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Let's talk traffic and how to get it. Your website has at most, 10 seconds to grab the attention of your visitor, so you need to have something "interest grabbing" above the fold. That's a newspaper term for what people see when looking at the top part of a paper. With more than 50 million websites out there, your viewers will demand topic specific information that will make them bookmark you, recommend you to their friends, and make them return over and over. An easy subscribe method on your site is a must. If must have an easy way for people to subscribe or you are literally throwing away customers; something you can't afford to do in these competitive times. Building a list is one of the single most important things you can do to survive and stay alive in business. One of the easiest ways to build a list is to offer something free to all subscribers. Offer value and people will stay with you for a very long time. If you don't have a large list of your own, then barter or buy advertising with someone who does have a large list with the same target market audience as you. Take your list, no matter how big or how small and ask your subscribers to refer 2 people to your site. Offer them something of value for helping you. Explain to them that you are trying to build your list so you can improve your site so that it will be more beneficial to them. We are all just ordinary people out there and many of us are happy to help others. Make sure there is a link on your site for people to forward your site to others with one click. Think, how many times has a friend sent you a site to look at. We all do it. Don't forget to always include your website at the bottom of every email you send. Make sure you use it in a sig file at any webboard you join. Same for newsgroups. Consider sending funny pictures out to friends and relatives with your sig file in the email. As they forward your email to others and they refer to others it will explode. Make sure you have a very effective sig file. This allows you to keep building and building. One of the most important things you can do with your website is to make sure any link that goes away from your site is set to open in a new window. This way your visitors do not leave your site and don't have to try and find a way back once they have finished at the other site. Your site must be as user friendly as possible. Getting your website link on other websites. Links to your site will affect your search engine rankings. The higher your ranking the more visitors. It's that simple. But not just any link will do. You need quality links that also relate to your business. Avoid link farms. Search engines will view your site negatively if you are in link farms or god forbid, webrings. Don't link with just anyone. Go for quality. A free site that will help you to get and exchange quality links is Ken Evoy's SiteSell. Free is good and they make it very easy for you. It one reason I return to their site over and over. Have a look http://value-exchange.sitesell.com Consider exchanging banners with these sites. It a benefit for both of you. Get listed in ezine directories and search engines. Submit by hand and not by some mass program. Many of them don't work properly and search engines are starting to ignore them. Start with http://www.dmoz.org as they feed a lot of other search engines. Then hit the top five. Get Google traffic. It's not that hard. There's no special trick. Simply go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and read their recommendations and then make sure you implement them into your site so that your site is properly optimized. Set aside some time every day...15 minutes to an hour and work on optimizing your site correctly. Want to get into Yahoo the free way. It's easy...visit here http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request It may take a month or more, but it will save you a lot of money. If you are in a hurry and time is money then used the paid listing. It by no means guarantee that you will get it and they will not refund your money if they reject you, but if you have done things right you should be ok. If you can write articles do so. If you don't then put appropriate articles on your site for others to read. Either will bring you traffic. Archived articles that you have written can bring you traffic for years to come. This is an effective long term strategy and will help to establish you and your credentials as well. A popular ezine directory like http://www.ezinehub.com will give you some insight on what ezines will accept your articles and submitting to ezine article sites will give you even wider distribution. Make sure all your articles include a small footer at the end, about the author. This should be kept to 4-5 lines and has to be as effective as possible in order to bring you new visitors. Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online. http://www.emailpromotions.net
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