A few tips for attracting visitors to your website

There's a fierce battle out there for the online consumer but to be on top of the game a few steps need to be followed to the letter.

1. CONTENT. One might think is enough to have a couple of pictures and some text describing your company or what you sell. Well, surprisingly or not, that might work at start, but it sure won't get your customers to come back. Try and include some new content every once in a while, like a newsletter, or an article about your products/services, a weekly special or some game with prizes. You can even include customer testimonials or free tips. Try and experiment with a few (or even all) of these techniques and analyze your visitor trend; see which one does best at attracting new or established customers.

2. SEARCH ENGINES. Now this is a tough one. Sure you might not have the advertising budget of a billion dollar company, but that shouldn't stop you from doing your best at hitting that first page in the search engine results. Do work on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and have your website listed on all major search engines. You can even set some money aside for PPC (pay per click) advertising. In order do do that, set a list of keywords that you believe is relevant for what your website has to offer), set-up a PPC account (its FREE!) and a monthly budget and got for it. You'll notice results from day one.

3. EXCHANGE BANNERS or LINKS. This is a win-win situation. Try and use banner and links that your customers will appreciate having, like referring sites that offer complimentary services to your service/product. For instance if you own a construction business and you do tiles only, use banner for companies that do roofs, or plumbing and so on.

4. PROMOTION. Promotion involves publishing information about a product, product line, brand, or company. Our topic though is how to attract visitors to your website. For one, you should include your website name on all business cards, email communication, brochures, flyers, invoices, envelopes, and any advertising that you do. If possible, try and include, beside your website's name, a list of what you do have to offer and any free tips, specials or whatever else you have to offer and might be of an interest to your customers.

Strategic marketing flow chart

iPhone 2.0

Yup! The news is out. Apple will have yet another expensive piece of equipment on the market, the iPhone 2.0 that is, no later than June '08. With an estimated consumer market going as high as 11 million, the iPhone 2.0 its definitively destined to be a power seller. One thing we know for sure though, an increasingly inpatient fan crowd is waiting for it's release. The countdown for iPhone 2.0 has begun.

Guidelines for online success

"The do's and don'ts of web entrepreneurship."

DO read this book! DON'T let it collect dust."

How you can tell if your website is really working

The number one thing to do, once you have your website in place, is try and set up an analytics tool . A free and easy to use analytics tool is Google Analytics. Once this is done, you can:

- keep track of your visitors (total visits, unique visitors) and trends (i.e. what pages received more visits)
- analyze the demographics (i.e. geographical location of your visitors)
- measure how your visitors turn into buyers set-up a conversion goal (i.e. link your services page with your contact page). Also, let's assume you had 200 visits this month, 7 sales, and you made an average of $200.00 per sale. This means you conversion rate was 3.5% (200 divided by 7) which brought revenues of $1,400.00 (200 multiplied by 7). You can now set-up a goal of having a conversion rate of, let's say, 10%. By accomplishing this, you can increase your sales (based on the numbers above) by $2,600.00.
- measure your marketing ROI (return on investment)- in order to do so you need to set-up a PPC (pay per click campaign). Let's assume your marketing budget for this PPS campaign is 100$. You create a list of keywords and decide upon one set of words to use with Google Ads. Google will charge you $0.5 per click. This means that the 100$ you have as your PPC budget will suffice for 200 clicks (visits sent to your website by Google). Assuming a conversion rate of 10% (meaning 20 buyers) and and average profit per sale of $200.00, those 200 clicks generated $4,000.00 in sales. Your campaign cost was $100.00. This means that your marketing ROI was $3,900.00.
- create marketing plans to increase your marketing ROI, conversion rate, number of visitors etc.

Apple's Safari 3.1 - reloaded

Apple recently released its improved Safari web browser. According to Apple's officials, it promises higher internet browsing speeds, in comparison with previous versions, due to its enhanced Java capabilities. Both IE and Firefox are presumably slower than the new Safari, up to 1.9 times slower to be more specific. Does browsing speed really matters? Well, to me it does and I am sure many of you think alike. It is the battle of the giants out there, and browsers market is no exception. Moreover, as a cherry on top of the pie, Safari is said to have a strong adherence to web standards meant to improve the Web 2.0 experience. Hurray I say, but the users should be the judge of that. If you're ready to give it a shot though, a fresh and FREE version of the new Safari 3.1 web browser can be found here.

Viral marketing. Definition

Viral marketing is based on human behavior. It is said that, a satisfied customer will pass along the news about the product or service that he/she liked to at least three people. In the same manner, absolutely voluntarily, at least ten people will be told about a product or service that was not according to the expected standards. The message in cause can be spread by word-of-mouth or by using the internet. Hence, viral marketing refers to any approach that encourages people to pass on a marketing message to others.



Written by R.B.