Traffic Isn't Where Its At! Teacher: Windsong You've heard it before. You need to get traffic to your site. Promote, promote, promote. Thats what you get from all the promoters and marketers on line. Is this really true? You want to market online. So you have built your site and submitted it to the search engines. You have placed classifieds and FFA's. You are continually promoting, and this is good. You DO want to bring traffic to your site. But it needs to be targeted traffic. What does that mean? It simply means that all the traffic you bring to your site should be potential customers. But everyone is a potential customer, you say. Wrong. You want to pull new traffic from those people who are already interested in what you are selling. However, all this new traffic to your site isn't worth anything unless they: 1. Stay at your site, instead of clicking away. 2. Return to your site often. 3. Buy your products or services. Now you ask, "How do I keep 'em at my site?" and "How do I keep them coming back?" and "How do I get them to buy my products?" Well, actually its easy. There are a few things to consider. People out there in cyberspace are looking for information. They are looking for whatever they can get for free. They are in a hurry. They have no patience whatsoever. So how do you design your site to meet the needs of these surfers? First off, you've heard the old saying, "content is king". This point can't be stressed enough. I have been to sites that claim to have content. They have tons of banners and maybe a link to an article or two, or some links to the sites of their friends. That is NOT content. Articles are great, but have them (more than one or two) on your site. Links to other sites can be good, but you need to be sure that they are relevant to the theme of your site. If not, you are going to lose that surfer before he/she has a chance to see what you are offering. Offer things on your site that are free. These should be things that have actual value to your visitors, ie: a free internet marketing course, free E-books, free internet access, or free email accounts. You get the idea. The more the better. However, be sure that these are quality freebies. Nobody likes cheap and sleazy stuff. It may take a little effort on your part, and some negotiation with other webmasters, but will be worth all your efforts. You will be building a rapport with these surfers. They will remember where they got that terrific freebie and come back looking for more. If your site is well laid out, and easy to navigate, in other words, user friendly, and you have more things on your site than what they have time for, chances are they will bookmark your site and will return at a later time. The more often they return, the greater the chances are that they will purchase one of your products or services. But remember this: the content on your site must be interesting enough for them to want to return. If they don't see anything that looks interesting they will click away and you have lost them forever. So the first and formost thing is to choose content carefully. Be sure that it is relevant to the theme of your site. If your site is geared around health related products, then DON'T have resources geared towards web design. It just won't fly. Keep graphics to a minimum. Remember that these surfers are very impatient. They want a page to load fast. Graphics slow it down considerably. If you use images on your site, be sure to optimize them. You can reduce most graphic files to about 1/2 their size. This does not affect the size of the graphic, just the file. Some graphics optimizers can be found at: http://marketing-resources.com/utilities.html If your main page is lengthy and takes a while to load, you may need to break it up into 2 or more pages. Be sure each page in your site has links to ALL the other pages. Make navigation easy. This will encourage surfers to check out all of your site, or at least the areas that they came there for in the first place. Then, hopefully, they will bookmark it as a useful resource. But you must have content that they will want to come back for. How do you find content for your site? Easy. Surf the web. Spend some time searching out useful sites. The internet is an educational experience. Get out there and explore. Use it to your advantage. You will soon have a site that people want to go to. Keep them coming back. Many of them will buy your products or services. Keep updating your site so it never, ever becomes stale. Keep those surfers happy. See you at the bank! About the teacher: Windsong is the webmaster/publisher Marketing Resources where you will find marketing and promotional resources. Subscribe to windsong's free e-zine: All About Web Profits!(tm) Send a blank email to: AllAboutWebProfits-subscribe@onelist.com