Dyno Domains Center

Everyone wants a web business. Well, not everyone, but a lot of people want to quit their day job and be able to work at home in front of their computer and make their living while being able to spend time with their families.

But how does that happen? Of course you have to have a website. That’s a start. And of course you need something to sell there. That would be a good step. But once you have a product and a website, the people will start coming to your website and buying stuff right?

Well, not exactly. The “build it and they will come” philosophy only works in movies about baseball. You have to do a few things to get customers. Of course you can submit to the search engines for traffic, but that takes time and is never guaranteed to send your website traffic. You aren’t even guaranteed to be indexed when you submit your website. Although this is a necessary step, it may not answer all your traffic needs.

You could trade links with other websites to get traffic. However, you need to trade links with a website that is already getting a lot of traffic for enough people to go there, then a few of them click your link and go to your website. Most websites that have a lot of traffic don’t want to trade links with someone with a website that has no traffic.

You could buy advertising on other websites. Again, you need to buy advertising on a website that is related to your topic and one that has a lot of traffic. Most webmasters are very proud of their traffic and charge a lot of money for you to advertise there. So unless you have a pretty hefty budget, you may not be ready for buying advertising just yet.

So, how do I get traffic for my website? I’m glad you asked. Again, you do need to submit your website to the search engines. That will probably get some traffic to your website in the long run.

But in the meantime you may need to purchase bulk traffic from a good source. There are several companies out there who offer to sell you traffic, but you need to be smart about it and not buy just any traffic. If the traffic you buy for your website is not geared or targeted toward your topic or product, then all you will do is spend money and get no one to buy your product or service.

Some websites sell popup, popunder, or exit traffic. What that means is they have websites out there that whenever someone goes to the website, a popup or popunder is sent to them advertising your website or it can be an window with your website actually inside of it.

If you purchase this sort of traffic you will definitely see hits to your website. The question is which popunder or popup traffic to buy. You need to make sure the company you are buying from is reputable. The wrong traffic to your website can penalize you with the search engines and hurt you in the long run.

In addition to that as I said above, the wrong traffic will not convert to sales anyway so it is a waste of your money. You need to find a company that is selling you targeted traffic. You need to be sure they have the type of traffic you want for your website. If one company does not have traffic that is specifically targeted toward your topic, product, or service, find another one.

However, keep in mind that you need to know who you are targeting. You need to understand who your buyers are. Many times your buyers may not come from a website that is related to your topic. If you are offering a general service or product, you may only need to make sure the traffic is coming from the countries you want it to come from. If your website is all in english, you might not want 100,000 visits from people in China.

Do your homework to make sure the company selling the traffic is legitimate, that the traffic is from the right countries, and that the traffic is traffic you can convert and popunder or popup traffic can get you started making sales in as little as one day or one hour!

D. David Dugan personally helps to maintain the DD&C Spyware Information site http://spyware.dugancom.com and often uses traffic from http://www.acceleratedtraffic.com.

So, you’ve added Adsense to your site and you are getting a few clicks. You could be thinking to yourself, How do I get a massive amount of visitors to bump up my earnings? If you’re anything like me, you hear those stories about webmasters that have added Adsense and are already earning five figure incomes per month, and you start to see the dollar signs.

So you start brainstorming. You come up with a few ideas: email marketing, ebooks, trial software, etc. The thirst for Adsense dollars (and maybe a few affiliate dollars) is your main drive. Pushing massive amounts of traffic through your site can give you quite a thrill ride.

Then along comes the well known email that markets the traffic exchanges. If you aren’t familiar with traffic exchanges, it’s really very simple. You see, you sign up for their service (which often times is free) and your website is put in a list. The way the free traffic works is that you surf the web using their browser, browsing sites that are in their directory (or list) and every 30 seconds you can refresh to a new site. As you continue to do this, it builds up credits for your account that you use for other people who are using their browser to see your site.

It’s a cyclical service. You see their site, they see yours. And since you can have as many browsers going (among the many traffic exchanges) as your computer can handle, you can theoretically build up a large quantity of hits on your site in a relatively small period of time.

It seems like a great thing, and for many it fills a very necessary niche, so I can’t say that the traffic exchanges are a bad service. I would use them in anything else that I am doing. I would, however, make a very big distinction.

First, I know and respect the tech’s at Google and I know that when they make a new program for their visitors and webmasters to use, they make it for the benefit of everyone. That is the case with their Adwords and Adsense programs, both targeted to helping webmasters make money through advertising (albeit the opoosite ends of the scale).

So when I put an ad on my website, I know that I am offering a service to the advertiser (through Google) to reach their target market. And ethically, I should only be paid when I provide that service (someone clicks through that ad to their site). There are extreme ethical problems if you were to use traffic exchanges with the Adsense program to try and cheat the advertiser out of his hard earned dollars.

