Sunday, August 19, 2007

How To Get Website Traffic For FREE

To get a huge traffic for your website, you generally need to shell out a large sum for it and if your website is worth the expenses and the traffic so purchased will keep visiting your website, then you can definitely make an investment in purchasing the traffic. But for starters it’s not quite easy to take such a big step. Whether your website has the potential to be popular among masses will be revealed only when people come and visit it. So most of the budding webmasters would like to opt. for the cheapest yet reliable means to earn website traffic.

1. E-zine publishing:

If your website is a content website like ours, then you can publish your articles in an E-zine website for FREE.
All you need to do is sign up for an account, submit your articles and put a link back to your site in the resources for your article.
The article is then reviewed by one of their editors in a week’s time and then when your article is approved by the editor you article is put live on their website.
They may even display your article in the high traffic zone and this may get your articles many views and the resources of the article that you display on it would get unique visitors for your website if these links are clicked.
For a great response publish “killer articles” which will get your articles maximum views and maximum visits for your website.
The articles should be so impressive that they not only read the article but
also come back to check out your website for more articles and valuable
data.

2. RSS feed:

Getting a personalized RSS feed is very simple.
Go to google news.com and type your search terms and you will find a list of results
in there.
Click on the RSS link to get the URL of the RSS feed source.
Go to Feedburner.com create an account and click the “my feed” link and paste the feed source URL and get your RSS feed created.
Once you activate it, you get a URL and clicking on it will lead you to a page
where you can subscribe to the RSS feed or embed the RSS widget in your website.
You can set a few topics whose RSS feed your website visitors can benefit from.
You can distribute it to your visitors for free or after collecting their email address.
When your personalized RSS feed is used by them, it would act as an advertisement for your website.
Your visitors can use it on their blog or website.

3. Word Of Mouth Publicity:

If you are in a workplace, school, college or any other social place, you can always let your colleagues & friends and of course your near and dear ones know about your website.
The website should appeal to them initially and later, jot down their valuable comments and try improving the site and then again tell them about your improved website and again take down their comments.
Also ask them about what features would they like to have in the website? What
problems do they face in their daily life (or what problems does their class of
people face in their daily life) and think of the solutions that your website
could provide.
Once your website provides solution to their problems, you have won half the battle, now they would definitely like to share the piece of information with the rest of
their people.
This will increase your website traffic as the people who visit your website will spread the solution that your website offers to their problems.
Include a feature which lets your visitors leave their comments on the website and without any hassles.
This way you could communicate well with your visitors and optimize the features of your website.

4. Meeting your visitor’s needs/requests:

Maintaining a good service and answering the queries immediately will attract even more visitors as they would have an impression that your website is run by a huge corporate organization with 100-400 employees.
Providing a good customer service always enhances your website’s resonance.

5. Joining Social Networking Websites:

This is again a very useful way to increase traffic to your website for FREE.
A good and impressive profile will just be fine to attract known and unknown visitors.
Leave comments on different profiles leaving your website name as your signature.

6. Joining Forums:

It’s a totally free of cost deal to increase traffic to your website.
Interact with the other people in the forum, solve their problems and these solutions could be included in your website and its link could be given to them for reference.

7. Chatting:

Make friends while chatting in a room with people whose interests are quite similar to the contents and subjects of your website and after a while give them your website’s reference to explore their interests.
Keep in touch with them to know how they felt after visiting your website and
what changes could be introduced to improve your website.


Here we have discussed mainly about asking people regarding their opinion of your website, so always take their opinion in the positive stride. You may sometimes come across harsh criticism which may wash away your enthusiasm, but never give up, rise and fight back all the negative comments with an even improved vigor. You can also come across false praises, so do not get carried away by it, stay grounded and focus over the majority i.e. what are the majority comments? Are they positive or negative and accordingly plan your next move.

How can Alexa.com be put to use

Ø Alexa.com is one such website where you can get the information regarding website ranks based on the traffic that visits the site.

