This is the first article of a three-part series. I decided to try
something a little different and illustrate the marketing
challenges of a small business. I’m using one of my clients,
PrescottWeddings.com (you can read more about PWC,
including a testimonial from the owner of PWC, on my Web
site, http://www.writingusa.com)

PWC is an online resource guide for couples planning their
weddings. Along with a ton of information for brides and
grooms, the site includes a resource guide where local
businesses can advertise their products and services.

We launched PWC in November 2001. Like many start-up
businesses, PWC didn’t have much money for marketing.
Yet we had two major challenges (three counting the limited
budget):

1. PWC had to attract two kinds of target markets to the site
– advertisers and couples — essentially at the same time.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had to appeal to each
group even though one was dependent on the other —
advertisers wanted brides and grooms logging onto the
site, and brides and grooms wanted a complete resource
center.

2. Several bridal print publications had come and gone in
Prescott — and had burned their advertisers while racing out
of town. Businesses were understandably hesitant about
sinking their money into another bridal venture.

Armed with those challenges, we went to work. Now, just
over two years later, PWC enjoys well over 40,000 hits a
month and has increased its advertising base by over
600%. On top of that, PWC is well on its way to establishing
a reliable brand in not just Prescott but throughout Yavapai
County.

So how did we do it? A great Web site with great content (but
more on that in a later article) plus three main marketing
strategies:
1) Using print to drive traffic online
2) Thinking small
3) Frequency, frequency, frequency

I’ll cover number two and three in the next two articles. Today
we’ll talk about number one: Using print to drive traffic
online.

The cornerstone of PWC’s marketing program has been
print advertising, more specifically monthly advertising in the
local newspaper. Print advertising is an excellent choice for
many businesses — from small to large. In fact, it’s not
uncommon for small and medium-sized businesses to
build their advertising program around print.

The strength of print advertising is its flexibility. Print
publications come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They
can appeal to a broad readership or a narrow one. They can
be published every day or once a year. This variety gives you
a lot of flexibility in fitting print advertising into your
campaigns.

You can also track print to a certain extent (coupons in
newspapers for example). Print is physical, allowing your
customers to carry something around with them.

However, print’s weakness is also its strength. It’s a visual
medium only, so it requires more effort and interaction from
your audience to make an impact (they need to stop and
read it).

In the case of PWC, we chose monthly advertising in the
local paper as the foundation of our marketing program. We
decided upon the local newspaper because it has the
broadest reach. Prescott isn’t big enough to have its own
evening television news, so the newspaper is the best
vehicle for local news.

If you live in a big city, the local newspaper may not be
practical because of cost. In that case, you may want to try a
niche newspaper or magazine, like a business or lifestyle
journal, or maybe a regionalized newspaper. In Phoenix for
instance, the Arizona Republic is the main newspaper, but
all the cities around Phoenix, like Scottsdale and Tempe,
also have their own papers.

Because PWC is a Web site, there’s an assumption we
should be using only online methods to advertise. Online
methods are good, and PWC does use them, but they only
take you so far. Print is a part of the “real world” — something
you can touch and pick up, not virtual like a Web site. Print
has also been around a lot longer, and carries more trust
with it. We found by using print, some of that trust and “real
world” essence rubbed off, making PWC seem less
anonymous and more like a “bricks and mortar” business
(a business with a store front).

Also, since we were trying to drive local traffic to the site, it
made sense to advertise locally rather than attracting
people from all over the world. But even with our local
advertising, we still have a substantial number of visitors
from around the state, including Phoenix and Tucson, as
well as all over the globe.

The point of our marketing program was to advertise
regularly so we could both build the PWC brand and drive
traffic to the Web site. Yet it was essential to keep our costs
down. So we leveraged our monthly newspaper advertising
to stretch our marketing dollar as far as we could. More on
that and how we “thought small” in Part 2.