Plus, if you haven’t figured out by now, Google knows what you are doing. They have specific ways of knowing what is a legitimate impression, versus what is a hit generated by a traffic exchange. Your numbers quickly dwindle if you use a hit exchange and you run the risk of being kicked off the program.

Plus, often times you have to go through two websites wasting a full minute of your time before you get one hit directed to your website. Building up over time, it eventually it all adds up.

Take, for instance, the “surf contests”. This is where they tell you who has racked up the most surfing in the week. These numbers are huge… up to 10,000 page loads. When you add it up, that’s over 84 hours of one week that is taken up trying to earn an extra 1,000 hits on your site. Not very worth it to me.

The best way to use the Adsense program is with a website that you have that is established and has a constant stream of visitors going through it. That’s the goal of the program, make money off of an existing site and its content.

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Is your site designed to appeal to your ego - or is it designed to attract customers and make it easy for them to BUY?

If you have an existing site, or if you are just getting your business onto the web, here are some simple steps you should take to ensure you have a successful e-Commerce website.

Tip 1:.

Get your content right. When a prospective customer goes to your website they are expecting to find expert information and useful content that will help them make a buying decision.

Think of it this way, if you ring up a business or walk into a shop to buy something, you expect the salesperson to know what they are talking about and to give you helpful information.

If the salesperson doesn’t know their product and can’t give you helpful advice, you are probably going to walk out and check the competition.

Did you know 80% of people surveyed use the web for comparative shopping, or to gather information that will help them make a buying decision. They do this prior to ordering online or visiting a bricks and mortar shop.

If your site doesn’t give them the information they need they go to your competitor’s website - its as simple as that.

When you design your site forget the hype, instead be information generous.

With an editable website you can upload new information and create informative web pages without any programming knowledge. This is extremely important if you want to get your site into the top listing on the major search engines, and it’s even more important if you want to be seen as an expert in your field.

But remember, when writing content use short sentences and short paragraphs to keep your content scannable. Most web users scan copy - they don’t read it.

Tip 2:

Keep your website simple and keep the ratio of text to HTML content high by staying away from too much Flash, DOM, Java, and JavaScript.

Moving icons, flying pigs, ding-dongs, and music drive most people crazy when they are browsing your website. It drives search engines away too because the robots ignore content utilising the above technology.

Flashy sites are great for some owner’s ego, but you won’t be able to count the sales lost because you drove your customers away.

The choice is yours - big head or more sales! Simple sites attract business; complicated, flash filled sites could drive business to your competitors.

Tip 3:

Make sure your site loads quickly - within 3-4 seconds - longer and you lose 10% of your viewers for every second it goes over 4 seconds (10% can mean the difference between profit and loss for many businesses).

Tip 4:

Spell-check your scripts and make sure your grammar is correct. You won’t get any brownie points for mis-spelled words or bad sentence structure. In order to build trust with your audience you need to look and act professional at all times.

Tip 5:

Stay away from virtual hosting. The cost of quality hosting and professional support is nothing compared to the cost of your site going down or having broken links and not knowing about it.

Just about as bad, is having to pay $80 - $120 per hour for technical support to fix broken links and other problems because your host does not have the skills to provide in-house technical back up of your site, and believe me the best of websites get glitches all the time.

Tip 6:

Talk to your web developer about optimising your key pages for the search engines and how you can add quality out-going and in-coming links to your site. It can be expensive, but for some organisations it will pay off in a big way, particularly if you use professional real-time web tracking to analyse your marketing activity.

Tip 7:

Keep adding informational content to your site. New content keeps your site fresh and interesting for people who re-visit your site…and a big bonus is it stimulates the search engine spiders. When they see fresh content on your site they automatically make a note to return soon and spider the site again. They absolutely crave new informational content.

Tip 8:

Beware of turning your site into an online brochure - viewers get annoyed by online brochures, they may be interesting in print, but they just don’t work online. When a client insists on having brochures on their site, we normally place an icon on the page enabling them to download the brochure in PDF format.

Tip 9:
Make sure there is provision on your site to gather names and email addresses automatically. Building a list of opt-in names of people interested in your products or services, and keeping in regular touch with everyone on your list, will pay HUGE dividends in the medium to longer term. You can get further information on building a profitable list at http://www.sitedesignnow.com/

Mike Greenfield is Marketing Director, SiteDesignNOW.com and NOW Technology Systems, an Australian and Brisbane Web Design company specialising in ONLINE CATALOGUES and NEWSLETTER HTML Marketing Systems. You can contact Mike@SiteDesignNOW.com

Many webmasters spend a lot of time tweaking their sites for the search engines because they think that search engines will bring them the most traffic for the time and money spent. It is a good use of time but combine a link building campaign and competitive intelligence and any webmaster can triple the traffic they currently have. With good competitive intelligence you may triple your conversion rate as well by bringing very targeted traffic.

