Archive for July, 2009

How To Generate Viral Traffic Pt1

July 28th, 2009

Provide quality content, products, or service

Providing quality content, products, or service is by far the best way to build your reputation, and build repeat traffic to your site.  Research has shown that on average, when someone has a positive experience they will tell two other people about that experience.  On the other hand, if they have had a bad experience, they will tell seven other people.  That act of telling others is how the viral traffic generation techniques start.  If your customers never tell anyone else about you and your site, you are back to doing all of the marketing on your own.

To build returning customers to your site, you need to establish a reputation as an expert in your field, very entertaining, or someone who has unique insights.  That does not happen if all you are offering is cheap, recycled drivel that you found on someone else’s website.  Make sure that what you offer is your own work, and something that is different from what can be found on every other website.

As your reputation as an expert increases, other websites and bloggers will start to pay attention to your website.  They will begin to talk about what you are doing, and will even give links from their website to yours.  Suddenly every one of their readers becomes a potential customer.  The higher the quality of material you produce, the more often your site will be linked to.  Each link to your site is an avenue for new visitors to your business.

If you do not think you have the ability to create something that will touch people like it needs to, you may have to spend the money and hire someone else to do it for you.  Fortunately for you, there are a lot of service that will put you in touch with freelance writers, site designers, and program designers.  If you have an idea about what you want, chances are there is someone available to do it for you.  If you are willing to take a chance on a freelancer who has not yet established themselves, you can often find one that will work for a low wage in exchange for the experience the job will give them.  Be careful though; often times you get what you pay for.  Make sure the work you get is up to the standards necessary to appeal to your audience.

Give Something Away

One of the best early examples of building a business by giving something away is Hotmail.  Hotmail gave away free email services and email addresses free to anyone who signed up for one, and a lot of people did (and still do).  Today millions of users have Hotmail addresses.

What made hotmail successful was one of the early successes of viral traffic building on the internet.  At the bottom of every email that was sent through one of the free Hotmail accounts was a message telling others how they could get a free Hotmail account.  Every time a Hotmail user sent a message, they were helping spread the name of Hotmail.

How did Hotmail make any money off of free accounts?  They did it by offering premium services to their customers such as additional storage space, and the ability to send emails without any advertising attached.

Hotmail became successful enough that in 1997, less than 2 years after it was created, it boasted over 8 million users and was purchased by Microsoft.  It is still one of the top web based email services in the world.

While you may not be able to achieve the same amount of buzz that Hotmail was able to generate, it does demonstrate the power of getting your message out be attaching it to something that people are willing to share with their friends, family, and co-workers.

Do not discount the fact that people love to get things for free.  If it looks interesting, and it is free, people are more than happy to give it a try.  While it is easy to get them to try your offer initially, it is a different challenge to get them to continue using it once the novelty has worn off.

Repeated use is critical for your success because multiple exposures will cement your companies name in your customer’s minds.  People are more likely to buy something from a company they have heard of than from one they have not heard of.  They might not even know how or why they know the name, but that sense of familiarity will make them more susceptible to your message.

What ever you are offering has to be functional, easy to use, and add value to the user.  You customers have to feel that it is worth their time and effort to pass the information along.  Then, and only then, will they be willing to tell their friends and family what they have found.

Part 2 coming soon, if you want the Full Viral Traffic Guide Now click here

Comments welcome.

Your posting links everywhere but not making money? This is Why

July 17th, 2009

Welcome to Social Media,

The clue is in the name Social + Media, in order to sell on social sites you have to be very tactile.

People in the social media world do not respond very well to direct sales messages this is because they have been bombarded all day long with it and when they get home they just don’t care what your selling or offering no matter how good you think your product is. When people are visiting these social media sites such as twitter, facebook & youtube they are relaxing and checking out the things they like the most, dogs for example.

Imagine you have just finished a hard day at work and you go to your favorite social sites and you see, “teach your dog some manners only $19.99″, “Make your dog fetch the ball only $9.99″.

