Why Having a Website is Good- But Not Enough

While it is easy for online customers to locate a business if they know precisely which company they want to find, it is growing increasingly difficult for businesses to stand out from the millions of company profiles now available on the web.

Bluntly put, now that your business has a website, your competition has become global, and the need to differentiate your online presence has become crucial to your survival and success. The number of visitors your website has every month determines the traffic of your website.

TIP 1: Ultimately, having a website is good, but it will be of no benefit to your business if it has no visitors.

What is the Difference between Organic and Direct Traffic

A clear understanding of how Internet traffic works is crucial. Direct traffic is visits to your web pages that come from people that already know you. While your leverage of free online services such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms are of benefit, they only help you “host” customers you probably already have. Put another way, these platforms will only receive the “direct” traffic of customers who know who you are and how to find you. What you need to capture is the traffic created by search engines and that is called “organic” traffic.

How Do Customers Look for Your Business?

Your potential customers look for companies by typing a service profile into a search engine to see which companies match their needs. The “service profile” is any number of keywords the customer chooses to describe what they hope to find. Your company will be “ranked” alongside any number of companies with similar profiles. Your goal is to increase your search engine “rank.”

TIP 2: The more traffic your website receives, the more often a search engine will place you at the list’s top as a “go to” source for customers.

TIP 3: Attracting Internet traffic involves ensuring that the words customers use to describe their needs appear on your site.

How to Optimize Your Company Website or Blog

Embedding key words that describe what the customer wants to find often is called using “search engine optimized” language, or SEO. Your company’s blog or website must tailor its profile to SEO language. This is not as daunting as it seems.

TIP 4: Writing articles, blog posts or service profiles about what you do using keywords most people use to describe your services will help you gain the traffic you need.

For example, if you run a landscaping company that specializes in caring for maple trees, write articles about proper maple tree care and post it on your blog. Drive traffic to this post by creating links to such posts on Facebook, online community boards, Craig’s list and the like.

Tip 5: If you want your post to rank for a particular keyword, ensure your blog title hosts this keyword.

Search engines use blog titles to form the index of companies a search engine “ranks” according to level of Internet traffic. A strong online presence demands an effective “company portrait,” a strategic use of SEO language, and the intelligence to help search engines help you. Being attentive to these aspects an online presence will reward you with customer interest, and subsequent revenue and growth.

This is a guest post by Alex Papa. Alex often speaks in seminars around the world showing people how to find new business ideas that will help them live the lifestyle they desire. In his blog he also offers a business start-up audio CD course.

It’s a win-win situation for both bloggers, with free content for the blog owner who is receiving the guest post, as well as increased traffic from the writer of the guest post.

I must admit that I haven’t done a guest post myself, I’m waiting to launch a more ‘International’ site before I start leveraging on some of the contacts that I have and build from there.

However, I’m open to anyone who would like to guest post on OBM in return for a link back to their website/ blog at the bottom of the article.

Of course I’ve got some requirements for my guest posts, but we’ll discuss that personally later on

If you’re interested in guest posting for Online Business Malaysia, please feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you shortly.

Thanks and can’t wait to hear from you guys (and gals)!

-William

Political news is always a hot topic, maybe because of its gossip like appeal. And particularly in Malaysia, because such a large amount of the population are fed up with politicians and the government in general.

Politics stirs up the most emotions, mostly anger I’ve noticed. And it’s the easiest for people to comment on, as they want to vent and let their frustrations be known.

What better place than the anonymity (typo?) of the Internet?

I’m going to do a few posts on political news to see if it does bring in traffic… but how targeted will that traffic be?

Then again, making money is an evergreen topic, so I think any traffic is targeted traffic.

What do you think?

This post was created to specifically answer the question above, which I received from @ChuckAinsworth via my Twitter account. Hope it helps Chuck! (Tweet this article to your friends if you like it, use the blue bird icon on the right. Thx!)

OK first things first, login to Facebook.

Click on your ‘profile’ page.

Scroll down the left hand side till you see this little link labelled ‘Create a Profile Badge’ and click it.

Modify the look and content of your badge. The screen shot doesn’t show it, but there’s a preview of the badge as you make the changes so you can see what you’re doing.

Click ‘Save’ when you’re done.

For blogger and myspace users, click on the buttons that you see on the screen and it’ll do it for you automatically.

For WordPress users, copy the code you see in the bar and then login to your WordPress blog.

Under ‘Appearance’, click ‘Widgets’ and add a text widget like what you see above. Paste the code into the text box that opens up, give it a title if you want, click ‘Done’ then click ‘Save All Changes’.

You’ll also want to rearrange the widgets to place the text box higher or lower up on your sidebar.

That’s it, reload your webpage and you’re done!

Hope you found this little tutorial useful!

If you did, Tweet it…

Thx,

-William Lee

And if you find one that works better than the others? Then rinse and repeat…

Blogs are a very popular ways of promoting your product or service. They are easy to install, easy to administer and easy to update. And search engines love them too. But what is a blog without traffic?Exactly. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.

