Website Marketing Resource

If you’ve been getting caught up in all this talk of RSS versus email, its time to stop wondering.

Marketing Sherpa just posted a new report that stirred up the old RSS vs Email debate again. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2988

The report starts out by stating, "It chills our blood when we hear email marketers and publishers blithely state, "I’m thinking about switching over to RSS entirely!" Oh no. Please don’t. RSS is worthy of testing, but it’s not an email replacement and it never will be."

A report in Jupitermedia titled "E-Mail Marketing: Alive and Well" notes, "RSS won’t be immediately effective as an alternative to e-mail marketing. (But) for some companies (primarily publishers who cater to a technical audience), it’s sensible to press forward with RSS now as a supplement to e-mail marketing." http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:concept/1103/id=96103/

A lot of people think this debate has been going on for long enough. RSS is NOT a replacement for email. It does not (and may never) rival the marketing reach and immediacy of an email message.

Those who’ve been mourning the death of email marketing don’t seem to "get" the fact that RSS hasn’t reached the tipping point yet. More people read email than RSS feeds ? many more.

For beginners, link exchange campaigns can be a minefield of problems. For example, here is a question I was asked:

“Hi Andy, I have noticed that a lot of sites that request a link exchange from me may have a PR 5 or 6 on their home page and when I click through to the links page there is a PR 0. This is very disappointing and I don’t exchange with them. Should I reconsider this practice or am I right in thinking they are doing something to prevent PR from passing to their links pages? Best Regards, Troy”

There are many things to consider when exchanging links.

The above question asks whether you should consider linking to a PR 5 site when the links page is a PR 0.

What are your thoughts on that?

The question you should ask yourself is “Why does the homepage have a PR5 and the links page a PR0?”.

There can be a few different reasons for this.

Reason #1 - the links page is new and has not had a PR assigned to it in the Google toolbar (that does not mean it has no PR, just that the toolbar has not been updated to reflect its PR).

As we all know, visitor traffic is crucial to the success of every Website. If you do not know how many views your pages get, how can you know if anyone is seeing your site, product or service? With an online business, you can not afford to guess at how effective your marketing, content, message or website design is.

Ideally, you need to know what pages are viewed, how long the visitor stays on any given page and what page they click to next. Also, if you can see the keywords they used to search for you, or see what link they clicked to get to your site (referral link), you have great information for SEO (search engine optimization) of your site content and keywords. This is all part of Web analytics. The more you know about site analytics, the better prepared you will be to get the most out of your site traffic and visitor usage. Read through these basics and you will be ready to go look for an effective visitor traffic reporting service, find the best features for the price, and boost your site’s effectiveness.

Who are your visitors?

Delivering regularly updated content to website visitors is easier through RSS resources.

RSS, also known as Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, has been used for years by online visitors. However, it has only recently begun to gain popularity among webmasters as a means of providing visitors with constantly refreshed content. These feeds were originally developed to deliver updated news more quickly, but they have since evolved to allow for nearly instantaneous updates of many types of information.

Growing websites can benefit from RSS feeds since they allow for fresh copy to be updated regularly online. Once the RSS feeds are inserted into the web pages, they provide a steady stream of syndicated content updated continuously. Most RSS feeds consist of a headline, content summary, and a link to the actual online article. They are typically composed in XML, a markup language similar to HTML, to allow webmasters to manipulate and integrate new copy into their existing site pages.

QUALITY Content Is King
 by: Todd Levi

Adding quality content helps to increase your site’s traffic and gives people a reason to come back.There are numerous reason why adding content to your site is important and this article will discuss just why this is.

One of the most effective and most dependable ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content. I’m sure you have heard it said that on the Internet, content is king. Well, it’s true! There are numerous reason why adding content to your site is important and this article will discuss just why this is.

Getting away from the “business card website”: A lot of websites are simply avenues to allow a company to have a web presence and are essentially just a form of an online business card or brochure. This type of web site gives nothing to the viewer accept a short iformational about what the company does and how to contact them. To get new web viewers and to keep viewers coming back you need to give them a reason to, creating qaulity content frequently is just that reason.

