How To Attract Visitors To Your Website

Your website is up. Just sit back and wait for the phone to ring, right? Wrong!Attracting visitors to your site is just as hard as creating the site itself.

The reason that most people don't get traffic is that they "Try" something, and then they give up. If a method doesn't work for you the first time, keep trying and improving. What works for one business may not work for another!

Below are some of the key methods on how to attract visitors to your site. Over the coming months we will go more in detail on some of the methods and continually give you more ideas on how to market your site.

If you would like help in any of the areas below, Sue Studios would be happy to assist you. Please contact us at: info@suestudios.com

1. Advertise Your Website on all marketing materials

   • Email signature (An email signature is a brief blurb about your business along with your URL and/or contact information. Put a signature on every piece of email you send out.)

   • Invoices

   • Stationery and envelopes

   • Brochures, business cards

   • Ads, flyers, sales letters, signs

   • Articles, newsletters

   • Announcements, press releases

   Let people know about your website AND what they'll get or find on your by appealing to their sense of curiosity and self-interest.

   Top

2. Register with Search Engines

   Thousands of web surfers find the information they're interested in on the Internet by searching for keyword phrases in the major search engines. If your Web site is not listed in these resources, you won't be found. Some of the major Search Engines are:

   AOL Search:	http://search.aol.com/	Yahoo:	http://www.yahoo.com
   Google:	http://www.google.com/	Alta Vista:	http://www.altavista.com/

   Before submitting your Web pages to the Search Engines and Directories, you'll need to learn a bit about optimizing your pages to give you the best chance of being found.

3. Niche Directories and Search Engines

   Find and get listed on targeted directories and Search Engines for your industry or location. There are lots of them! Good places to start looking are:
   http://yahoo.com/
   http://www.dmoz.com/

   One of the Canadian wellness directories is http://www.saskworld.com/holistic/index2.htm.

   Top

4. Webrings

   A webring is a way of inter-linking related Web sites so that you can visit each site one after the other, eventually (if you keep going) returning to the first website. A ring is managed from one site. Joining a webring will help build an online 'community.' Just as directories, there are lots of different webrings. One health related webring is http://www.selene.com/healthlink/index.html.

5. Linking

   • Build your link popularity by listing links to other sites, and they list a link to yours in order to 'share' each other's traffic. Make sure that the other website is attracting the type of visitors that you want. If you are primarily targeting women entrepreneurs, then you won't want to do an exchange with a site that is attracting male wrestling fans. Most search engines take link popularity into consideration when ranking your site.

   • Consider adding a 'Link to Us' section on your site where you provide the HTML that visitors can simply cut and paste to their own web pages.

6. Advertise on a targeted website

   Find complementary but non-competing sites and check their rates for advertising. Banner ads are the most common type of advertising permitted; however, they're usually not very effective. Text ads or endorsements typically perform better. You could also try an "ad swap" by swapping ad space with another website that caters to your audience.

   Top

7. Write articles

   A very inexpensive way to drive targeted traffic to your Web site is by writing articles related to your product or service. This is a great credibility-builder and gives you exposure!

   If the readers feel that the article you wrote was interesting, informative or helpful, many of them will now visit your Web site to see if you have even more helpful information there. If your articles are focused on you and your company, the chances of getting them published are greatly diminished.

   Distributing the articles is just as critical. Publish the articles:

   • On your website

   • In your newsletters

   • To other newsletters, magazines, websites, electronic newsletters. Another 'bonus' is that articles are often archived on websites for visitors to refer to time and time again.

   • A monthly column (offer to write a monthly column)

8. Newsletters

   Build and use your own opt-in list of targeted and interested prospects. Offer a free newsletter that provides fresh, interesting, and relevant content. You'll receive feedback from your readers about what's important to them, and over time they'll come to know and trust you. Your products, services, and even recommendations will then be taken much more seriously because you've developed credibility with your readers.

9. Newsgroups

   A newsgroup is a discussion about a particular subject consisting of messages written to a central Internet site and redistributed through Usenet, a worldwide network of news discussion groups. Users can post to existing newsgroups, respond to previous posts, and create new newsgroups. Contributing to a newsgroup will help establish you as a helpful member of a community. Others will get to know you and will often refer you to others. To get more information about newsgroups or to help you determine which newsgroup you could join, see http://www.geocities.com/findnewsgroup/.

Top