We can view the traffic details of any website on alexa.com and the traffic details for the top 10,000 websites are highly accurate.
You can also compare the traffic variations of 5 different websites at a time.
You can also get specific information like number of unique page views per day, what percentage of people from a particular country use the website, what feature of the website used the most and the websites linking to it.
All this information could be of great use to you in developing your website if carefully researched upon the available information.


Ø You can keep a careful watch over your competitors website’s alexa statistics and watch his moves as in what features were newly introduced, how often is their website updated and how does this affect their alexa ranking.

Ø Keep a watch over the top 10 “movers and shakers” websites and the top 500 websites and see what are their moves and how is it proving profitable to them.

Ø On looking at the top 500 websites you can also get a fair idea regarding which type of website is the most popular among people and a deep research into these websites can also reveal the secret behind their popularity.

Ø By looking at a top websites’ rank you can make out how much traffic does the website get per month. Certain websites display their monthly traffic details. Whenever you come across a website that has traffic statistics displayed on their website simply check out its traffic ranking details in alexa.com. This way you can come to know what amount of traffic gets what rank in alexa.com or the popularity of a website depends on how much amount of traffic per month.

Ø Alexa.com counts the number of times your website was ranked by the alexa toolbar and sends the website URL to alexa.com. On placing the alexa widget on your website also leads to an increase in the website ranking. The changes are seen in less than a weeks time after using these two features for a website.

15 Website Designing Tips


1. Design It For Beginners:

A website is visited by all sorts of visitors.
So design a website keeping in mind everyone and their ways of using a
website.
If you design your website for novice internet users , they are quite aware of how to browse through a website so you may restrict your user count to just a handful of people.
But, if you design your website in such a way that even the beginners can benefit from it then your website traffic can include both beginners and novice users.

2. Clear Reading:

The website should have a very attractive look, but at the same time, it should
not prick your eyes if you look at it for a very long time.
The background colours should be wisely chosen (avoid using very bright fluorescent colours).
Match your background & font colours systematically.
Use clearly readable font types and sizes. The font type should also gel with the theme of your website.
In short the look should be pleasant but not dull.
The vibrancy in a website look is appreciated only if it is not disturbing enough to
divert your focus away from its contents.

3. Follow Uniform Format:

Follow uniformity throughout your website.
If your website displays its headings in font size 13 then use that
font size for all the headings in a website.
Use the same font size or colour for all your text contents on your website, then stick to the same method throughout the website.

4. Loads Quickly:

People on an average spend only 10 seconds per webpage. So if a website takes too long to load its contents completely, then you may run a risk of loosing visitors.
Your website is not the only website on internet to give information about a particular thing and you will definitely agree with this fact after running a search for a thing in a search engine and come across millions of websites with similar contents.
So avoid too much of graphic contents on every webpage which takes a long time to load.
To avoid a visitor’s annoyance, restrict the size of a webpage to 40-60K.

5. Easy To Navigate:

Moving from one page to another should be easy in a website.
The links like “Home”, “Contact Us”, “About Us”, “Sign Up”, “Sign In”, “Account Information”etc. should be present in every webpage of a
website.
If you expect that everyone is going to use the back button on their browser to return to the previous page then you might be wrong, not all might be aware of the button’s use and in some websites the programs in it disable the use of back buttons
which might annoy the users as much as a pop-up window. So avoid such things.

6. Labeling of Hyperlinks:

Always keep in mind that hyperlinks should be appropriately labeled.
The visitor should know that by clicking over it should lead to a webpage that he wanted to go.
If a content of a website has hyperlinked images then label the image saying that clicking over it might do so and so thing as not all of the website visitors might be aware of the hyperlinked images.

7. Get Your Own Domain Name:

Your website name should be quite easy to remember, so accordingly choose your own domain name.
There are various websites which provide free website services where the name of your website becomes www.yourwebsite.freewebsites.com. Now the domain name won’t have as much as recall value as a website with the name www.yourwebsite.com.
For more tips and advice for domain name registering click
here.

