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There Must Be Some Easier Way
While pay-per-click may be a good business model for your website, there s nothinglike free traffic to lay the foundation. My log furniture site used to get 100unique visitors per day before it started fetching in 200 and now 300 on an averagebasis. The personal goal here is 1,000 unique daily visitors but 10,000 would alsobe welcomed!
Following are some of the best ways we have found to grow website traffic:
#1: Website Optimization
A local business magazine recently ran an article calling SEO (search engineoptimization) the equivalent of hocus-pocus . The author of the article, whoapparently worked for an SEO firm, described optimization as a somewhat shady activity that s impossible to get a handle on. I say Baloney!
SEO is not pseudo-science. It is a very tangible and real way to increase websitetraffic. If you haven t taken care of the basics e.g. making sure your website has arelevant title, focuses on the right keywords, avoids practices that are disdainedby the search engines, etc., you can be sure that, once found, your website will notrank as highly (or get as much traffic) as it otherwise would. Begin yourtraffic-garnering efforts by making sure your website is up-to-snuff.
#2: Publish Helpful, Relevant Content
Publishing helpful articles on the Net with a link back to my log furniture websiteseems to result in traffic spikes nearly every time. Notice the emphasis is on helpful articles. There is plenty of useless drivel out there by people who arebeing paid $5 to write an article. Not to insult anyone, but I spend 2-8 hours onthe articles I write depending on how much research is required and how technicalthe article is and that costs more than $5.
It doesn t seem to matter what you write about. My topics so far have included SEO,the simplicity of Amish life, improving your bottom line, and understanding Googleoperators. The key is to make them relevant, short and helpful.
#3: Add more products to your website
Our experience has been that adding more products to the website helps us to come upin the search engines more often. A person who finds a rustic night stand at oursite might notice that we have log bunk beds. Somebody who is shopping for anunfinished pine dresser might not be thinking of rustic furniture at all, stumbleacross one our products, like the whole site, and end up furnishing their cabin.Each product is like a fishing line cast in the sea. The more well-described baityou have out there the more fish will bite.
#4: Improve your website conversion rate
Five years ago; we used to get one log furniture order for every 100 websitevisitors. Now it seems like closer to one order for every 300 unique visitors. Partof the reason for this, we believe, is that the web has become more competitive. Butwe also pay attention to our conversion rate.
We are in the process of making a change right now that might really help. Someonepointed out that when you click on an item to buy it within Miva Merchant s standardinterface, there is no confirmation that the item has been added to your shoppingbasket. This might lead some customers to believe that the website isn t workingproperly. They might not be savvy enough to check the shopping basket. They mighteven leave the site without ordering (perish the thought!)
These glitches can really hurt website sales. We went to the Miva Merchant sitefor third-party modules and found a script that displays the shopping basket aftereach item is added. We purchased the script and install, and are watching to see howit affects website sales and conversion rate. Our guess is that this will have apositive impact on sales.
Conclusion
obviously, there are a lot of other ways to increase website traffic. The fourlisted above are a great place to start. If you re not into SEO, find somebody whois. If you are paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars of month forpay-per-click traffic, it may be wise to divert enough of those dollars to ensurethat your website is the traffic-snagging, profit-generating machine you intend itto be.
