Category: Marketing & Advertising
It's the specter of every webmaster: a never-ending fire hose of traffic. Why is this so hard to achieve? Well cupcake, for one, getting traffic to your site is a skill. In fact, it's an entire business. A business that you're trying to do all by yourself - that's why you think it's so hard. You're trying to do two things at once. You're trying to run your own business as well as a "side business." Guess what? Usually, that's a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, there's a solution for that: outsourcing.
You're Hiring Experts
When you outsource your traffic generation to another company, you're basically creating a marketing department for your company. No, they aren't employees as a matter of law, but they "yours" as a practical matter. They will answer to you, provide you with all of the data analysis you'd get from an employee working the same position, and they will also be motivated to help...
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The paid traffic scene can seem a bit daunting. First, you have to find a good traffic broker, then you have to test landing pages. Finally, you have to figure out how to scale up your traffic without creating more unnecessary work for yourself - all the while worrying about the extra bandwidth load on your servers. If that weren't enough, you might not even know what kind of traffic you need to buy. Not all webmasters face this problem. Some have done their research, had a friend "on the inside," or have gotten really lucky with traffic brokers. Before you dive into any traffic campaign, here's what you need to know about what you're buying:
Global Traffic for Branding
This type of traffic is more or less for branding. Don't expect sales from it (though don't turn them away if you do get any). Global traffic is basically untargeted traffic. There are no unique IP addresses associated with visitors. Your visitors are served popup ads...
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Blogs can be powerful ways for companies to keep in touch with their customer base. While social media allows some connection, a blog provides freedom for companies to show in-depth views of what goes on behind the scenes in the company. This kind of intimate view of a company’s goings-on can work to increase brand loyalty, leading to more repeat business.
That being said, not all blogging is equally as effective at creating or strengthening a customer base. Implementing these simple tips will help you use your blogging efforts wisely, producing benefits both immediately and in the long-run.
Set a blog schedule and stick to it. Too many people want to blog when they feel inspired. The problem is most people feel inspired only once in a while. Honestly, nobody is going to visit your blog on a regular basis if they cannot expect to find at least one new post to read at each visit. This means you need to set a schedule of when you post on your blog and then stick to it....
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You don't need to pitch your products and services to sell them. That might sound incredible, but it's a strategy that some businesses employ and they're cleaning up, big time. For example, while investment research firm Casey Research does have sales pages for its newsletters, much of the "selling" is actually done through editorial pieces. e-Commerce sites can take a tip from this, and other, companies that employ a similar strategy. It will increase traffic to your site, boost sales, and earn the trust of your visitors more than an outright sales message.
Tell a Story
One of the best ways to sell is to tell a story. Get away from telling users how great your product is. Instead, earn their trust by telling a story. The story should incorporate a problem that you know for a fact that your readers are having. Then, the story should illuminate a solution - a generic solution - to the problem. Finally, the story should demonstrate how...
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Online advertising is probably more important than ever. With the rise of Facebook marketing (nope, it's not going away), and some clever marketing moves by other social networking sites like LinkedIn, you don't need to rely on Google. In fact, small networks, traffic brokers, and even individuals who sell redirected traffic are all seeing a surge in business. Free organic traffic is, well, not really free. In fact, it's often more expensive than just buying ad space.But just because buying ads is usually better, doesn't mean that you can throw something up on Google's Adword's network and hope for the best. You have to optimize your online advertising so you don't blow your cash on worthless leads. Here's how to do that.
Make a Plan
This should be obvious, but most people are too lazy to do it. Figure out what you need to be profitable. If you need to make $3,000 per month, or $7,000 per month, it doesn't matter. What does matter is...
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Traffic. SEO. Money. You want all of it. Problem is: it's not as simple as going to the money store and picking out your income off the shelf. Traffic is something that most companies struggle with, and t's the first link in the chain of a successful online business. SEO firms charge a lot of money. However, they can never guarantee you results. Methods are often shielded behind a permanent virtual wall of trust. Now, Clearspike is changing all of that.
What Clearspike Does
Clearspike takes a lot of the expensive agency stuff and simplifies it. For example, your typical agency goes out and submits articles, video, and even podcasts to various places. They submit articles to article directories, your website to search engines, and help you optimize on-page factors so that you'll rank better for your chosen keywords.
Clearspike's sophisticated algorithm automates the on-page optimization and submits all of your stuff automatically - no...
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If you want to make money online then you probably know just how important it is to be able to increase web traffic to your online properties. Whether you're directing traffic to a website, sales page, social media page, or an ebook in an online store, it pays to understand the most effective and efficient ways to drive traffic. Since time is a factor for most entrepreneurs, especially ones just getting started, this guide will show you the absolute best ways you can increase your traffic in just 3 months.
Pinterest
Pinterest is an up and coming social media site where you build your own image galleries. This can be a great opportunity to create a traffic funnel to various web properties that you own. Just keep in mind that Pinterest is frequented by mostly women and what that means for how you decide to do your demographic targeting. In other words, make sure your images are rich, high-res, and something that will appeal to a largely female audience within your...
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Thanks to the various research, analytics, and insight tools that we have at our fingertips, tracking and measuring data is easier than ever. Want to see how many people visited your site last week? Click. Need to know the percentage of people that abandoned their shopping carts? No problem—all those numbers can easily be crunched by a standard analytics program.
Another convenient feature of these metric programs is their ability to generate reports at a drop of a hat. Tables, graphs, and charts can be pulled up in seconds, allowing people to easily make sense out of the data.
Yes, everything is great and swell in the realm of data and analytics… right? Not exactly. Unfortunately, while a lot of site owners may be tracking their data, a good number of them are tracking the wrong things. These things are what the tech world refers to as “vanity metrics.”
Coined by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup, vanity metrics are...
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YouTube executives indicated this week that the company plans to add paid subscriptions to certain premium channels on the company’s streaming video site in the near future. These subscriptions could become available as early as this spring, according to the New York Times.
YouTube has for some time now been the most popular video sharing website on the internet. It allows people to upload videos directly to the site on almost any topic that they can then share with millions of users for free. Many well-known companies and celebrities now produce high quality content for YouTube. Until now, however, they only way for creative individuals to earn money from their content on YouTube was from advertising revenue.
Over the past few months, individuals who have watched content from YouTube providers with large followings and regular uploads may have notice a new “H+” icon on the video. This means it is a high-end provider and offers...
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If you are like most business owners, the quest for leads is unending. After all, if people who are interested in possibly becoming customers do not learn about your business, they will never spend money with you – making it hard for your business to thrive, to say the least. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of available means by which you can collect leads. This ebook discusses several of the options that can potentially have the most impact on your long-term success.
Using Mobile Marketing to Capture Leads
Mobile marketing campaigns enable marketers to reach their target audience with a tremendous level of precision, maximizing the return from the money they invest in ads. They accomplish this by selecting consumers based on specific requirements, such as their mobile phone carrier, their device manufacturer and their location.
Mobile advertising is an easily accessible strategy for even small businesses; however, that does not mean it...
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