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Strategies to Put Eyeballs On Your Website
By Bill Platt
Successful websites are those that actually sell products and services to their visitors for a profit. And, successful webmasters are always working hard to bring even more visitors to their website, so that they can make even more sales and profits.
Successful webmasters all share three essential traits. First, they have developed processes for generating links to their website. Secondly, they have figured out how to employ a strong call-to-action with their advertising. And thirdly, they know how to track and test their results so that they can fine-tune their advertising.
ALL LINKS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL
A human being will never see some links. Maybe the search engines will construe those links as valuable links, but I would not count on it. Google is a little too smart to give value to links that human beings cannot find on their own.
Eyeballs are important to Google, and they should be important to you too.
While some links will serve no use to you directly or in the search engines, other links will prove to be far more valuable. Some links will deliver hundreds or thousands of visitors a month to your website.
Successful webmasters are those that can generate links that will deliver hundreds or thousands of visitors to their websites each month! It all adds up. The more valuable the links are that you can develop, the more traffic you will serve. The more traffic you serve, the more profitable your website will become.
LINK PLACEMENT STRATEGIES
There are many well-known methods for generating links to your website. Five of the more noteworthy and effective are as follows:
* Paid Links
* Viral Linking
* Article Marketing
* Paid Search
* Directory Placements
Here is an overview of each:
1. Paid Links
Usually, this type of advertising is delivered in banner formats, but is also available in text links. Pricing for paid links varies from cheap to incredibly expensive.
If you have an advertising budget equal to that of General Motors, then you could afford to buy advertising in one of the mega-websites such as: Yahoo! Games, Cnet.com, Disney.com, or FoxNews.com.
These mega-websites can deliver your advertising message to literally tens of thousands of people per day, but the costs can be staggering.
As always, you will get what you pay for. If you buy advertising on one of the mega-websites, you will get a lot of exposure for a lot of money. If you buy advertising on one of the small traffic websites, you will get a little bit of exposure for a little bit of money.
2. Viral Linking
Viral Marketing is a concept that suggests that your marketing message can pass from person-to-person, through existing social networks. In theory, if you have a compelling marketing message, people will be inclined to tell their friends, who will tell their friends, etc. Just like a virus that passes from person-to-person through human contact, your marketing message can also spread like wildfire.
If you create a resource page on your website that is full of valuable information and links to other resources, you will find that people will want to share your page with others. And, if you create free tools and services that are cool, clever or useful, then people will also want to link to those as well. The better your offering, the more likely people will be to link to it.
For example, according to MSN, there are 677 links to the tool called the TPW Text-to-Hyperlink Converter: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl and over 98,000 links to a search engine submission tool called Free Web Submission at: http://www.freewebsubmission.com
3. Article Marketing
If you can create an informational article, you can add information to the end of that article that tells about you and your website. Upon completion, you can offer your informational article to publishers and webmasters as a Free Reprint Article. This designation tells publishers and webmasters that they can use your article in their ezine or website, so long as they keep your Author Information and links intact.
While there are literally hundreds of places to place your articles, these two are among the best:
http://www.EzineArticles.com
http://www.GoArticles.com
4. Paid Search
The basic structure of Pay-Per-Click search advertising is that you can bid on keywords, and then the highest bidder on a search keyword gets the top spot. The next highest bidder gets the second spot, etc. The advertiser does not pay for advertising unless someone actually clicks on his or her advertisement, and then the advertiser is billed at the rate that the advertiser has agreed to pay the search company.
PPC advertising can be purchased at:
Google Adwords - http://adwords.google.com
Yahoo! Overture - http://www.overture.com
MSN Advertising - http://advertising.msn.com
7Search Advertising - http://www.7search.com
The above engines are the most expensive PPC providers, but not the only ones. There are literally hundreds of other PPC providers on the Internet, although most serve considerably less traffic.
5. Directory Placements
With directory websites, you are allowed to submit a 5-10 word headline for your listing, and usually up to a 25-word description to be placed with your link.
Directories are a good place to turn for highly targeted traffic, since most users will navigate through the various categories to find just the right websites to meet their needs.
A few of the highest traffic directories are:
http://www.Yahoo.com
http://www.Dmoz.org
http://www.ExactSeek.com
You can find another 200 specialized niche directories, search engines, and article directories, by reviewing the http://www.isedn.org list of member websites.
IN CONCLUSION...
If you build your website and then sit around waiting for traffic to come to you, your website will certainly fail.
To be successful, do as other successful webmasters have done before you --- build large numbers of links to your website and aim to generate links that potentially offer real value.
Link building is time consuming, but it does offer real potential for the profitability of your website. Link building is not easy, but it is essential and worthwhile.
About the Author
Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com
Bill specializes in distributing free reprint articles for his clients. Besides the exposure, traffic and sales that can be generated from the publication of an article in an ezine, many of his clients use reprint articles as part of their link building strategy. TIP: Sales Copy is not an article. If you are able to educate and inform your readers, then publishers and webmasters are more likely to use your article in their ezine or website.
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/26020.html
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