Michele Pariza Wacek owns Creative Concepts and
Copywriting, a writing, marketing and creativity agency. She
offers two free e-newsletters that help subscribers combine
their creativity with hard-hitting marketing and copywriting
principles to become more successful at attracting new
clients, selling products and services and boosting
business. She can be reached at http://www.writingusa.co
m

Generate Website Traffic that will Blow Away Your Online Internet Marketing
Competition by having a plan and putting it into action!

If You Build It Will They Come? Well, Yes, and NO!

The period of time between launching your Internet Marketing Venture and watching your traffic explode can be the most exciting time you have, provided you lay the groundwork properly.

Failure to provide for Traffic will torpedo every one of your early efforts!

With the overwhelming task of developing a site (or multiple sites), hosting, publishing, and testing, many newbie Internet Marketing entrepreneurs breathe a sigh of relief once their efforts are underway and then the light goes on: How am I going to get Visitors?

In the spirit of focus – which I have written about recently, I can’t say enough about planning your website traffic needs in advance. And again, just like all the other Internet Marketing options you have for building profitable programs, there are an equal number of means, methods and tactics for increasing your website traffic.

And once again, not all methods suit everyone and you must rise to the research challenge I’ve discussed in my maintaining focus chapter. But rest assured, there are methods and combinations of methods that will have massive amounts of traffic flowing to your website in no time and you don’t have to be an expert to succeed with most of them!

The best overall tip I can give you is Stay the Course and never let up.

Structure your days (or weeks) to spend a specified amount of time on building traffic and it will reap rewards ten-fold. Do a little, and then coast for awhile and you will never see the numbers you envision.

Remember, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, My Friend!

Stephanie Mulac is a Motivational Coach and owner of http://www.90PercentAttitude.com, a website dedicated to helping Marketing Professionals Make Money With Websites on the Internet by developing a positive, winning attitude and providing online encouragement to others who don’t have a support system in their lives.

Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it’s pretty obvious that high search engine rankings still are the be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this time?

‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’ has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a word like ’shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product you might be selling, but then -luckily- there are not as many SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.

So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies? Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to describe your business, it’s time to integrate everything yet again and focus on your site’s usability and accessibility.

Usability

What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does your site still provide valuable information to your human visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense. “Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal being to intertwine search with a consumer’s daily activity. As clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies fail simply on wording and text writing.

It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to your site are not going to be impressed by what they read. Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past and using common sense, neutral language will open up the content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool (free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered; http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.

There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you quite a good insight into your content. If you think your content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to match content and keywords.

Accessibility Accessibility of sites is way more of a technological issue. You will have what is generally considered an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers. Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching between your content and the search engines. The various limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text, JavaScript through the

There are two good ways you can check how accessible your website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can successfully access all your pages and download the Opera browser and follow their instructions to enhanced accessibility. Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’ guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are not excluded from your site because of some silly technical hiccups. Where an SEO says he’s making all the difference for his clients is that he has numerous checklists to make sure your business in whatever location or segment it is, is optimised. He likely will market his services saying that he will make your site more localised than your competition.

There is a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use here and it remains to be seen whether better accessible local business site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher Return on Investment numbers. Local search appears to be performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn’t have (or probably need) a Web site so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results from comparable segments to the one you are in!

All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy, prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. It is not deemed 100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are likely issues you’ve comply with for years already, but it’s always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you that edge over the competition you need!

Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a hyperlink is removed from the text -something that easily happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.

Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets the standard and you can run your site through their validator tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to get it analysed to see if search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your content/page into sections before indexing it – e.g. header, metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out and optimise!

Internet advertising is not easy.

It is a numbers game.

The more traffics and hits you get at your sites,
the more you’re most likely to generate sales.

But you’ll always have more people that don’t buy
than who buy.

There may be many reasons why they have not
bought which may be because of your price, payment
options, or any other possible reason.

You don’t have to watch as you keep losing all
these potential lifetime customers.

There are a couple of savvy internet web site marketing
secrets that you can use to minimize the loss of these
prospects.

(1) One way is to accept barter offers for your product.
Maybe the person can’t afford to buy your product.
They may have something you could use in your
business or personal life. If the barter deal isn’t fair
enough, either of you could add in some cash. You
may not make money but, they might buy other
products you offer.

(2) Another way is to include a negotiation offer at the
end of your ad copy. Tell your reader if there is
something they don’t like about your offer, they
could contact you and negotiate a different buying
offer. They may not like your price, guarantee,
shipping methods, payment options, etc. You can
gain a potential lifetime customer by being flexible
with your offer and negotiating instead of loosing
them.

(3) A simple way to attract lifetime customers would
be to give people a freebie. The freebie should be
related to the other products or services you sell.
You may not be getting paid for the freebie, but
you will get a lot more people using one of your
products because it is free. If they are impressed
by your free product there is a high chance they’ll
buy your other products in the future.

(4) The last way is to sell your product at the price it
costs you to produce or buy it. You will usually
sell more products at a lower price than your
competition which equals more potential lifetime
customers. You will break even in cost but you’ll
make your profit from the upsell and backend
products your sell your lifetime customers.

May these internet web site marketing secrets help you
to make a lot of money.

Warmly,

I-key Benney, CEO

I-key, a Millionaire CEO from New York City is the creator of “Mscsrrr: Millionaire Secret Cash System”,(investing online) program, which has helped thousands of ordinary people from all over the world to attain financial security and shining success during the past 2 yrs.

Mscsrrr Millionaire Cash System helps you to generate $1,500+/Week for life, from home or office, part time or full time. No large investment or hassles. Win $1000-$2000 free “cash”.

Why Traffic Touts and List Pushers Are Bad For Your Business Simply Easier Marketing – Part 2 of 3. —————————————————————-

(c) 2004 Charles Kangethe ————————-

In this Article we look at the second competitive advantage of successful Internet Marketers – Warm Traffic and True O’pt-In Lists.

Good, Bad and Ugly Traffic ————————–

Marketing depends heavily on the type of Traffic you attract.

* Untargeted Traffic

Similar to Traffic passing high street shops in vehicles.

This Traffic is of very little use.

* Targeted Traffic

Similar to people window shopping on the high street.

There is a chance that if the products appeal, they will walk in to get a better look. Competition from other shops, for this type of Traffic is very high.

* Warm Traffic

Similar to browsers who walk into the high street shops to “Touch and Feel” the merchandise.

Your best prospects and chances of sales come from this group.

=> Sidebar – What Traffic Touts don’t want you to know * They can and will sell you untargeted and targeted Traffic.

* Very few can deliver warm Traffic! <=

Wrong Traffic Is Bad For Business ———————————

* Paid Traffic

1) Adverts in Cyber Space

Surfers who see your ad have a choice of acting on it or moving on.

This can deliver all three types of Traffic. It depends on the quality of your advert AND where the advert is placed.

2) Buying Popups, popunders, or popovers of your offer

Depending on where you buy your Traffic you are given the O’ption, at a cost, of filtering for language, geographical region and surfer interests’.

=> Sidebar – What Traffic Touts don’t want you to know * Page Impressions with no filter deliver untargeted Traffic!

* Page Impressions with filters result in untargeted to targeted Traffic. You have to buy big Traffic volumes to convert a small percentage into warm Traffic. <=

3) Pay Per Click (PPC)

If you have never done a PPC campaign start small with a less competitive engine than Overture or Google.

PPC delivers highly targeted to Warm Traffic depending on the quality of your advert.

4) Cost Per Action (CPA).

Providers of CPA are not easy to find because the entire risk of the promotion lies with the provider not the advertiser.

This is a good way of building Warm Traffic and only paying when that Traffic takes particular action such as subscribing or buying on your web site.

CPA delivers Traffic similar to PPC.

* F’ree Traffic

1) F’ree For All (FFA)

FFA sources typically generate untargeted Traffic. But there is another reason to avoid them.

They are not entirely F’ree !

Apart from the time it takes you to earn “credits” which are the currency FFA’s, any Traffic costs you bandwidth, and although most hosting accounts these days have generous bandwidth, if much of it is being used by people who will never buy from you, then that is a wasted business cost!

