Also keep in mind that that the most effective tactics will do no good unless your product and or content are any good. But assuming that there's a market / audience for your goods, here are some tactics that could bring you incremental traffic and business to your site:
o Search. We all want to be on that top search results spot in Google and Yahoo!. But the truth is that it is not that easy and in fact an entire industry has blossomed around helping companies get a top search engine ranking. However there are a couple of things you can do to help your search position. First, be sure to re-submit your site at least 2-3 times a year. Search engines are constantly changing the algorithms that assign a site its ranking and so it is a good practice to re-submit your site every now and then.
Another good practice is to reach out to those few that have the top rankings in the search results page and request a link from their site to yours. Here's a great example: as of November 2006 a Google search for "hispanic small businesses" yielded the smallbusinessnotes.com site as the top result. This is the position I have always wanted for my site but in lieu of getting this spot we managed to get a hyperlink from that site to ours thus getting some nice "flow through" traffic.
Curious about paid search? Assuming that you have a budget, I will say that it works and that its performance based model is better than conventional banner advertising. If you want to try it out, both Yahoo! One of the best options is PRweb.com which for well under $100 will distribute your press release around the country, regionally or locally (your choice) through Google News and Yahoo! News amongst others. Because so many sites syndicate Google and Yahoo! news you will find that coverage can be quite good. PRWeb.com will naturally also include your press release in their site and so you can use the unique address (URL) of your press release and forward it to local or regional media who may pick up the story.
There are thousands (perhaps even millions) of bloggers writing their thoughts on the internet today. The fact of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of these bloggers do not make enough money from their blogging activities to do it full time. There are very few bloggers making more than 30,000 dollars a year from their blogs. But, at the same time, there are people making hundreds of thousands even a million or more dollars by blogging. So what separates the two groups?
The answer is much simpler than you might have first thought, but the sooner that you begin to understand this concept the sooner you can start to make money. The answer is targeted traffic.
Targeted traffic is visitors coming to your blog interested in what you are selling. It is a pretty simple concept, and most bloggers do not understand it. Regardless of how you are planning to monetize your blog, you are going to need to attract targeted traffic in order to succeed. The top earnings bloggers operate blogs that get thousands of visitors each month, sometimes even millions of visitors.
o Search. We all want to be on that top search results spot in Google and Yahoo!. But the truth is that it is not that easy and in fact an entire industry has blossomed around helping companies get a top search engine ranking. However there are a couple of things you can do to help your search position. First, be sure to re-submit your site at least 2-3 times a year. Search engines are constantly changing the algorithms that assign a site its ranking and so it is a good practice to re-submit your site every now and then.
Another good practice is to reach out to those few that have the top rankings in the search results page and request a link from their site to yours. Here's a great example: as of November 2006 a Google search for "hispanic small businesses" yielded the smallbusinessnotes.com site as the top result. This is the position I have always wanted for my site but in lieu of getting this spot we managed to get a hyperlink from that site to ours thus getting some nice "flow through" traffic.
Curious about paid search? Assuming that you have a budget, I will say that it works and that its performance based model is better than conventional banner advertising. If you want to try it out, both Yahoo! One of the best options is PRweb.com which for well under $100 will distribute your press release around the country, regionally or locally (your choice) through Google News and Yahoo! News amongst others. Because so many sites syndicate Google and Yahoo! news you will find that coverage can be quite good. PRWeb.com will naturally also include your press release in their site and so you can use the unique address (URL) of your press release and forward it to local or regional media who may pick up the story.
There are thousands (perhaps even millions) of bloggers writing their thoughts on the internet today. The fact of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of these bloggers do not make enough money from their blogging activities to do it full time. There are very few bloggers making more than 30,000 dollars a year from their blogs. But, at the same time, there are people making hundreds of thousands even a million or more dollars by blogging. So what separates the two groups?
The answer is much simpler than you might have first thought, but the sooner that you begin to understand this concept the sooner you can start to make money. The answer is targeted traffic.
Targeted traffic is visitors coming to your blog interested in what you are selling. It is a pretty simple concept, and most bloggers do not understand it. Regardless of how you are planning to monetize your blog, you are going to need to attract targeted traffic in order to succeed. The top earnings bloggers operate blogs that get thousands of visitors each month, sometimes even millions of visitors.