8. Use “Click here” signs more than underlined hyperlinks:

“Click here” sign enables the visitors to understand that the text is hyperlinked and clickable.
A new visitor might not understand that a particular underlined text is hyperlinked and clickable.
Make the hyperlinks as clear as possible to your visitors.

9. Add “Contact Us” link on each webpage:

The “Contact Us” information should be very conspicuous and easy to reach out for.
It should be present on every webpage.
This assures the visitors that the website is transparent and trustworthy and its
owner could be contacted whenever required.

10. Do Not Make Every Keyword Bold:

Whenever you want to attract a visitor’s attention to a particular word, make it
bold or change it font size or font type or font colour but then the frequency
of this technique should be limited and care should be taken that you don’t make
most of the words in your text content bold and cause the visitor to overlook
the actual important words. Sometimes too many intermittent bold words may also
annoy the visitors.

11. Big websites should have a search feature:

If you own a very big website, then you definitely need to install a search
feature in it, as you would not like your visitors to struggle for a small piece
of information on your website which they could easily locate by a search engine
feature embedded in your website.

12. Website should be useful for visitors:

A website should be designed in such a way that it benefits the visitors.
If possible provisions should be made on your website to write reviews about your website and this could enable you to understand where your fault lies, what the user wants and what you could provide.
At least gather reviews from trustworthy friends about your website and ask them to suggest improvements.
All this will lead to a user friendly website highly beneficial to the visitors.

13. Good Grammar Usage:

Try using good grammar in your text content wherever possible. This will
definitely leave a good impression on the visitors, but, keep in mind not to be
too verbose or else you might just scare away your visitors.

14. Point wise representation:

Point wise representation of views is preferred to paragraph representation. It makes your points clearly understood and readers don’t find it too lengthy, time consuming or boring.
But, if content demands paragraph representation then go for it.
Also do not crowd your contents with too much of bullets and numberings and make it difficult to understand what you wanted to say.

15. No crowding of ads on a webpage:

Placing ads wisely is definitely important, but that doesn’t mean you crowd your webpage with too many ads from all the possible internet advertising companies.
These ads might then start overshadowing your contents and finally decrease the importance of your website.
So wisely place limited handpicked ads which will ensure you maximum revenue.

resource: http://www.onlinemoneyblog.biz/15_website_designing_tips.asp

Publicity of Websites/Blogs through E-zine articles

There are various websites where you can publish your website or blog articles for free. This is used purely to increase the publicity of your website/blog. This kind of marketing of your website is known as E-zine marketing. Now the question is that how does it work.

This simple representation of its working will provide you with all the details you wanted to know about the working of an E-zine website.

You sign up for the free E-zine account in an E-zine website.

You publish your article in an E-zine article website.

The article is first reviewed by the website and if approved it is made live on the E-zine Website.

This article is read by many visitors.

This article has links to your website which you must mention while writing about the resource name for your article if you are publishing the article for publicity of your website.

This link brings visitors to your website if those links are clicked.

This increases your website/blog traffic, gets you a nice page rank which again gets you a top position on search engines & thus leads to a stampede of visitors to your website.

So handpick a few best articles on your website/blog and publish it on the E-zine article website and automatically experience the credit of traffic that it generates.

Simply take care that the article should be a “Killer Article” and that it should make the visitors genuinely surf through your website ad become a regular visitor. So the bottom-line is this trick is going to work only for a very informative article and a very attractive and simple website that the article leads to.

25 Ways To Promote Your Website


  1. Newspapers: Giving an advertisement of your website in the newspaper and its likes is a very good means to promote your website. But to maintain its reputation you have to work hard at its various factors like look, clarity of concepts, features offered and regularly updated facts.

  2. Media: Giving an advertisement in T.V. or radio is a very good way to promote your website but then its for you to decide whether the website is worth such a publicity as this kind of publicity is quite expensive and the outcome of this publicity should definitely be in proportion with the amount spent in its publicity.

  3. Distributing Pamphlets: You could print pamphlets with the required information about your website and distribute it among those who could actually benefit from it.

