Buying Traffic For Your Website
When companies do business in internet, they have some useful way to get more traffic.
Old Way: Banner Ads
Banner ads (and the related forms) are the most widly known method of paying to get extra visitors. Over the last year, though, the click-through rates of these are getting lower and lower, making them much less effective. There are new banners and other forms of advert being developed which are interactive and have greatly increased click-through rates. Although standard banner advertising is not a very effective use of your money, these 'new generation' ads could be very effective.
Sharing: Affiliate Programs
Another method of getting extra traffic which has been around for a long time is affiliate programs. These are systems where webmasters earn a comission on any sales they refer you. Even with the slowdown in internet advertising, affiliate programs are still extrememly popular, mainly because companies do not pay out unless they actually make a sale. Although this eliminates wasted advertising money, the affiliate comissions can take away a lot of a company's profit margin and the setup costs can be large. Although you can run the system yourself, joining a big network like Comission Junction can cost as much as $2000 plus a comission of every payout. The big networks will manage all tracking and payouts, though.
Google way: Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
Several search engines have undertaken a new revenue model. They are charging people for their position in the search engine. Sites bid an amount which they must pay per visitor the search engine sends them. The sites are then ranked based on how much they are paying. Although this seems like an expensive way of getting visitors it is actually highly effective. The company can choose the keywords they bid on and how much to bid. A typical bid is usually about $0.30 to get into the top 5 on a search. For some popular terms and for the top spots bids can get extremely high, though, and it is usually better to settle for a lower placement or a less popular search term. The good thing about this type of promotion is you are only paying the search engine if you get a visitor, so if you get no visitors, you won't pay.
Yahoo Way: Pay-For-Inclusion
What this means is that many sites that used to take submissions for free, now charge a fee. The most notable is Yahoo which, although it still accepts free submissions, very rarely adds a site which has not paid the $199 express submission fee. Although this sounds like a lot, many webmasters will testify that Yahoo is probably the best source of traffic for websites and it is certainly worth being in the directory. Other directories and search engines will only accept paid submission, some add paid submissions quicker than free ones and some offer premier listings for paid submissions.
New Way: Search Term Advertising
This is a search engine tool. Most search engines will offer advertising based on the search term which is used. For example, if you were a computer retailer your advert would be shown on a search for 'computer software' but not for 'television repairs'. This is very effective at increasing your click through rate, which is especially important as most of these systems are based on pay-for-views, not pay per click. They are very cost effective, though, and are a good way of mounting a medium scale advertising campaign.
Monday, October 23, 2006
How To Make Advertisers' Money
There are two ways to get advertisers to your site and make money from them.
1. Sale your sapce directly. You may find advertisers and let them put their banners or similar stuff on a certain space of your website. You are an info-estate owner, like a mall owner, and your advertisers are your tenants, they rent a space from you. You can charge them based one time term, pay-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-view (CPM), or other way you both can accept.
Affiliate programs is the other way to do it. You advertise a product or a range of products on your site (like an Amazon.com search box), You will then be paid a percentage of sales you make. This is good if you have an audience who are very likely to buy from an affiliate program you are publicizing as you will earn a lot more than from a banner. For a list of thousands of programs you can join visit AssociatePrograms.com
2. You work as a sub-agent, then you let someoneelse like google to find advertisers for you. But you need convince google to send the "tenants" to your space, and the tenants also need satisfy your standard. AdSense is a popular programm. Many people are making decent money from it now.
What are "pay-per-click (CPC)" and "pay-per-view (CPM)"?
Pay per click will pay you money every time someone clicks on the banner. Pay-per-view will pay you every time the banner is loaded into someone's browser.
It is obvious that pay-per-view is going to make you a lot more money but, unfortunately, it is only available to large sites. Pay-per-click advertising will not get you as much money but if you can get well targeted advertising you should get quite a lot of clicks. Recently, many advertisers are starting to use pay-per-action (CPA) banners, where the user must do something on the advertisers site (like sign up to a newsletter) for you to earn the money, similar to affiliate programs.
Banner companies will look at your site and target the advertising for you. You should only have a few advertisers as they will have a minimum pay out (usually $25). You will not get paid if you don't reach this amount so you should concentrate on a few to make sure you get paid. Some companies, like Commission Junction work as an agency where you can earn from many advertisers and all the money is pooled into one account, which is very useful.
1. Sale your sapce directly. You may find advertisers and let them put their banners or similar stuff on a certain space of your website. You are an info-estate owner, like a mall owner, and your advertisers are your tenants, they rent a space from you. You can charge them based one time term, pay-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-view (CPM), or other way you both can accept.