2) Traffic Exchanges (and Safelists)

People exchanging Traffic are often, like yourself, primarily sellers of services and products and not buyers.

Unless you have exceptional or very unique products you are unlikely to attract much buying interest from the other people in the exchange program.

3) Search Engines and Directories

These sources deliver highly targeted to warm Traffic in potentially big volume.

The drawback is that Search Engine O’ptimisation is difficult, and time consuming.

It can be frustrating because the payback in higher ranking and Traffic often takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months

4) Self syndication through Writing Articles and Press Releases

This results in similar Traffic to Search Engines, but the volume is significantly lower !

When Is An O’pt-In List Not An O’pt-In List ? ———————————————

Many marketers do not really understand True O’pt-In lists and therefore they end up building a collection of names and e-mail addresses from which O’pt-Outs are highly likely.

* Single O’pt-In Lists

Constructed on the strength of a single contact people receive a one off or periodic information and products from you.

* Double O’pt-In Lists

Constructed as above, with a confirmation step that the signup details are correct before you send information or start selling.

* True O’pt-In Lists

True O’pt-In lists go a stage further. They capture the prospects mind.

Your aim is to intellectually and emotionally involve the list with you and your business.

Do not fall into the trap of sending occasional mails from an autoresponder to your single or double O’pt-In list and think that is enough.

You must motivate people with useful offers, as well as intellectual and emotional triggers to remain on the list AND to buy from you.

O’pt-In e-mail lists can be :

* Purchased

=> Sidebar – What List Pushers don’t want you to know You have no easily checked evidence of : * How long ago the names were obtained * Where the names were culled from * Which competitors have the same names * A genuine interest in your offer from the list <=

* Home Grown.

Building your own list from Targeted and Warm Traffic is the slower but surer way to succeed.

The key is to nurture your lists and turn them into True O’pt-In lists and not just a collection of names and addresses.

Putting It All Together ———————–

Your Prime “Paid” strategy should be :

Start PPC (and CPA) campaigns Capture names and e-mail addresses Develop autoresponder messages using Triggers and Motivators to create True O’pt-In Lists

Your Prime “F’ree” strategy should be :

Start a SEO exercise Compliment the SEO with an self syndication campaign Capture names and e-mail addresses Develop autoresponder messages using Triggers and Motivators to create True O’pt-In Lists

=> Sidebar * The two strategies above will create Warm Traffic in volume and help you build responsive True O’pt-In lists. The Paid route will deliver results faster. The F’ree route will deliver Volume. <=

However, to make a decisive move to the super marketers bracket, you need Traffic and lists in even bigger quantities. Here is how to explode the volume.

A) Build a themed web site with highly O’ptimised content pages. B) For each content page develop offshoot pages that are equally highly O’ptimised.

The result is a tree like structure. For an example let’s say your theme site is about Golf.

* Your home page is about Golf in general.

* Your main content pages include Putting, driving, chipping, pitching, the mental game.

* Each main content page has sub content pages so under Putting Pitch marks and repairs, grass types, reading the green etc.

If all the pages in this structure are keyword phrase O’ptimised your Warm and targeted Traffic will literally explode.

How do you build so many O’ptimised pages ?

The old “not recommended” way was to build Search Engine friendly, people unfriendly Doorway pages.

For a new Search Engine and People friendly, way to do this there are two tools you should look at in the Relevant Resources Section.

Relevant Resources —————— Learn Pay Per Click Tactics => http://www.anysurf.com – Practice for low cost on this engine => http://www.payperclicktools.com – Information on PPC => http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com – PPC directory

Simply Easier Marketing 1 – First Competitive Advantage => http://www.simplyeasier.com/ownarticles.html – HTML version => http://www.simplyeasier.com/articles/affiliates.txt – Text Version

How To Build An O’pt-In List F’ree e-course => http://www.simplyeasier.com/Optin heOptinstrategy/

Build True O’pt-In Lists with intellectual and emotional triggers => http://www.simplyeasier.com/21mm

An unusual Cost Per Action Solution => http://www.simplyeasier.com/articles/radio.txt

Syndicate yourself with F’ree Press Releases and articles => http://www.simplyeasier.com/articles/press.txt => http://www.simplyeasier.com/articles/how2write.txt

Build Search Engine and People Friendly Web Content Pages => http://www.trafficequalizer.com => http://www.rankingpower.com

Other relevant articles:

All Website Traffic Is Not Created Equal By Angela Wu (c) 2004 http://onlinebusinessbasics.com/article.html

Ten Tips to the Top of the Search Engines By (c) 2004 Jill Whalen http://www.highrankings.com

———————————————————— Charles Kangethe of http://www.simplyeasier.com is a leading new wave marketer and a published author from England. The “Simply Easier” brand name is your guarantee of high value, quality Marketing Products, Services and Resources. ————————————————————

Getting links to your website all over the Internet is one of your best methods to get a higher ranking in the search engines. The reason for this is the more links you have, the more popular you are in the eyes of the search engines, and as a result you will be rewarded with a higher relevancy ranking than other websites with fewer links. So, what you want to do is joint venture with as many other websites as possible and get your links out on the Net. This will increase your traffic and ultimately your revenue, so it is certainly worth your while to put some serious effort into reciprocal linking. Follow these suggestions on how you can get started with reciprocal link exchanges and win the link popularity contest.

Tip #1 Find Quality Sites

The first thing you should do when it comes to reciprocal linking is research. You want to find some really high quality sites that already rank well and that target the same market as your website. These sites should not be in direct competition with your site, they should be related in some way. The reason it is important to find sites that already have a lot of traffic is because the more traffic they have, the more people that will view your link and ultimately visit your site because of it. Of course, you can still get your site linked with less popular sites, but that should only be after you already are linked with some really popular sites.

Tip #2 Use the Personal Touch

When asking another website to link to your site, you need to make sure your site is worth linking to. For instance, if you still have pages under construction or is disorganized with no clear focus, no other site is going to want to link to you. So, first make sure you have a quality site. Then, write to the quality sites you located personally. You want to send a polite e-mail that compliments the other site and ask for a link. You should provide all of the information for your link including title, URL, description, and any information the webmaster will need to link to you. This will save the webmaster a lot of time and effort and he will be more likely to link to your site than if you do not provide this information.

Tip #3 Link First

In your personalized e-mail you should also mention that you have added a link to their site and give them instructions on where they can find it. When you link first followed by a link request, providing all the necessary information to post your link, you will significantly increase your chances of getting a reciprocal link. Also, give the other webmaster some time to get your link up. Check back in a week or two and if it still not up, simply send a gentle reminder e-mail. If your site is still not posted within a short period of time after that then simply remove the websites link from your website and keep moving. Remember, while obtaining links is your goal it might not be first on everyone’s list.

Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

When you work with web site traffic, you must have the tools that show you the real picture about this traffic. You must know for sure how targeted your visitors are, what they want, what offers they like more, what offers cut down their motivation to use your product/service.

Only professional URL tracking tools can show you the real picture about your online business. And those who do not want to see real picture, venture their business to a great risk of losing everything.

HOW TRACKING WORKS.

Nothing difficult at all. You create a special link and put it inside your copy, mailing message, autoresponder letter, pop-up window, web page – anywhere you wish. Your URL gets special ‘counter’ that is activated every time someone clicks your link. When you know the statistic information about clicks on any of your links, you see the response that your business gets with clients, subscribers and web site visitors.

A simple example will show how URL tracking can help you to qualify the motivation for your products among subscribers. Let’s say you have 3,000 subscribers in your car driving tips course. Using URL statistics you can see how much clients exactly are ready for special action with your web site.

You write email letter to your subscribers, saying: “bla-bla-bla. You are my subscribers. I have terrific car related offers to you.”

Then you place several trackable links with text:

“…Click this link if you want to get discounts for car wash:
http://www.YourWebSite.com/link1

Click this link if you want to get car insurance:
http://www.YourWebSite.com/link2

Click here if you do not have a car and want to get loan for car purchase:
http://www.YourWebSite.com/link3 …”

This example is simplified, but you can get the idea. People will click on particular links if they like any particular offer. And you just look at the statistics for the number of clicks on each link and know:

1. How many people from your list have a car (link 1 + link 2)

2. How many people from your list do not have a car (link 3)

3. How many people from your list are interested in lower prices car wash services (link 1)

4. How many people from your list need new car insurances (link 2)

5. How many people from your list ignored all your offers (3,000 – link 1 – link 2 – link 3)

This info is very useful. Maybe after such a test you will find out that 2,600 out of “your” 3,000 subscribers did not click any of the links at all. Then you should think it over: maybe you do not have a car targeted traffic.

That was an example of URL tracking aimed at qualifying the subscribers into different groups by their interest. But tracking can give more useful info about your online business.

You can check what type of your ad copy is more effective with a simple URL testing technique. Write two ad copies that will differ in some copywriting elements. Put two different links in these copies. Track both links and you will immediately know what ad copy works better. No hypothetical suggestions, only real facts.

The technique is universal: you can test different variants of texts, offers, products and services and see what works and what not. This technique is called split testing in Internet marketing. You make several variants (i.e. split you offer into several testing variants) and see what variant gets better response. Then you choose that variant that works better and stick with it, do more and more split testing to get a better and better effect from your web site.

Now that you know the benefits of using URL tracking, you should know what features professional URL tracking tools should have.

PROFESSIONAL URL TRACKING TOOL SHOULD HAVE THESE FEATURES:

- you can create and test as many URLs as you wish;

- you can make two types of links: HTML and TXT links;

- you must be able to edit your URLs;

- you must be able to track link statistics to see: when the link was clicked, how many times it was clicked, how many unique clicks were made, etc.

URL tracking does not bring you traffic, but it shows the most truthful picture about what traffic you get to the web site. This is a very important tool: it is always better to dodge troubles in advance then to face problems all of a sudden.

Nickolay Bokhonok – CEO And Owner Of DesktopMoney LTD. Inventor of Internet marketing software and scripts. Successful Internet entrepreneur. Learn more about web site traffic building strategies, tips and tools at Free Traffic System web site.

Free Traffic System – Your Web Site Traffic Doctor.
info@FreeTrafficSystem.com

Testimonials are widely used by internet marketers. You see them plastered all over sales pages and websites in a bid to make you feel more comfortable with whatever product or service is being promoted.

I expect that, like me, you’ve sometimes wondered if these testimonials are real. Some of them aren’t but the large majority of them are 100% genuine. Usually you can tell the real ones because they will have a link back to the originator’s website.

So what does this mean for you? Simple – the next time you use a product or service that you’re happy with think about sending the supplier a testimonial – and include a link to your website or blog. If the supplier decides to use it, it’s good for them and it’s good for you – you will get traffic from your link.

To give just one example, I wrote a review of an e-book and published it on my website. It was one of the few e-books that I have genuinely enjoyed and learned from this year so I gave it a good review. I also e-mailed the author to tell him how much I had enjoyed the book and pointed him at the web page where it was reviewed.

A couple of weeks later I found that a snippet from my review was being used as a testimonial (he asked permission first of course) and that a link to my site had been included. This was on a very high profile sales page.

Mine was one of 4 reviews and the other 3 were all by world famous internet “gurus”. I don’t mind admitting that I was mildly amused to see my name there along with the big dogs – but I was even happier when I checked my traffic stats later. I was receiving a steady trickle of traffic from the sales site. Obviously people who wanted to check that there was a real person behind the testimonial.

The traffic is pretty constant week in, week out, and I expect it will continue for as long as the e-book is promoted. It’s a nice payback for a testimonial which I wrote in all sincerity.

So, if you are really happy with something in future, write to the supplier and let them know – include a link to your site or blog. It’s nice to be nice.

Hamish Hayward
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