  4. Website name on your stuffs: Everything that goes out of your house should carry your website name in it. This is one of the free ways to publicize your own website. These stuffs could include your carry bag, your purse, your wallet, your car, your personalized accessories, etc.

  5. Sponsor Special Events: There could be various events that could be carried out in your locality which you could sponsor and make it known that this event is sponsored by www.yourwebsite.com. These events could be anything from a small celebration of any occasion, a sports meet, an art competition, a marathon race or any other event that is quite in sync with the concept of your website.

  6. Visiting cards: Get your website name printed over your visiting card, your envelopes, letter heads, etc.

  7. Join forums and blogs: Join the webmaster’s forum or any other community which deals with subjects related to your website. Interact with them and influence them with your ideas and views and then make them known about your website.

  8. Leave comments in blogs: If you come across a blog which has a post which deals with the subject that you have covered in your website then leave a comment in that post and type your website URL in place of your signature and ask people to visit your website to get more information about similar topics in your website, provided your website actually has more information.

  9. Start Blogging: You can start a blog of your own at www.bloggers.com and write your posts and mention the recourses of these posts as your website name. Here you can also come to know what people feel about your website contents from the comments that they leave and also lead to publicity of your website.

  10. Advertise in search engines: Search engine advertisements is a definite and a sure shot publicity stunt and get your website a huge amount of publicity.

  11. Provide commissions (Affiliate Programs): Set up an affiliate program of your own where you can provide the necessary commission to the websites which diverts traffic to your website.

  12. Link sharing: This is one of the best ways to gain publicity for your website getting your link or logo of your website with proper links to your website placed over a very popular website can increase the popularity of your website too.

  13. Ezine-articles marketing: This is somewhat similar to blogging. Here you submit your articles with the resource for your article as your website name and more popular your article become over there, more publicity your website gains through its popularity, so publicity for your website using this method can be achieved only by killer articles.

  14. Starts Contests: You could begin a contest of your own, wherein you could involve people to visit your website, sign up for the contests and win prizes. Keep these contests as interesting and clean as possible. You can frequently use this trick to gain publicity but assure the visitors that you actually give away prizes to the winners and display the winners list(s) and there comments as testimonials.

  15. Tell Friends and Colleagues: At the initial stages of your website begin its publicity by telling about it to your friends, colleagues, relatives and the ones you know. Ask them to visit the website and then later tell about it to their friends and relatives. You could call this as mouth to mouth publicity which begins with the known ones and continues with the unknown ones.

  16. Write press releases: This is again a very good way to gain popularity and there are various sources on the internet itself which provides free press releases facility. Here are a few of them:
    http://www.prleap.com/sign_up.html
    http://i-newswire.com/
    http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
    http://www.pressbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi
    http://www.pr.com/press-releases
    http://www.prfree.com/
    http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml
    http://www.theopenpress.com/
    http://www.przoom.com/
    http://www.prweb.com
    http://www.newswiretoday.com/
    http://www.free-press-release.com/

  17. Use Pictures and Videos: Most of the popular websites have interesting and attractive pictures and videos which draws more attention than mere words. This also leads to simplicity of expression of contents, proper utilization of your webpage area and a different approach to present your contents. All this makes your website quite popular.

  18. Give away RSS feed: Give RSS feed [?] to your website visitors and make it easy for them to sign up for one.

  19. Add ‘Tell a friend’ or ‘Bookmark Us’ or ‘Set as Homepage’ script to your website.

  20. Publish videos in Youtube.com: Make an attractive video and upload it to Youtube.com with proper links to your website. For more information regarding how videos can lead to huge publicity of your website click here.

  21. Write articles in wikipedia.com: Wikipedia is a very popular website with millions of articles published in it. You could publish your article on a particular topic with proper links to your sites if required. You can also write your website name as the source for the reference of articles.

  22. Hire public vehicles to display your website name: You could pay a particular amount to a public vehicle owner and ask them to display your website name over their vehicle or else you could even provide them vehicle accessories which carry your website name. Now this offer will rarely come across any rejections. The vehicle accessories could include seat covers, fare meter covers, vehicle mirrors, etc.