Strategic Link Building

Link building is directly related to search engine optimization. Because of this many webmasters fail to think about link building as a strategy of its own separate from search engine optimization. Strategic link building can bring in a lot of targeted traffic to your website. There are four good methods for obtaining quality links. Each method becomes more powerful.

The first method is simple and easily implemented. You go surfing for sites that you like, and would appeal to your visitors, and you ask for a link. It helps to offer a reciprocal link in exchange but it is not always necessary.

To get results, you’ll need to send your request to about ten sites for every one positive response you get. Once you get some experience, these odds will improve. So, expect to do a little work. The results will be worth it.

Please Note: In approaching the prospective website’s webmaster, make sure you are sending them a relevant link request and make it personal. Let them know you visited their site and why a link would be valuable. There are a few link building software programs that send spam to webmasters. You want to make sure that the email you send is sincere. Link building is a legitimate marketing strategy and approached ethically it can have significant impact on your bottom line. It’s worth taking the time to do it right.

The second link strategy is also very powerful. It is also simple. Submit articles to free content sites to be included in other websites and ezines. The free content sites will post your articles on their websites and offer your article to webmasters to reprint on their sites and newsletters. This is a great strategy. The reason it works so well is that each article has a resource box that contains your website name and a link. The article can be reprinted only as long as it also contains the resource box. If you have a popular subject, your article and link can get published on thousands of websites this way.

And talk about targeted traffic. If you’re selling fly fishing rods to an upscale audience you can write an article for that audience and by the very nature of the article it will get picked up by websites that attract your clientele. They will read your article and click over to your site. This is quality targeted traffic.

As you have probably already thought about, the links are also great for your search engine rankings. The link in your article is surrounded by your site keywords. The article itself will populate the search engines and the links to your site will support higher page rank. It’s all good.

The third strategy is very similar and that is to write a press release. If it is newsworthy a good press release can do wonders. It will not only get published on many websites you may get a few interviews and be on TV or in a national magazine.

One relatively sure way to get some publicity is to hand deliver your press release to your local media. They like local stories and if they like you, you are bound to get some good press.

There are two important points on using press releases to promote your business. First, be persistent and keep submitting new press releases. If you are creative there are many newsworthy stories about any business. You just have to find them and promote them. The second point is to be personal. “The Media” sounds big and impersonal. There are thousands of media outlets and getting to all of them is nearly impossible, if not cost prohibitive. Well, that is one of the nice aspects of getting press. The best way to get a national story is to start local and build. The Media prefers to get their news from the news. If you have a story of national interest and it is first published in your local newspaper, you can bet that many astute editors will pick it up and take it national before you know it.

So, get to know your local press. They’re good people.

The fourth strategy has been around since the internet began. It is to post to forums and news groups. It’s easy and fun plus the links are valid and hold a lot of weight. The search engines like forum post links a lot. In fact, the best way to submit your site to the search engines is to post your website link in a popular forum. The forum will be spidered within 72 hours and your site will begin the submission process on it’s own.

Here too, stay on topic and be honest about your posts. You can buy a spam poster and post to ten thousand forums automatically but, being about the oldest trick in the book, it will get you in a lot of trouble. It’s not good business. Seek out forums you like and get involved. That’s all there is to it.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence will supercharge your link building campaign.

Wouldn’t it be great to know what links are sending traffic to your competitor’s website? Wouldn’t it be great to know which sites were sending the most traffic to your competition? How about what keywords drive the traffic to your competitor’s websites? There are ways to know.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A lot of knowledge can be explosive. You can take your pick here. There are two methods. Both methods work to identify the links that exist for other websites and allow you to target them. The first method will get you going and the second method will give you a mighty edge.

The first method is free and easy. Download and install the Google toolbar. Once installed, you will see a link called “Backward Links”. Now, go to a website that appeals to your target market and use the “Backwards Links” toolbar link. Google will show you a list of websites that link to the site you’re visiting. This is a great place to begin your link building campaign.

While you are working this list of websites you can begin another list. As you visit the websites look for a link directory on the site you’re visiting. Once in a while you will find a site with an industry directory or a resource page that has links to related websites. This is another nice list for you to work. This method will generate a lot of quality links and bring you visitors that are looking for what you have to offer. If you’re critical of the sites you send requests to, you will build a network of quality sites sending you targeted visitors.

The second method is to employ some competitive intelligence tools. Would you like to find out which sites are responsible for sending traffic to your competitor’s pages, including search engines and the search keywords that were used? Competitive Intelligence tools provide you with the means to monitor your competitor’s web sites and to identify their major traffic sources. By using these tools you maximize the use of your time by targeting quality websites. It is easy to see the value here. Knowing what sites to target is valuable knowledge indeed.