Affiliate programs is the other way to do it. You advertise a product or a range of products on your site (like an Amazon.com search box), You will then be paid a percentage of sales you make. This is good if you have an audience who are very likely to buy from an affiliate program you are publicizing as you will earn a lot more than from a banner. For a list of thousands of programs you can join visit AssociatePrograms.com
2. You work as a sub-agent, then you let someoneelse like google to find advertisers for you. But you need convince google to send the "tenants" to your space, and the tenants also need satisfy your standard. AdSense is a popular programm. Many people are making decent money from it now.
What are "pay-per-click (CPC)" and "pay-per-view (CPM)"?
Pay per click will pay you money every time someone clicks on the banner. Pay-per-view will pay you every time the banner is loaded into someone's browser.
It is obvious that pay-per-view is going to make you a lot more money but, unfortunately, it is only available to large sites. Pay-per-click advertising will not get you as much money but if you can get well targeted advertising you should get quite a lot of clicks. Recently, many advertisers are starting to use pay-per-action (CPA) banners, where the user must do something on the advertisers site (like sign up to a newsletter) for you to earn the money, similar to affiliate programs.
Banner companies will look at your site and target the advertising for you. You should only have a few advertisers as they will have a minimum pay out (usually $25). You will not get paid if you don't reach this amount so you should concentrate on a few to make sure you get paid. Some companies, like Commission Junction work as an agency where you can earn from many advertisers and all the money is pooled into one account, which is very useful.
The Ways to get Your Content
The Ways to get Your Content
There are several ways to get your content done. You may write it yourself, or get someone else to write it for you. But there two new ways may works better:
1. Get Your Visitors To Generate It
It has become common recently for sites to invite their visitors to contribute. This could be in the form of user-submitted news or articles, comments and feedback from readers or even a forum or discussion board. This is cheap to do and will save you time, but you will need quite a few visitors to make this worthwhile. The popular website Sitepoint, has the majority of its content submitted by visitors.
2. Content Syndication
A good source of content is to use syndicated content from other sites. Many news organisations will provide a free 'news feed' where they give you some code to display news headlines on your site, and because the headlines link to their pages, they are willing to do it for free. There are also many authors who write articles etc. which can be used in exchange for a byline (a small paragraph of text and a link at the bottom). This is common in many newsletters, where guest authors write featured articles.
There are several ways to get your content done. You may write it yourself, or get someone else to write it for you. But there two new ways may works better:
1. Get Your Visitors To Generate It
It has become common recently for sites to invite their visitors to contribute. This could be in the form of user-submitted news or articles, comments and feedback from readers or even a forum or discussion board. This is cheap to do and will save you time, but you will need quite a few visitors to make this worthwhile. The popular website Sitepoint, has the majority of its content submitted by visitors.
2. Content Syndication
A good source of content is to use syndicated content from other sites. Many news organisations will provide a free 'news feed' where they give you some code to display news headlines on your site, and because the headlines link to their pages, they are willing to do it for free. There are also many authors who write articles etc. which can be used in exchange for a byline (a small paragraph of text and a link at the bottom). This is common in many newsletters, where guest authors write featured articles.
How To Design A Successful Website
There are some basic logic you need to follow to Design A Successful Website.
1, The Page Design
The basic structure of a page on your site is vital in the success of a particular design. There are many proven theories about the way a user looks at a page, the most important being their eye movements. The first place a visitors looks at on a page is the area in the top left. This is exactly the reason why the majority of websites place their logo at the top left of the page, as it instantly allows the user to identify the website which they are at.
The positioning of particular elements on the page is also vital in making a design. Logic states that the main navigation of a website will either be placed in a bar along the top or the left of the page. This comes from the basic workings of the English, and most other Western, languages. When reading a book you start from the top left and work across the page, so it is instinct to look at the top and the left for instruction. Of course in other cultures words are read from right to left, and sometimes top to bottom or bottom to top. If you view a website developed for this target audience you may find the navigation on the right, for example. Although this is logical for the main audience for this website, you will probably find it confusing. This is why, if you are developing for a mainly Western audience, you should do the logical thing and place the navigation on the left or at the top, even if you want to have a strange new design on your site.
Logic also states that when you have finished reading a page on a book or in a magazine, you turn the page to go to the next article. You don't return to the beginning of the magazine, then go to the page you want. This idea can be translated loosely onto the web. When someone finishes reading a page on your site, they don't want to go back to the top before going to another page, so provide another system of navigation (usually a text version of your primary navigation) at the bottom. This will make your site easier for people to use.
