Blogging On My Mind

Traffic is essential to anyone who owns a website and/or blog. Without traffic we have no customers or sales. Unfortunately traffic does not just come to us, we have to work at it an we have to be consistent and persistent.

Sales conversion rates normally average less than 5%. What this means is that only 5% of the people who visit your site will become a paid customer. So, to grow your sales, you need to boost your traffic and/or your conversion rates. Below are 12  ways you can do right now to start increasing your traffic to get those sales.

1.  Launch an Article Marketing Campaign – Writing articles is not as hard as you might think and it can do wonders for your traffic! Write about something you know and just pretend you are telling a friend all about it. There is no need to use big, fancy words because people just want basic, straightforward information. Submit your articles to some of the more prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles.

2.  Guest Posting and/or Commenting on Blogs – Do a search to find quality blogs in your niche and ask if they accept guest posts. Write helpful comments on existing posts and leave your link. Get involved and start building your reputation! A good place to find blogs that need guest posts is BloggerLinkUp.

3.  Write Website Reviews – Review websites on Alexa and get more traffic and improve your Alexa rating. Go to Alexa, register an account and start reviewing and getting that traffic.

4.  Relevant Keywords – There are a lot of free keyword suggestion tools you can use to find the top keyword searches for your niche. For example: if you own a pet care site, you would enter the words pet care and the tool would find the most relevant keywords for you to use on your site.

5.  Yahoo Answers – Visit Yahoo Answers regularly and post as many answers as you can but be  sure to follow their policies. You cannot try to directly lead people to your purchasing pages or leave low quality answers with your website link.

6.  Interactive Site – Make your site interactive with forums, polls, surveys, etc. If your visitors feel more involved with your site, you will get repeat visits and longer stays. Add a little fun as well with contests, games, etc. Have a weekly or monthly scavenger hunt, trivia game, etc. Running a contest for a month can boost your traffic by thousands.

7.  Business Cards – Produce an effective business card and hand them out wherever you go. Be sure to make it unique. Offer a discount on a first order. Add a personal message. Offer a freebie. Make your business card more than just your name and address.

8.  Podcasting – A podcast is an audio or video broadcast which people can listen to and/or watch on many devices. Make your podcast informative but interesting. Talk about how your site can help the people listening and let them know about any contests or other interactive activities you offer. All you need to make a podcast is a working microphone and a voice editor such as Audacity. Once you have made your podcast, promote it in podcast forums and podcast directories such as PodcastBlaster.

9.  Moving Billboard – Turn your vehicle into a moving billboard to advertise your website wherever you go. Use affordable vinyl coverings such as Car Wraps or magnetic signs from Esigns. A day of fun can bring you a lot of traffic from your mobile billboard!

10.  Social Media – These days social media is a must for more traffic. Join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. Visit message boards and forums and really get involved. Answer people’s questions, offer helpful advice and information. Becoming an active participant in social media can do wonders for your traffic.

11.  Offer a Freebie – Write an informative report or ebook and offer it for free. Put in your website link and other business info. Let people know they can give it away on their sites as well. Add it to your email signature. Post it on your social media pages. Before you know it, your report could be all over the web bringing you new traffic every day.

12.  Sitemap – Create an XML sitemap for your site and submit it to Google. A sitemap will allow more accessibility to your pages by the search engines, thus making your pages easier to find by people doing searches. You can easily create up to a 500 page sitemap with XML-Sitemaps. There are other options as well such as XSitemap. Do a search and find alternative options to choose from.

There are numerous ways to get more traffic to your site. Some will work for you and some will not.  Try the ideas in this article and add to them, or mold them to work even better for you. Traffic does not come easily but by working hard, trying new ideas and finding out what works best for you will be very effective in boosting your traffic.

About the author: Terri Seymour has over 12 years of online experience and has helped many  people start their own business. Visit her site for free articles, resources, information, resell  ebooks and more. Sign up for the RSS Feed for a free business ebook with MRR.  http://www.SeymourProducts.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Good blog writing is an art. It requires attention to detail, good grammar, good punctuation, correct spelling and great content. So what is the single biggest mistake a blogger can make when writing a blog post that is supposed to be optimized for search engines?

Basically, it is to sacrifice any of these requirements in order to use what they think are high paying, low competition and high inquiry keywords or keyword phrases that simply do not fit into the content of their post under the misconception that they believe this is a good website search optimization strategy.

Examples are deliberate misspellings, phrases that are questions and cannot be contextualized as answers, abbreviated phrases and so on.

