and give us some new ideas and tricks to play with. So here is our first guest Ian Del Carmen is an online business professional running his main site at http://www.ianDelCarmen.com. His other sites include http://TheOnlineBusinessProfessional.com, http://MobileEbooks.net, http://InfoProductLaboratory.com, and many more…

Many people will tell you that to get your web site noticed you need to ‘optimize’ your site for the search engines. You are then led up a path where you have to keep changing your web site as the search engines change their ways of listing things. As fast as you ‘optimize’ your site, Google and the others have moved the goalposts, meaning you have to keep optimizing over and over again.

Now consider some facts. Most people in the world are not users of the Internet. Let’s repeat that. The vast majority of people who you want to reach don’t use the Internet. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your web site, they simply will never find it.

Here’s another fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make most of their sales ‘offline’. They sell their books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars, workshops and conferences. Indeed, for many ‘Internet marketers’ these ‘offline’ sales represent the bulk of their income.

So what do these facts tell us? They show us that ‘offline’ promotion is more important than online promotion. You may be able to optimize your web site to get high rankings in a search engine. But that doesn’t mean you’ll reach the vast majority of people who could buy your product or use your information.

This was confirmed recently by one study that showed most people go to an Internet address (URL) after having read it in a newspaper or magazine, been given it by a friend or colleague, or having heard it being mentioned by someone speaking at a meeting or on TV. In other words, it seems that significant numbers of people who get to your web site will do so having heard the URL somewhere outside the Internet.

You can get many people visiting your web site, even if you are not ranked highly by the search engines. You can do this in two main ways:

1. Write articles for use in regular publications – newspapers, magazines and so on. Always include your URL in the article and you’ll get millions of people to notice your web site address.

2. Speak at every opportunity. Make presentations to business clubs, chambers of commerce, local societies – you name it, you should speak at it. Every time you speak, announce or your web site address.

Although these are the two principal ways of gaining offline publicity for your web site, don’t neglect your business stationery, posters, car stickers and so on. The more your web site address is visible outside the web, the more visitors you will get regardless of how kind the search engines are to you.

Pay-per-click or ppc advertising can be costly and grossly ineffective. When going ppc you need to really watch costs, conversion and ad effectiveness. While we are new to the ppc arena we do know that mistakes can and will cost you.

First off always go with Google Adwords and Yahoo!, MSN is ineffective and you will get very little traffic from them. By far Google has been our best performing ppc platform, obviously with 60-70% search market share.

Choose your keywords carefully, general terms do not and will not convert. We run an annuity website, but using the term “annuity” is too broad, costly and competitive of a keyword to be effective. In other words, you will spend a lot of money for low to no results. But, the keyword annuity comparison, while competitive, is a better fit with lower competition and low cost per click.

Google offers a keyword tool to help you pick the keywords best for your website. Pay close attention to advertiser competition for the keywords, more competition means higher costs for you. We concentrate on lower cost keywords that fit our sites best. This method keeps our costs lower and conversions higher. We also offset our costs with Google Adsense so those who do not buy will hopefully click off our site and we can recoup a portion or more of our cost per click.

Ad variations are also important. Create several, and we mean several, different ads with your focus keywords in the ad. If the ad contains the keyword that you are bidding for then you may get a higher quality rating which can mean lower cost per click expense for you. Ad quality is extremely useful for ppc advertising and pay close attention to it.

Cost control is extremely important when using ppc advertising. Since you have greater expense exposure than traditional banner advertising, which is generally fixed costs, you have to watch costs. We refuse to pay more than $.50 a click, therefore we set out maximum bid for $.50 and daily budget at 20-$30 a day. From there we watch conversions and which ads generate more clicks.

Do not assume you will get business from ppc, it’s like a website, just because you have it that doesn’t mean that it will work or generate money for you. Log in to your Adwords account at least daily to check your stats, make adjustments and hopefully you will have conversions.