Enough said about competitive intelligence. I’m sure you’re more than just intrigued.

Link building using competitive intelligence should be considered an integral part of your ongoing marketing effort. It should not be a quick test that is shoved aside because it did not have an immediate return on investment. It works and it will grow with time. It is one of the best investments you can make in marketing your website. Done in earnest, you just might consider it more effective and more deserving of your time and attention than search engine optimization or any other online marketing method six months from now.

Resource Links:
Competitive Intelligence Tools
Digital Point Forums

- JD
Blog About Retail

Every webmaster who has personally tried promoting his or her site understands in some sense the value of reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking refers to the agreement between website owners to mutually link to each others’ sites in order to increase both exposure to each others’ visitors as well as link popularity to search engines. Traditionally, this process has been very labor-intensive involving a number of steps to initiate contact, establish acceptable link parameters, and verify and police the reciprocal linking arrangement. Now, a controversial new linking tactic has emerged called “the cooperative reciprocal linking network.”

The purpose of these reciprocal linking networks is ostensibly to utilize “unused advertising space available on the web.” Here’s how it works: the site owner puts a bit of code on each page of his or her site and it serves up hyper-linked text or graphic ads promoting the sites of other cooperative members. Each time a coded page is loaded, the ads change. This is much like how Google Adsense ads work except there is no correlation between the pages’ topics and what ads are served–in other words, the ads are not contextual.

Although dynamically generated, these text ad links can be crawled by search engine spiders. In this sense, the ad linking network can be thought of as an automated method of reciprocal linking capable of providing a boost to each member site’s link popularity.

Participation in the reciprocal linking network is generally free (hence the term “cooperative”) and what one gets out of it depends on what one gives into it. If a webmaster agrees to display five ads per page and his or her site has 100 pages indexed by Google, then that webmaster’s site is given a weight of, say, 500 (5 x 100). The higher one’s “weight,” the more often one’s ads will show on other sites in the network. In order to be an eligible page, the page has to be indexed. The reciprocal linking network checks this using Google’s application program interface or API.

So what’s the controversy? Reciprocal linking network critics contend that because the links are crawl-able by search engine robots and the fact that ads may be irrelevant to the page’s topic area, this is akin to having some sort of reciprocal link farm or scheme designed to influence the web page’s link popularity and search engine ranking. Indeed, one well-known individual’s web page showed up for a while in Google at No. 4 for the term, “eBay” purely because he designed his link ads so that the anchor texts had the word “eBay” in them. Carried across thousands of reciprocal linking participants in the network, it had automated the reciprocal linking process and, at the same time, boosted his page’s link popularity for that particular term.

One would think that this is a bad thing from the search engines’ perspective, right? Not quite. GoogleGuy, the unofficial Google spokesman who regularly posts to website marketing forums, responded to a thread at one forum on this topic. GoogleGuy said he was concerned about linking out to “bad neighborhood” participants in the network (like some Polish site that was apparently cloaking the cooperative ads). GoogleGuy did not say that the network was bad because it had the potential of manipulating rankings, rather he said the worry was “bad neighborhoods.” So, does that mean that if the bad neighborhood problem was under control then the reciprocal linking networks are sanctioned? Maybe…

Here’s how I look at these cooperative reciprocal linking networks: what if Google didn’t exist? What if no search engine existed? What would I do to advertise my site? I would have to participate in reciprocal linking with other sites. But reciprocal linking willy-nilly would not cut it; it would have to be targeted, topic-based reciprocal linking. I would link reciprocally with other like sites. Would I participate in reciprocal linking networks if there were no search engines? Absolutely! It would greatly ease my reciprocal linking time. But the reciprocal linking networks are untargeted as they are currently configured-this is clearly something the operators need to address.

In conclusion, reciprocal linking via cooperative ad networks is a great idea. Google and the other search engines should not have any issues with them in concept. But concept is not reality; in reality, people are joining these networks and trading “weight” to influence link popularity and rankings in the search engines. So, it’s not a perfect solution to the busy webmaster’s reciprocal link management problems. Is participating in a reciprocal link network spamming the search engines? I don’t believe so because the search engines have not clearly defined exactly everything that is or isn’t a spamming technique, and in this business, whether a technique constitutes spamming or not often comes down to a question of degree.

(c) 2005 Philip Liu - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Philip Liu is a freelance author and publisher currently based in New York City. Philip publishes regularly on his websites, Cell Phone News + Reviews (focusing on cell phone news, rumors and reviews from around the world), and DTVScoop - Plasma, LCD TV Reviews + News (focusing on digital television news and reviews).