The flaw in focusing on keywords of this type rather than content is that the search engine operators actually look for and value good content i.e. the content that flows nicely, has correct spelling, good punctuation etc. etc.

They do not value nonsensical paragraphs that are clearly written to attract search engine attention rather than to meet the requirements of visitors to the website that have arrived there for a specific purpose and that is to find great content and information on their topic of choice.

You only have to think about what happens when someone arrives on your website and either cannot make sense of what you have written or, equally as important, cannot find the information they are looking for.

They simply leave again and go and look for a different website or blog that does provide the information they want in a format they enjoy and in a place they can find it.

The technical term for what I am discussing is the bounce rate, the time a visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit. If they only look at the first page or leave almost as soon as they arrive then you will register a high bounce rate – 100% basically says that they have not found what they came for and left immediately.

A more acceptable level is 50%, but should be lower if possible, and that should be the minimum target any webmaster or blogger aspires to achieve.

Writing your blogs or websites with the objective of providing useful information that is well written and with appropriate keywords that describe the actual content of your site will result in far better search engine optimization than selecting keywords that are inappropriate or cannot be converted into sensible paragraphs of written text that can be understood and enjoyed by your visitors.

If you do your keyword research thoroughly and with this view in mind, there is a high probability that you will find keywords that are high paying, low competition, with sufficient numbers of inquiries and that do fit with your content in a sensible and coherent fashion.

The extra effort required to do this will ultimately reward you with the associated benefit of attracting more people who in turn will become loyal visitors that come back to revisit your site and who are likely to recommend it to others.

Remember it can take a very long time to build a loyal fan base for a blog but all the work put into achieving that can be lost in moments by placing rubbish in your blog posts. You need to consider both the human elements and the search engine algorithm elements.

About the  author: Brian Stephens  writes at Building an Online Business  that offers information and advice on how to create and promote a small business on the Internet. This includes an online projects job board, for home based jobs.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

According to the latest social networking news, Twitter has begun to outpace Facebook. Reportedly, Facebook lost six million users in the last month. Twitter appears to be the new generation in social networking.

Twitter is being used worldwide to educate, sell products, and socialize. New research reveals that people who use virtual networking are healthier than those who do not participate.

1. Define the Target Market Precisely, and Stay Focused.

The biggest mistake new Twitter marketers make is that they attempt to reach everyone who might be interested in their product or service. But Twitter doesn’t work that way. In order to maintain subscribers, you have to engage.

For examples, consider how many of the largest corporations use Twitter solely to target their young consumers.

2. Proactively Acquire Followers.

Another big yet common mistake is the expectation that followers will magically arrive. Instead, we must earn our followers. A great way to do this is to follow high-profile individuals and groups in the appropriate market, and then communicate with them, which will draw attention to your account if that communication is engaging enough.

3. Quantity Matters

Do not waste time wrestling with quality versus quantity. An active presence is a key to recognition and to maintaining a large subscriber base. That doesn’t mean you ought to tweet nonsense, but your followers will quickly forget a tweet that falls flat, and that failed tweet still has the cumulative effect of making your presence felt.

4. Share Content from Others.

A good means of consistently delivering interesting tweets is to share tweets from others that you think will engage your base. This has a number of positive effects, including possible recognition from the original poster. A consistent effort in this regard can get you talked about by Twitter users who are influential within the target niche.

5. Leverage Automation.

We don’t have to do all tweeting by hand, and we can use automation to great effect to maintain our presence. For instance, a number of sites provide free Twitter automation based on RSS. Simply choose a relevant, high-profile blog, and then the service auto-tweets each time it publishes a post; you can even filter it based on tags and such.

6. Use Followers like a Focus Group.

Most Twitter users understand that they have to engage their audience, but they find it difficult to so. The truth is it’s not that difficult if you approach your followers as you would a focus group. Twitter followers follow because they’re interested. They also want to exchange ideas. After all, communication is what social networking is all about.

7. Do Not Fear Controversy.

In fact, controversy is so effective that many Twitter marketers go out of their way to create it. You don’t necessarily have to go that far, but if you have a hot topic that is relevant to your niche, you should tweet it, encourage conversation and run with it as far as it will take you. Of course, always be careful not to alienate your base.

8. Be Human.

When operating a business online, people tend to act professional to the point where it becomes impersonal. We don’t want to make this mistake on Twitter because emotional connection is a big part of what makes Twitter so productive.

Be business like, but don’t be afraid to have fun and to engage with your base on a personal level, have fun with your twitter marketing.

Credit:  Complete Twitter Marketing was used as a resource for this article. The site provides articles, information and products available for general Twitter marketing http://completetwittermarketing.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources