Providing Value and Quality Content

So your company has a web site, sit back, relax and rake in the big bucks! What is that? Your web site has done nothing to increase revenue? This is a common occurrence for small and large business's. Everyone has a website today, just because you have one does not mean that your bottom line will increase.

I have spent the last three years studying different web sites and the companies or people that own them. I have seen everything from the ugly sites with tons of traffic to the big flashy expensive to produce sites, with no traffic. Let's say that you are in the business of selling stereo equipment. A quick Google search shows that there are 6,110,000 web sites indexed by Google on stereo equipment. Now you want to start another one. What makes you think you can pass up all 6 million of these sites and start bringing in revenue from your new website?

That my friends is a serious question. Prior to starting a business or building a web site you must first ask: What value do I have to offer? The question some need to answer is: What is value? Can I sell the same stereo equipment the other 6 million are selling and somehow offer more value to the end consumer? Probably not.

If you already have a business that is producing value, you are ahead of the game. Your goal now is to market your company on the web and bring that value to a wider audience, which will increase your revenue.

There are a lot of theories on how one should market on the Internet. Web site marketing is really not much different than marketing by any other medium. The one thing that the Internet gives us is the ability to provide quality information. Your website marketing can be tailored to provide lasting quality and value for your consumers.

There are a lot of article that explain the need for quality content. You could probably read a million blogs with “articles” on quality content. The writer writes one or two paragraphs touting quality content, publishes it and expects to be seen as an authority on the subject, based these few sentences. Quality content is not a few sentences or a couple paragraphs of regurgitated crap. Quality content is you talking about living life and connecting life, to what you are marketing. Quality marketing and advertising is not necessarily blatant. One of my favorite examples of marketing is the TV show Ghost Whisperer. In that show the main character is always driving a brand new Jeep. That jeep is provided by Chrysler. This is very subtle advertising and it works!

Let's say that you start a website to sell antique bicycle parts. A Google search shows 570,000 sites related to this subject. How can you market your website and get passed all these “established” sites and be seen by your potential customers. It is not enough to have a quality store, stocked with quality items for sale. Have you ever heard of a company called McDonald's? Everyone has. Why do you think that when you watch TV you see so many McDonald's commercials? Do those high paid Marketing executives at McDonald's think you will forget who they are? Do they just have money to burn? No, the trick is to keep your name in front of the customer in a fun, friendly way. If they are hungry, just watched a McDonald's commercial, good chance they will go to McDonald's to satisfy themselves.

So how do you do this with antique bicycle parts? You build a blog and on a regular basis write article that people who ride, work on and rebuild antique bicycles will find interesting. Think about a magazine. We will use Popular Mechanics as an example. Why does Popular Mechanics exist? Would Popular Mechanics exist without revenue? I think not! Popular Mechanics is a business, they exist to sell advertising. They get you to purchase the products for sale in their magazine by providing quality content. The cool thing is, you actually pay for the privilege of getting this content and end up paying more by purchasing the products for sale in the magazine.

Quality content for our example of a site for antique bicycle parts can come from the basic interaction you have with your customers. If you have a brick and mortar business with the web site being used for marketing, you should be full of stories to write about. Think about it, you have customers coming into your store on a regular basis. As part of the sales process you talk to them, establish a connection, listen to their stories and problems. These stories are priceless. From the grandfather that talks about his first bicycle, the person that broke down on a cross country trip, mechanical repair tips, family outings at the national park and a million more stories.

If people are interested in your products, they will be interested in reading about the lifestyle encompassed by your products. If you are the CEO of your business, you will hire someone like me to do this for you. If you are a small business owner just starting out, you may have to do it yourself. Some people are not that good at writing and have no choice but to hire the work out. Either way, if you are not providing quality content, you are leaving money on the table.

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Popular Article by J. Michael Warner

How To Build A High Traffic Website
Deep Branding On The Internet

How To Build A High Traffic Website

Many businesses have vanity websites. It strokes the ego to "be on the web" but does not do anything for your revenue stream. In order to improve your bottom line you must build a high traffic website. What is high traffic? That answer will be different for all of us. I am in the business of Internet Marketing. I help companies build traffic to their websites with Blog Marketing and Social Networking. Since my primary Blog Marketing Plan is $2,995.00 and my business is small, I only need a small amount of traffic to actually bring in decent revenue. How much traffic and revenue you need will be determined by the price of your products, the size of your business and your expenses.

Once you have determined that your business needs a high traffic website the next question is: How do I build a high traffic website? This is a very complex question, one that is not easily answered in a few paragraphs.

Build A High Traffic Website - Establish Your Keywords

I write and market for other businesses. The advantage being that you already have products and know what you are selling. You just need someone to do the marketing for you. Some people reading this may wonder why I am writing about how I run my business. If I tell everyone how to do what I do, some think that I will not be able to get any business. Not true. We are all CEO's of our own life. You do what you do best and hopefully have a passion for, I am the same. Not everyone reading this article can afford my services, those that can understand the need to delegate and have a budget for marketing, can hire me. Those that can not afford my services can use these techniques, build their business and everyone wins.

I recently did a little market research for a company in Michigan. The company is a marketing and sales consulting firm. Out of 19 keywords that this company focused in on, they did not rank in the top 100 searches on Google or Yahoo. So basically if they are getting any traffic from the search engines at all, it is minimal. Main competitors that are on page one of Google and Yahoo, are getting over 100,000 visits to their websites each month. Do you think you can improve your bottom line with an extra 100,000 visits to your website each month? Before you get to excited, realize that building a high traffic website is not something that can be done overnight.

So how do you establish what your keywords are? Do keyword research. Webconfs has an excellent tool that will help you figure out what keywords will be the most useful for your business. Simply type a word in that is the most relevant to your business and it will tell you what keywords are the most relevant and how many searches are done each month on those keywords. For example if we type the word marketing, it tells us that marketing has received 52,680 searches in the last month, Internet marketing has received 20,730, search engine marketing 20,730. These numbers change on a regular basis as it is a reflection of the previous month. The list for marketing gives us about 20 keywords. Depending on your market, it may only show a few keywords or none at all. Some subjects simply do not have very many searches conducted for them. If that is the case, you are at the mercy of advertising in order to generate traffic to your website.

Assuming that you have a business with products or services that are searchable, what do you do with your keywords? The first thing is to ensure that the keywords are used in the meta tags and keyword description in the coding of your website. Your webmaster can take care of that, just tell them what keywords you want in your meta keywords and come up with a meta description of your website. The meta description is a couple of sentences that best describes your company. When someone does a search and your company shows up in the results, your meta description is what they will read. So make your meta description interesting.

Building A High Traffic Website - Utilizing Your Keywords

Now that you have established your keywords you must use them. If an important keyword for you is marketing, you must insure that the word marketing is used as much as possible on your website. Use the word marketing enough so that it is obvious your website is about marketing. The best way to do this is to not only use the word marketing on your web pages but write or have someone write quality content for your website. Quality informative articles on your website will go a long way towards helping your website rank high with the search engines.

The next step is to start a blog for your website with quality content added on a regular basis. How regular? How much traffic do you want? If you are operating with a low budget you may have to do everything yourself and just budget your time accordingly. If your business is going well and you can afford to outsource your marketing, you can hire me. Either way, if you do nothing, your website will never be a high traffic website.

When writing articles for your blog make the articles at least 400 words. Sometimes I write long articles, like this one. The theory behind shorter articles is that most people are busy and do not have time for long articles. The theory behind longer articles is that if the content is important and well written, it will be bookmarked and people will return to read it. Having said that, do not write articles or have articles written, that sound like advertising. People do not go to blogs to read about Bobby May's newest exciting discovery that only costs $19.95 and is guaranteed to save the world, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. Think about what people in the market for your products or services would be interested in reading. If you are in a network marketing company, write about personal experiences of those involved in the business. If you sell bicycle parts, write about bike trips, learning to ride and how to articles, anything that your respective market will find interesting.

The next step is article frequency. Publish articles on a regular basis. The best way to build traffic to the blog is to publish 3-4 articles every day. No easy feat unless you have nothing else to do or deep pockets. I would recommend that you decide on a schedule and stick to it. Publish at least two articles each week to your blog. Once the search engines get used to the frequency you are publishing they will index your site on a regular basis. People that publish 3-4 times each day can end up being indexed within five minutes of publishing an article. Less frequent publishing will cause your site to be indexed usually within a few hours.

Build A High Traffic Websites - Link Campaigns

The search engines look at a multitude of things to determine how high your website ranks. The two most important are quality content and links. No website will ever reach the first page of a popular search if they do not have a lot of links coming into that website. For example the sites that end up on the first page of the popular search terms marketing or Internet marketing have anywhere from tens of thousands of links, to millions.

The first type of links we are concerned with are internal links. As you write articles, link them to each other using anchor text links. Take the one main keyword or keyword phrase and at least once every article, link that word or phrase to the main page of your website. From there the best way to utilize internal links is to link relevant pages to each other. For example if you write an article and mention Linkedin, link the word Linkdedin to an article you wrote about Linkedin. If you write an article about credit, install a link on the word credit to your article about credit. Anchor text links tell the search engines that the page being linked to, has importance in the subject of the word or phrase used for the link.

Anchor text links can also be used in the second type of link, external links. External links are the links found on other websites that link back to your website. These are also called backlinks. This is the type of linking that causes failure among most people that want to market on the Internet. This is work. The easy way to place links on other websites is to write such compelling, timely, quality articles that other people will read them and write about the article on their website, linking back to your original article. Actually, this is easier said than done, but if you can pull it off more than a few times, your website can really explode with traffic.

The real time consuming work is in placing links yourself on other peoples websites. I have read a lot of articles saying you should ask for links on the sites you want to be on. This is a waste of time! If I write Darren Rowse of Problogger and ask him for a link, he will just delete the message. Now if I am an interesting writer, Darren may ask me to do a guest post, which will then link back to my site. Excellent idea since he is very popular and if the regular readers at Problogger like what I have to say, they may start reading my blog.

The other method I use to gain links is to leave comments on any and all blogs relevant to what I am writing about, linking back to me. I have been told that this is a waste of time because most comment sections are encoded with no follow instructions for the search engine spiders. Well my friend, the spiders don't seem to listen to instructions. Ever since I started building links in the comment sections, the spiders have been following them. Not all, but enough to make it worthwhile.

In order to check the status of the links to a website go to Google dot com and type the word links:www.yoursite(dot)com, using an actual dot of course. Type this into the search box. Hit enter and it will tell you how many links your site has and what the links are.

Building A High Traffic Website - Get Started

The information in this article is enough to help you get started building a high traffic website. It is not meant as a be all, end all product. The nature of the Internet is that what works today may not work next year and probably will not work in five years. Good luck and if you decide you like the idea, but would rather pay to have the work done, give me a call.

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