Affordable Website Promotion

3 Aug

You would find it very difficult these days to totally escape from the grasps of Facebook, or at least hear about the effects it is having on the internet and users.

With many people spending hours per day on the system, many employers must see it as a costly expense. A waste of time as employees are spending working hours on the system instead of being productive.

However, there is a way of turning this social phenomenon into a useful business tool. It is something that I am going to be testing out over the next few weeks and months (given that I have refused even a personal page, I have a long way to go), but the ground work of my research is well in place so I understand what is needed and get the plans correct.

In short, you want to get people interested in your business page on Facebook and then get them to like you, your products and your activities. Their 'friends' can then see what they have 'liked' and because you are on the list, they can then maybe come over to your page on Facebook and join your followers.

Once you build this list of followers you can then entertain them by posting teasers on your wall and surveys. This keeps them active on your page and teases them across onto your main site every so often.

I have customers that do this very well. Some have a website to provide the ecommerce function and then use their page on Facebook to promote the site to loads of people. It certainly is a way forward.

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20 Jul

There are, I believe, 3 essential keys to search engine traffic. Get all of these right, in the correct proportions, and you should be flooded with traffic. Get one wrong, and you could be doomed to failure.

So, just what are these keys? Well, that information, how you get them and why I believe this to be true is going to take a full series, starting from August. It will take me until then to write, check and double check everything I am telling you. So in the mean time, do sign up for the RSS feed so that you don't miss anything. Or, just book mark this post and keep coming back - every week or so I'll add links to the new relevant posts.

In summary the three keys are:

1) Write plenty of quality content. Contrary to what you might have seen elsewhere, the weight is on quality, not necessarily uniqueness. But that difference comes out in key 3.

2) Build a good number of links. No surprise here then. Write articles and guests posts. Leave comments on do-follow blogs. Forget link exchanges! Target your link building carefully though.

3) Get plenty of traffic. No left to three because it is the surprise, but because it is where it should go. But how can you get plenty of traffic to build search engine results? And why? But it look like, moving forward, having this as the third step is going to be absolutely vital.

Given that steps 1 & 2 have been well looked at, I will only glance through them quickly. Most of this new series will be looking at how you can build traffic to build search engine results; why this should be the case and the theories behind it.

The content I'll look at then will include:
• Writing quality content for your site.
• Building incoming links for your site
• Increasing traffic, to increase search engine positions
• Why Google would favour heavy traffic websites
• How Google could monitor your website traffic
• The evidence that Google could use traffic as part of its search engine ranking algorithm
• Which is better, lots of unique visitors, or lots of hits?
• Ways to increase traffic for free, without optimising your site.
• Cheap, paid methods to increase your website traffic

Hopefully, that should be enough to get us started and no doubt a few more titles will be added along the way. Check back during August when I'll start using this page as an index and linking to the relevant new posts.

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25 Feb

Utube can be used as a fabulous marketing tool. Do you know how to use is and what to do? Here is a quick look at what you can try.

Recently, when booking a holiday accommodation, I saw an excellent use of utube for promotional purposes. The owner of the holiday apartment had simply slowly walked around the entire apartment and filmed the apartment as he walked. This gave a tour of the apartment, which he loaded to the website to share with everyone else.

As a web designer, customers with videos already on utube are very easy to deal with. This is because they make sharing the videos so simple. There is no loading up to website, no getting the video from the customer in the wrong format or even converting from a DVD. And it is just as simple if you are maintaining your own website and you can even include uploaded videos in any blog tool, whether you are hosting the blog yourself or using the free tool.

So if you are promoting a service for which you can take a video, upload it to utube and then embed it into your website. It may sound tricky, but they provide the exact piece of code needed to cut and paste into your website. It should only take you seconds.

It is not just apartment owners that can use this service. I know a wedding videographer who has uploaded sample videos and these are shown from his site. For anyone who can video their service or product, this technique will work.

But you do not get the best of utube just by taking videos and linking to them from your own website. I recently saw a sample video for someone who also happened to be in accommodation. Instead of a plain video about the company, it was a funny fictional video about some holiday makers. This video was working in another way. Instead of adding to the service of the website, it is trying to drive in more visitors.

How does that work? Well, start getting people looking at the video and rating it. Some of these people will enjoy the video and decide to show their friends. This then means that the video is being shown around a circle of people that it appeals to and so more of these friends are likely to pass the link onto their friends.

This is excellent marketing. You are not paying for the marketing, other people are doing this for you by word of mouth. What could be better than free marketing from potentially hundreds of people you do not know? This really is viral marketing working for real.