1.Have A Ping List Ready

There are hundreds if not thousands of blog services that you can ping to let them know that you’ve made an update to your blog. These services then take your new post and display it in one form or another on their site. Just search ‘blog ping list’ in Google or try a few of these:

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

Although there is of course alot more available. This is just to get you started.

2.Add RSS Buttons For The Most Popular RSS Readers

Yahoo, Google, Feedburner, bloglines etc are all popular feed readers that your visitors may be using. So make sure you give them the option to add your RSS feed to any reader that they may be using. This way readers can easily subscribe to your feed. Speaking of which, have you subscribed to my blog yet?

3.Regularly Update Your Blog

Search engines love a regularly updated blog. They consider it fresh and new content and favour those that do update often. You should try and update your blog at least once a day, although don’t go overboard. Too many updates in a day has the opposite effect and isn’t liked (10 posts a day or more).

4.Post in Forums

Post useful comment in forums that are talking about your subject matter. I’ve personally never been very good at getting traffic from forums because you have to stay very engaged to get a good amount of traffic from them. But traffic does come, so keep at it and be patient.

5.Use Blog Search Engines

Blog search engines such as Google Blog Search are plentiful out there, from blog search engines targeted at health blogs and a range of other topics. Just do a search for ‘blog search engine’ and add your site to their directory.

These are just a couple of the things you can do to slowly drive more traffic to your blog and hopefully start making more money online.

Keep trying,

-William Lee

Well not exactly.

You have to remember that the people on your Facebook account are technically meant to be your ‘friends’ and most of the time most of them are your friends, people you know.

So if you start a niche site about shoe polish… do you think ALL your friends deserve to know about it? Is this your target audience that you are trying to push an affiliate product to?

I wager it’s not.

But if you’re starting a site that means something to you, such as a personal blog, a food blog or maybe an Internet marketing blog like this one, I’d say you could market to your group of friends.

It might be something they can relate to and hence come and visit your site.

So if you think your friends ARE your target audience, here’s a good way of getting some traffic and exposure.

1) Login to your facebook account.

2) Click on your name on the top right hand side of your facebook page.

3) Click ‘post link’

4) Paste the complete link to your article. NOT just your homepage. The reason is if you post your article link, Facebook will try and find an image from the article to use and add it to your link.

5) Click ‘Preview’ and let it load. If a little summary like what you see above doesn’t display, you have to remove the trailing ‘/’ from your URL and try again. (NB: Sometimes it doesn’t work even when you do that. In that case, I have no idea what to do… sorry.)

Choose a picture from the available options and if you’re fine with everything, click ‘post’.

6) If it posted correctly, you should see it show on your wall like this.

7) Facebook will then decide which of your friends would like to know this information and post it on their Facebook ‘newsfeed’ on their home page. And more often than not, the people that Facebook think would like to know what you are up to are your closer friends or who view alot of your pictures.

These people are likely to click your site, pay a visit and who knows, maybe even tell a friend?

8 ) I’ve been doing this for one of my other sites since the day it launched (about 5 months ago) and here is the proof of the traffic. It is easily in my top 5 sources of traffic.

Petalingstreet.org is a Malaysian blog aggregator that I use for that site because its targeted audience is Malaysia.

So why not give it a try? You may get 10, 20, 50 or even 100 visitors almost immediately to your site. But remember that these people are your friends, please don’t SPAM them with useless information ok?

Add me to Facebook! (or click on my picture in the sidebar)

-William Lee

Unique Article Wizard is an online tool that has been going around the Internet marketing circle for quite a while now. Apparently alot of the big Internet marketers use it to bring in traffic to niche websites, or even their own branded sites.

How it works is you supply an article to the Unique Article Wizard program and it will ask you to rewrite the article one more time. It then takes both of these articles, combines them in many different ways and creates hundreds of slightly different articles.

They claim that this is enough to prevent Google from punishing the article content for ‘duplicate content’.

The Unique Article Wizard network comprises of more than 1000 article directories and blogs which your unique article will be sent out to. Each of these unique articles will have at the bottom, just like a normal article a resource box.

You can put your link there linking your article back to your website. The ‘blogs’ in their network will do a pingback to your site, another way of getting back links to you.

Unique Article Wizard slowly sends out these articles on a time delay basis so as to not make it look like your site is getting too many back links at once. However, some people have said that after only 2 days they are already getting listed on Google for some good keywords.

I’m still thinking whether or not to get myself a copy as at USD$67/month, it’s not the cheapest tool out there. Along with my recent purchase of an Aweber.com account, that would bring my monthly Internet marketing expenditure to USD$86/month, or approximately RM300/month.

That’s NOT small change.

But think about it this way… if I manage to make one sale every 2 days, at an average affiliate comission of $25 using a combination of these two tools, that adds up to USD$375/month or RM1300.

That’s ALSO not small change.

I would have easily paid for my monthly subscription to Unique Article Wizard and Aweber with a nice profit in hand.

All I’d have to do then is repeat the process for other niche sites and affiliate products.

I’ll let you know how it goes,

Unique Article Wizarding,

-William Lee

See if you can spot which product I’m trying to sell…

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