The final item of page design you should pay attention to is that of distracting the user. Especially on many personal home pages, there are many flashing animations and sometimes sound around the page. Unless they are the main content of the page they should be removed. This is because they are highly distracting (which is why many adverts are animated or flash). Your users have come to the site to view the content, and you should do your best to please them, again a logical idea but something which many people forget. The same goes for visible counters etc. They are not important to the user so get rid of them. They have no place on a site if they have no use.
2. The Structure
Another aspect of site development which should be looked at is site structure. There are really three basic structures: hierarchical, flat and walkthrough. Usually, it just takes a bit of logic to decide which is best for your site.
Some sites, such as Free Webmaster Help, Yahoo and many forums use a hierarchical structure, where pages are in sections and sub-sections. This is a good way of storing large amounts of categorized content. It is important with these systems, though, to be able to provide navigation for all levels of the design, although clutter is kept to a minimum as navigation options from other categories can be hidden.
The walkthrough style is less popular, where the user starts at one page and follows through the pages on a set path. This is difficult to achieve successfully, but works well for online ordering and tuto
rials.
Flat sites are not particularly common. The best example is probably a basic news site, where the latest stories are linked to from the main page. This is very simple to implement, but if you are following this route it can be very tricky to keep the site easy to use, as there are often a huge amount of options presented to the user.
You should probably have an idea what category above your site fits into, and by applying this logic you can create a structure for the site
3. Let The User Know Where They Are
This piece of design logic is often overlooked by many webmasters, and it is a major mistake. The common assumption is that users will enter your website by the the front page and go from there to the information they want. Unfortunately, this isn't the case, as the majority of visitors to most websites will be referred by search engines, going straight to the page they are looking for. If this happens, the user may have no idea where in your site they are. This is easy to overcome by using simple logic.
One method of letting users know where they are on your site is to use meaningful URLs. This works especially well with a hierarchical structure. For example, at Free Webmaster Help, many people enter the site via the PHP/MySQL tutorial. If you look at the URL (http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/) it is obvious that this page is about PHP/MySQL, it is a tutorial and it is on Free Webmaster Help. It also helps, as the user can then delete part of the URL and get a full listing of tutorials, or even go back to the main page of the site.
This method can be taken a step further by the use of a 'Breadcrumb Trail'. A breadcrumb trail is often found at the top of many sites (like Yahoo, SitePoint and Free Webmaster Help). It is basically a textual representation of the site or directory structure, showing where the user currently is (on the PHP/MySQL page it shows: Home - Tutorials - PHP/MySQL). Each item in this is linked, so the user can easily access different pages. A breadcrumb trail is a very useful method of improving usability and is easy to implement.
There is another way of letting users know where they are in a site, which works best with the 'walkthrough' type of structure. In, for example, an online ordering system, it is very often helpful to be told at what stage the order currently is. This usually takes the form of 'Step 2 of 5' but an even better way is to use a graphical representation of all the stages in the order process, with the current one highlighted. Users are much happier if they know exactly what is going on.
1, The Page Design
The basic structure of a page on your site is vital in the success of a particular design. There are many proven theories about the way a user looks at a page, the most important being their eye movements. The first place a visitors looks at on a page is the area in the top left. This is exactly the reason why the majority of websites place their logo at the top left of the page, as it instantly allows the user to identify the website which they are at.
The positioning of particular elements on the page is also vital in making a design. Logic states that the main navigation of a website will either be placed in a bar along the top or the left of the page. This comes from the basic workings of the English, and most other Western, languages. When reading a book you start from the top left and work across the page, so it is instinct to look at the top and the left for instruction. Of course in other cultures words are read from right to left, and sometimes top to bottom or bottom to top. If you view a website developed for this target audience you may find the navigation on the right, for example. Although this is logical for the main audience for this website, you will probably find it confusing. This is why, if you are developing for a mainly Western audience, you should do the logical thing and place the navigation on the left or at the top, even if you want to have a strange new design on your site.
Logic also states that when you have finished reading a page on a book or in a magazine, you turn the page to go to the next article. You don't return to the beginning of the magazine, then go to the page you want. This idea can be translated loosely onto the web. When someone finishes reading a page on your site, they don't want to go back to the top before going to another page, so provide another system of navigation (usually a text version of your primary navigation) at the bottom. This will make your site easier for people to use.
The final item of page design you should pay attention to is that of distracting the user. Especially on many personal home pages, there are many flashing animations and sometimes sound around the page. Unless they are the main content of the page they should be removed. This is because they are highly distracting (which is why many adverts are animated or flash). Your users have come to the site to view the content, and you should do your best to please them, again a logical idea but something which many people forget. The same goes for visible counters etc. They are not important to the user so get rid of them. They have no place on a site if they have no use.
2. The Structure
Another aspect of site development which should be looked at is site structure. There are really three basic structures: hierarchical, flat and walkthrough. Usually, it just takes a bit of logic to decide which is best for your site.
Some sites, such as Free Webmaster Help, Yahoo and many forums use a hierarchical structure, where pages are in sections and sub-sections. This is a good way of storing large amounts of categorized content. It is important with these systems, though, to be able to provide navigation for all levels of the design, although clutter is kept to a minimum as navigation options from other categories can be hidden.
The walkthrough style is less popular, where the user starts at one page and follows through the pages on a set path. This is difficult to achieve successfully, but works well for online ordering and tuto
rials.
Flat sites are not particularly common. The best example is probably a basic news site, where the latest stories are linked to from the main page. This is very simple to implement, but if you are following this route it can be very tricky to keep the site easy to use, as there are often a huge amount of options presented to the user.
You should probably have an idea what category above your site fits into, and by applying this logic you can create a structure for the site
3. Let The User Know Where They Are
This piece of design logic is often overlooked by many webmasters, and it is a major mistake. The common assumption is that users will enter your website by the the front page and go from there to the information they want. Unfortunately, this isn't the case, as the majority of visitors to most websites will be referred by search engines, going straight to the page they are looking for. If this happens, the user may have no idea where in your site they are. This is easy to overcome by using simple logic.
One method of letting users know where they are on your site is to use meaningful URLs. This works especially well with a hierarchical structure. For example, at Free Webmaster Help, many people enter the site via the PHP/MySQL tutorial. If you look at the URL (http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/) it is obvious that this page is about PHP/MySQL, it is a tutorial and it is on Free Webmaster Help. It also helps, as the user can then delete part of the URL and get a full listing of tutorials, or even go back to the main page of the site.
This method can be taken a step further by the use of a 'Breadcrumb Trail'. A breadcrumb trail is often found at the top of many sites (like Yahoo, SitePoint and Free Webmaster Help). It is basically a textual representation of the site or directory structure, showing where the user currently is (on the PHP/MySQL page it shows: Home - Tutorials - PHP/MySQL). Each item in this is linked, so the user can easily access different pages. A breadcrumb trail is a very useful method of improving usability and is easy to implement.
There is another way of letting users know where they are in a site, which works best with the 'walkthrough' type of structure. In, for example, an online ordering system, it is very often helpful to be told at what stage the order currently is. This usually takes the form of 'Step 2 of 5' but an even better way is to use a graphical representation of all the stages in the order process, with the current one highlighted. Users are much happier if they know exactly what is going on.
How Does Google Ranking You
How Does Google Ranking You
It was in December 1999 that Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page published their document 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine' that everything began to change. This document showed the workings of their new project, a search engine called Google, which at that time, held data on 26 million web pages. Over the 2 years since then, Google has changed the webbeyond recognition.
Finally, there is a search engine which is fast, powerful, accurate and has an enormous database. Today, Google holds over 2 billion pages in its index, the largest search engine ever. Results are accurate and, using Google's 'Page Rank' technology, and the masterful idea of showing a snippet of the site's text containing the search term instead of the META description, the user can easily see which ones are relevant. Google's huge cache of every page in its index has made 'Error 404 - Not Found' from listings a thing of the past and the total lack of large images on the site means it is one of the quickest sites to load on the web, even when showing 100 results per page. Now, Google offers web search, image search, directory search (based on the Open Directory), Directory Search (with the world's biggest Usenet archive) and catalogs search (mail order catalogs online).
This sucess has immense implications for webmasters. Google is now the search engine of choice for most of the web and it handles over 150 million queries a day. With that sort of popularity, a webmaster's first promotion task should be submitting to Google. Although it is highly likely that Google will pick up your site anyway on its next crawl, its always best to be safe. Getting into Google is simple, but getting a high ranking isn't. Traditional methods just don't work. Repeating your search term is useless, as is carefully planning out your META tags (Google doesn't use them). What you must pay attention to is Google's PageRank.
This is the method used to rank search results. Each page is given a PageRank based on this formula:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Although this looks extremely confusing, in essence it means that your PageRank is based on the following:
1. The number of sites linking to yours
2. The PageRank of sites linking to yours
This means that a site with 500 links to it from other sites will get a much higher rank than one with 5. Also, if two sites, each with 100 links to them, but one of them has links from Yahoo, CNN, the BBC, Amazon and Microsoft, the one with the links from the more popular sites will get a higher ranking.