Of course, just producing the video is not quite enough. Not only does it need to appeal to a group of people, it needs to link back to you. Maybe in the background it very clearly shows your logo or right at the end of the video your website address scrolls across the screen.

Whatever approach you take, utube is there and can be used to your advantage.

Article by Keith Lunt

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22 Feb

If you are looking to increase the traffic to your website, have you considered the benefits of some free traffic from Twitter? Here's what you need to do.



Obviously, before you start to get any traffic from Twitter you must first sign up. So go ahead and create an account now. But how does the system work?



Twitter works by a system of you follow people and they follow you, if they think you are interesting. What is following? It is basically just subscribing to their updates, which are known as Tweets. These Tweets are on show to you whenever you log on to Twitter to read updates.



And that, fundamentally, is the system. So the key is getting followers as more followers means 3 things:



1 - Potentially more people reading your Tweets and becoming interested in your product and eventually becoming a buyer.



2 - More people listing you. If the people following you think that you are interesting or have a connection with them, then they might also list you. With this they have created a group of people who they can filter to read just their latest posts.



3 - Better search engine optimisation. Although I have not seen any proof, it is obvious that there is a correlation between the number of times a person is listed and the number of followers which ties in with the page rank of the page. Of course, the higher the page rank the more often Google is visiting you. And this means search engines listing your Tweets quicker and more often. Also, your Twitter page can link to your homepage and this should provide some search engine favour.



So what are the keys to getting plenty of followers?



1 - Be interesting and write often. If you write once per month, even if the Tweets are outstandingly informative, there will not be many Tweets for people to find and therefore follow you. Likewise, if you Tweet on the hour, but your Tweets are boring, other members are unlikely to be inspired to follow you.



2 - Follow people yourself. If you do not follow anyone then your account is going to look unmanaged and spammy. Do try to follow as many as follow you. You can do this by finding people who you would like to follow you. Search for people Tweeting about the same products and see who is following them and who has listed them. If they are related to you, there is a target to start following,



Getting the most out of Twitter is about getting plenty of followers and them publicising your offers on the service, in a way that other readers will not find offensive. Tweet interesting information updates often and you should have a good amount of success. But do not go for the filling the account with spammy contents. The system and your followers will soon catch on and you will be left high and dry without a Twitter service to use.



And do not forget that there are a lot more affordable website marketing tips over on the blog for you to uncover. Not just about Twitter, but about all elements of website promotion form build and design to using the promotional systems to their best advantage.



Pop over to real web traffic to learn more about what Keith Lunt has on offer in his marketing articles. You could be thanking us for it!

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12 Feb

Recently I have seen the light and started to test out various different methods of social network marketing. And I must say that I have gone from unconvinced to spreading the word of social marketing.

OK, so what is this all about? It is quite simply about using free social network sites to promote your online business, website or services. Sign up to a free service and, within the boundaries of what they allow, you can be promoting your business.

One such method is obviously Facebook. The owners of this website have created a special type of account for business holders to sign up to. WIth so many people using Facebook it is quite easy to get current customers to become fans of yours. They can then keep up with your latest news, offers and goings on through Facebook.

With the amount of times that users of this system log on to view their messages, by posting regular information your messages will be on show to them frequently, for just the effort of making a few simple posts, or writing on the wall as it is known.

The big benefit of this sort of promotional work is that it is absolutely free and you are giving the people what they want. They are visiting Facebook to read about what other people are doing and you are telling them what it is you are offering. They are therefore susceptible to reading messages, so are likely to see and read what it is you have to say. You are hitting them with a suitable message just at the point they want to read it. And this is free!

Twitter is just as good and useful, but I have also experimented with this a lot more on the technical side. Here you are just posting small messages of up to 140 characters at a time - the same length as a standard mobile phone text message.

People searching Twitter might happen across your messages, Tweets as they are known. If they are interested in what you have to say they might follow you and it is often courtesy to follow them back. Others might follow you because they have noticed that you have similar interests or because they already know about you. Some will follow you in the hope you follow them back so that they can promote their message to you, showing that the marketing system works.

When you set-up a Twitter account it is important to find a few suitable people to follow. Once you start following people and Tweeting, people are more likely to find and follow you. It is these people that are reading your Tweets and maybe starting to buy your products.

But as well as the direct marketing, search engines will also see the posts and any links you include. It is a way of directing search engines into your site, another reason to have a go at social networking.

These methods are both free to use and well worth having a go at. If you have not already tried one, sign up now to see how they might improve your business.

Keith Lunt

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