The bottom line is that there are plenty of really talented people out there who will never be heard from because they don’t understand even the most basic principles of marketing. Marketing isn’t often taught in Fine Arts courses because the instructors, by nature, are better at teaching the craft than they are at marketing themselves in the craft. Most marketing experts haven’t fine tuned their artistic talents enough to have a product worth marketing.

So the good news is that it is easier for a talented artist to learn the principles of excellence in marketing ideas and services than it is for a marketing genius to develop the passion and skill sets needed to produce good and, sometimes, great art.

Your website looks good and is ready to be shown to the public but now you’ll have to begin your marketing phase.

The first thing you’ll want to do is start writing internet articles?for free! They don’t have to be long or profound, they just have to be written well, stay on subject, be controversial and have great titles that search engines will latch onto and deliver people into your funnel.

Think about the first thing you ever heard about "marketing a website" on the web. 99% of the time the first words anyone ever hears are "search engine marketing." Or some semblance of the phrase.

And from that point on, the hammering of misinformation never lets up. You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without the search engines. You are led to believe that only people who can guide you through the mine field of search engine optimization are the SEO "experts."

Also you are told time and again that the only way to market online PERIOD is through the search engines. You are conditioned over time to focus most, if not all, of your efforts on tricking the search engines into liking your site above all your competitors for search terms where "there can be only one."

Well, here’s a wake up call: The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or know-how to turn an idea into a profitable online business focusing only on search engines.

Multiply Your Links and Get Unlimited Traffic
 by: Noor Cholish

I feel the most effective way to get people to link to your

web site is by offering web masters the option of giving

away your free stuff. In exchange, they link to your web

site. Why would other web masters want to do this? They

may want give away a freebie to draw traffic to their web

site. They also may not have the time, knowledge or skills

to give away certain types of electronic freebies from their

web site.

Your links will just keep multiplying. When a web master

offers your freebie to his or her visitors. Those visitors may

decide to also give away your freebie. And so on and so

on… The more people that link to your web site the more

traffic you’ll get. Below are four of the most popular types

of freebies given away on the internet to increase traffic.

Free Software

Offer free software from your web site. The software could

be freeware, shareware or demos.

Free Online Services

Traffic-generation is a hot topic for marketers. In particular, "free traffic" seems to be the desire of most. But many sources of "free" traffic are not really free-they take your time, which can often be more valuable than spending a few dollars on your marketing.

The best idea is to combine the better sources of free traffic with some paid advertising. I propose three methods that will boost your traffic. If you remain dedicated to these three methods of advertising, you will get all the traffic you need. These sources are: 1) Writing and distributing articles; 2) Contributing to forums; and 3) Writing and buying ezine ads.

1. Writing and distributing articles

This is my favourite way of driving traffic to my sites. Articles have the ability to become viral, and that can be a huge plus for you, and a great reason to write articles. Focus on creating a 300 word article related to the theme of your site or business. Include a resource box at the end of your article that features a link back to your site. Then, distribute your article to article distribution sites (like EzineArticles.com) and email groups (like http://groups.yahoo.com/group/business_articles). You will see traffic from this method.

You have managed to get your website to that magical point where you have established popularity, traffic, loyalty and a community of fans. Your site contains a wealth of information, resources and services that you provide free because that’s just the kind of person you are. You may not have intended to make money from your site but now that you have an audience you realise that it’s possible, or perhaps you have to start thinking about generating income because your costs to manage the site have increased and it’s starting to hurt.

You have been diligent over the years to build up your community and wonder how to go about making some revenue by leveraging this audience (as the marketers would say, you want to monetise your site). Maybe you have some big dreams and plan to one day generate advertising income from your new web project. This is a very common plan for online business given people tend to expect information and services to be free. Advertising may be one of the only revenue generation strategies available to you.

How much traffic do I have to have to make money?