Would you respond to them? probably not and whats more if you keep sending them this kind of stuff they will most likley stop following, leave the group or unsubscribe from your list, videos, blog or whatever it is that you do.

You need to provide GOOD content thats relevant to the persons passion, for example instead of the same old sales pitch why not write a review of a product that you recently purchased but be honest and don’t lie and say it’s good if it’s not, you must build TRUST from your followers. Try to include some really useful hints, tips or tricks thats related to the item, for example if you just reviewed a dog shampoo include some tricks on how to get the dog in the bath or how to get the dog to stay still while you hose him down.

If you can become an affiliate of the product you just reviewed, then add your affiliate link to the bottom of your review, or on the side navigation somewhere. Call the link find more information on this product, or something similar and not Buy XYZ for only $19.99

In this one instance you may not sell anything, but you have built a new relation with your followers. You have provided new, useful, valuble, trust worthy information and you have not tried to sell them anything. Your followers are happy and they really apperciate this type of content, and remember happy followers turn into happy buyers.

Now you can post links to your new content, but tell them what your doing or what you did or what your problem is. I would go with something like “My damn Dog jumped out of the bath, I’m soaked. (link goes here)”

Just repeat this simple content first & money later concept. I’m sure you will see an improvement in no time.

Comments, thoughts, Suggestions are all welcome.

Free Stuff > 20 Twitter Templates Pack

July 16th, 2009

I know how you all love twitter and free stuff so I created this template pack for twitter, just download, unzip, login to twitter and add one of the templates to your profile. Your profile will instantly stand out from the other twitter profiles.

Download Twitter Templates Here

I’d love to hear your comment and suggestions as always.

How to create a website Part 1 – The Domain Name

July 15th, 2009

Okay so you want to create a website but where do you start?

The first thing you’re going to need is a Domain Name, something like www.mycooldomainname.com

The domain name is the address of your website and it will be used for directing traffic (people) to your site.

Normally the domain name is formed in three parts, but you only choose two of the three parts.

part1.part2.part3 = www.domainname.com

But before you go rushing to buy www.iwanttobethenextgoogle.com you need to think about it for a minute. What is the website going to be used for,  is it you / your company / your passion / your mum ?

It’s likley that the domain name will be in use for a long time to come and so you should consider some things before deciding on the name.

1) Make the name easy to remember, generally short names are better.

2) Ensure the name cannot be spelt, or worded in different ways. For example www.were.com could also be where.com or wear.com, also stay away from numbers combinations like the 411.com could also be fouroneone.com. Think about the people coming to your site, you don’t want to have to explain that 411 is the numbers 411.

3) If your domain name is not something fixed like your company name, you should consider including keywords in it. For example if you own a pet shop based in essex you may want to choose www.petshopessex.com

4) Sometimes unique domain names can be used to your advantage, names like google, twittter, facebook, myspace. But remember that these names only become popular with branding, advertising and the public awareness.

5) You can’t use special characters in your domain name like#@¬$, but you can use hyphens – which act like a word spacer. Search engines can read sperate words even if they are not seperated by hyphens www.thenextbigthing.com is okay and so is www.the-next-big-thing.com

6) Once you have found a domain name you will need check that someone else has not already registered it. To  see if the name you have chossen is available type it in here:

Trust 1&1 Internet for your domain name registration, from only £1.99/year!
Check now!

Now that you have selected a name you need to choose the TLD (top level domain) for it, the is the part 3 of the website address, the .com bit. I would always recommend registering a .com in conjuction with another name that maybe more appropriate if you were regisitering a name for a charity it would be a good idea to register www.yourcharity.com & www.yourcharity.org and if you can afford it I would register all available TLD’s as this will help protect you brand in the future.

Note that the TLD’s have some restrictions on who can register what and what for, they can be only registered for a minimum fixed term of 1 year and some TLD’s such at .co.uk can only be registered for a minimum of two years.

I hope this article helps with deciding on your domain name, I’d really appericate your comments or suggestions for improvement.

See Part 2 – The Web Hosting