  23. Free classified submissions: This is one of the free means to gain publicity for your website. Here is a list of a few classified advertising websites.

    Craigslist http://www.craigslist.com
    Google Base
    http://base.google.com
    Classifieds for Free
    http://www.classifiedsforfree.com/
    Text Link Exchange
    http://www.txtswap.com/
    Recycler.com
    http://www.recycler.com/
    Yahoo Classifieds
    http://classifieds.yahoo.com/
    US Free Ads
    http://www.usfreeads.com/

  24. Free Directory Submission: You could also submit your website in popular web directories like www.dmoz.com.

  25. Give away Free stuffs: You can attract more and more visitors to your website by giving away free stuffs to the visitors. These free stuffs could include webmaster tools, scripts, E-books, Free downloads, Free softwares etc.

resource: http://www.onlinemoneyblog.biz/25_ways_to_promote_website.asp

Domain Registering Tips

Searching for a domain name? So where do you think you are going to search domain names available for use? You might have definitely come across websites while checking for available domain name that offer services where you can search for domain names under the titles like ‘Check for domain name availability’ or ‘domain name check’ or ‘domain lookup’. Think twice before using such services, because not all of them are perfect and their results are not quite reliable. So always search for the availability of domain names in a well known search engine.

The domain names that you once searched for and had been shown available but now when you finally decide to register a domain name you see that it has already been taken and now this leaves you in a state of panic because you have already designed your website with that name and now you need to change this banner you designed emptying your pockets and now imagine repeating the whole process all over again. The domain names that you search for could be immediately registered and even a delay of couple of days could prove disastrous for your website and could lead to you compromising for your website title which would be the identity for your website for a given period of time.

While registering for domain names care should be taken that the website name should be registered first and then the website name should be embedded in the website. This could save a lot of time and efforts. After registering a domain name you could select one of the web hosting companies of your choice and then host your website. Now at least you can rest assured that your website has a fixed name and you could use that name in your website titles and banners without worrying about it being taken away. This is just a precautionary measure, not that each and every one who doesn’t purchase domain name first is affected by it.

The domain name if taken could be acquired once again when its validity expires. A domain name is registered by a webmaster for a fixed period of time and if he would like to own it again he needs to renew his domain registration once again. The webmaster is notified through email close to the date of expiry of his domain name so that he could renew his domain name well before it gets expired and if he fails to do so, his domain name expires and is made available for other webmasters to acquire
If you are reluctant towards losing the domain name of your choice and would not like to compromise over your website name, you could find out who currently owns the website name you liked your website should have and then find out whether the owner of the domain name would like to sell it you. Of course you will have to shell out a few more dollars as per the domain owner’s demand.

Using a Video to promote your website

A Picture is worth 100 words then just imagine the worth of a video on your website. Every pixel of your website is a valuable asset and using it effectively is a must to make it a profit making machine. A video may just occupy a space of say 300x300 pixel or even smaller but it would still do wonders. It may carry the information which would have stretched up to many webpages of your website. You can’t expect a visitor to religiously go through each of the webpage to collect the information to be supplied. At times the visitor might think it to be a long process to extract information and may give up browsing your website & look for another website. Thus you loose a very valuable visitor. A visitor on an average spends at the most 10 sec on a webpage and understands it, so simplicity is a must for every website. Every glance at the website should convey the right kind of information & in the right proportion.
Displaying a video on the website not only makes things very clear but also captures attention and increases the time the user would spend on your website.
The video that is displayed should also be worth displaying. So carefully make it and upload it to attract visitors and promote your service or product or simply your website content.
Besides displaying the videos on your own website you could also upload it to some popular video sharing website like youtube.com to get maximum attention for your video and then add a link back to your website in the video. The only care that has to be taken is that the video should be provocative enough to relate to the viewer’s sensibility and make him respond to the video.
resource: For viewing few examples of such interesting videos visit www.onlinemoneyblog.biz