Cheap keywords and enticing ads will create sales for you. One last thing, never bid the same amount for content advertising as you would for search engine advertising. With click fraud and mfa sites abundant, you will find that content ads are next to worthless, IMHO.

If you are doing ppc arbitrage be very careful and keep your bids low and content keywords high to maximize returns. A 10-20% rate of return on arbitrage is EXTREMELY good.

I think this is, quite possibly, the most asked question by anyone starting out in this business or hitting a plateau even with their sites progression and development. Here are some ideas to consider when trying to get more traffic to your website. I suggest you test out methods and see which specific techniques work for your specific website because everyone’s sites works differently

1. Blogging
Blogging has become a phenomenon and highly attractive. People become loyal to good bloggers that write interesting, humorous and insightful posts. Blogs give you a chance to prove to others you’re an expert in your field.

Ok, lets say your not into the whole blogging idea, it is time consuming, here is another approach. Find Blogs out there written about your topic and post on them. A lot of blogs allow you to post on their site and there you will be able to basically put in your two cents and give them the following, HIGHLY IMPORTANT LINE ending your post which should always be in anything you write…

Do you know what it is?

“For more information go to mysite.com”

It may seem like a simple line but if you forget to put it in, you missed your chance to get targeted traffic to your site for free! When people are interested in what you have to say they will look at your site for more information so it is crucial that you have one HIGHLY IMPORTANT LINE in there.

2. Article writing
One of my favorite ways to get traffic and links all in once! Write articles about your site, go and submit them to just 10 different article/content exchange websites with your link/website info on the link in the article and watch the traffic come in, and the links pointing to your site go up. No joke, this method really works. The downfall would be you obviously can’t control where your articles appear and what type of websites.

3. Press Releases
Press releases have always gotten me great highly targeted traffic,. There are many PR services out there to consider, paid and free. I personally prefer the paid method (you get what you pay for) PRweb.com. They get your press release (after editors approve it there, so don’t make it a sales letter, make it and informative piece) into some great news resources to give you high traffic and highly targeted visitors.

4. Viral Marketing
Some of you may not think you know what viral marketing is, but you’ve seen it I guarantee! Think about those jokes you get in your email, that you keep passing on to your friends, or those funny You-Tube videos that you share with everyone. A lot of these are ll attempts to start viral marketing. Viral marketing is creating something that will be passed around by others causing the marketing pice (no matter how subtle) to take on a life of its own almost. You create something so funny or entertaining that people just start spreading it for you, and all the time there is a link to your website in there somewhere for people to learn more or see more at.

5. Integration Marketing
This technique is pretty much a traffic exchange that can be useful is you set yourself with a targeted site that is comparable or related to what your product or service is. Integration marketing is a hot topic and many claim it is a necessity to a successful website. I highly recommend you look at as many experts in this field as you can. The more you know, the more you can offer on your site and become more successful.

Ex. You have a newsletter on your website that people can sign up for. After signing up for your newsletter there are given the opportunity to sign up for other peoples newsletters or product information.

When you line yourself up with a website with similar client base this type of traffic exchange can be beneficial for your both. Or have other get their members to sign up for your list/newsletter or forum etc.

6. PPC advertising
Be very careful before you ever start a PPC campaign. You can literally lose all your money with these things if you aren’t highly informed on how to do this effectively. Keep you bids low to test waters and only increase them slowly to see if the results are worth the bid increase. PPC can bring you traffic, but not always that targeted traffic so you have to test this method to see if it is beneficial to your specific website.

7. Paid ads (very different then PPC)
Paid advertising allows you to determine which websites specifically will have your ads. You can make sure o approach highly relevant websites and strike a deal with them to place you advertising on their website, possibly even swap advertising, they place yours if you place theirs on your site.

8. SEO techniques
I never overlook ways to get free traffic. SEO techniques to help your site with its natural search engine rankings will always help you increase your traffic. To go into all the SEO techniques you can use here would make this the worlds longest blog post, there are lots of great resources out there to refer to to help your Serp’s… and also an idea for a future blog post for me 