So the only way to guarantee a high ranking with Google is to exchange links with people, which is exactly what makes the web so powerful anyway. All Google is really doing is returning to the roots of the internet. Exchanging links is free (usually) and, now Google powers Yahoo's web results, it seems to be the best way to build up traffic. But is a good PageRank the only way to get a higher listing. It probably is, but here are a few other tips which may or may not work (they appear to have given quite good results in some cases but this may be coincidence).
1. Get a keyword filled domain name. If someone searches for 'free advice' and your site is www.freeadvice.com, you should get higher up the search results
2. Put keywords in your title. If your site has the title 'F
ree Advice' it should appear higher up the results for the above search
3. Get your site included in the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org). Google appears to rank these pages higher.
Getting a high ranking in Google is not the only way you can benefit from it, though. Take a look at the design. To many people, Google is the best designed site on the web now. Its fast loading and easy to read. You can also learn an important lesson: If you see something wrong with the internet and can provide a good fix, you are well on the way to success. Thirdly, take a look at the Google Zeitgeist. Even if it doesn't help your website, its an extremely interesting page, and you may just be able to change your site to take advantage of highly searched queries.
Google is a revolution. Its changed the way the web works, and its changed the way webmasters promote their sites forever. If you still don't take Google promotion seriously, you're making a big mistake, and if you're considering spending thousands on promoting your site, take a week or two to exchange links with other sites first. I guarantee you won't regret it.
It was in December 1999 that Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page published their document 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine' that everything began to change. This document showed the workings of their new project, a search engine called Google, which at that time, held data on 26 million web pages. Over the 2 years since then, Google has changed the webbeyond recognition.
Finally, there is a search engine which is fast, powerful, accurate and has an enormous database. Today, Google holds over 2 billion pages in its index, the largest search engine ever. Results are accurate and, using Google's 'Page Rank' technology, and the masterful idea of showing a snippet of the site's text containing the search term instead of the META description, the user can easily see which ones are relevant. Google's huge cache of every page in its index has made 'Error 404 - Not Found' from listings a thing of the past and the total lack of large images on the site means it is one of the quickest sites to load on the web, even when showing 100 results per page. Now, Google offers web search, image search, directory search (based on the Open Directory), Directory Search (with the world's biggest Usenet archive) and catalogs search (mail order catalogs online).
This sucess has immense implications for webmasters. Google is now the search engine of choice for most of the web and it handles over 150 million queries a day. With that sort of popularity, a webmaster's first promotion task should be submitting to Google. Although it is highly likely that Google will pick up your site anyway on its next crawl, its always best to be safe. Getting into Google is simple, but getting a high ranking isn't. Traditional methods just don't work. Repeating your search term is useless, as is carefully planning out your META tags (Google doesn't use them). What you must pay attention to is Google's PageRank.
This is the method used to rank search results. Each page is given a PageRank based on this formula:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Although this looks extremely confusing, in essence it means that your PageRank is based on the following:
1. The number of sites linking to yours
2. The PageRank of sites linking to yours
This means that a site with 500 links to it from other sites will get a much higher rank than one with 5. Also, if two sites, each with 100 links to them, but one of them has links from Yahoo, CNN, the BBC, Amazon and Microsoft, the one with the links from the more popular sites will get a higher ranking.
So the only way to guarantee a high ranking with Google is to exchange links with people, which is exactly what makes the web so powerful anyway. All Google is really doing is returning to the roots of the internet. Exchanging links is free (usually) and, now Google powers Yahoo's web results, it seems to be the best way to build up traffic. But is a good PageRank the only way to get a higher listing. It probably is, but here are a few other tips which may or may not work (they appear to have given quite good results in some cases but this may be coincidence).
1. Get a keyword filled domain name. If someone searches for 'free advice' and your site is www.freeadvice.com, you should get higher up the search results
2. Put keywords in your title. If your site has the title 'F
ree Advice' it should appear higher up the results for the above search
3. Get your site included in the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org). Google appears to rank these pages higher.
Getting a high ranking in Google is not the only way you can benefit from it, though. Take a look at the design. To many people, Google is the best designed site on the web now. Its fast loading and easy to read. You can also learn an important lesson: If you see something wrong with the internet and can provide a good fix, you are well on the way to success. Thirdly, take a look at the Google Zeitgeist. Even if it doesn't help your website, its an extremely interesting page, and you may just be able to change your site to take advantage of highly searched queries.
Google is a revolution. Its changed the way the web works, and its changed the way webmasters promote their sites forever. If you still don't take Google promotion seriously, you're making a big mistake, and if you're considering spending thousands on promoting your site, take a week or two to exchange links with other sites first. I guarantee you won't regret it.
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