I’m back from a week-long excursion and happy to say I am feeling just great!
It definitely wasn’t a vacation, as “a vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking” (Earl Wilson quote) — and I enjoy every minute of what I do on a daily basis. I’ll get into the habit of letting you know when I am planning on not posting for more than a few days at a time.
So, how about a few tips on increasing your sites’ web traffic with little or no effort? Let’s dive in.
We’ll have to break things up into two types of basic sites — business/sales sites and more personal/blog style sites. (Both types may serve as a “muse,” depending on monetization and other factors.)
First off, increasing traffic to your more traditional “business” income sites (cart-based, services, affiliate sites), without just increasing your spending on Google AdWords, can be accomplished by just making subtle and even simple changes to your content and layout.
I’ll give you a great example. Sometimes I like to visit StumbleUpon.com and check out a few videos. Seems simple enough. After going to the site and clicking Videos, you are presented with several thumbnail-size video links and not a Stumble button. That means you have to click one first, just to get started. This not only annoys me, but I have actually met two web-savvy people who actually kept looking on that page for a Stumble button for a couple minutes.
Once you’ve actually loaded the video interface, try clicking on the StumbleUpon logo in the top left corner to return to the site’s main page — no dice. It doesn’t link. Sure, you can use the back button, but that is something that should be ingrained into every web designer’s subconscious — logo/name links back to homepage (almost like a reset button for the user). In fact, there are almost no navigation options — aside from Sign Out & Learn More. Visitors remember even the slightest difficulty in navigation or awkward layout and will respond by not returning to the site as often.
Secondly, for your personal/blog style sites, you should definitely consider the above two items along with the following:
I mentioned one such service above: StumbleUpon. You should check it out and utilize it right away. Many sites are getting the majority of their traffic just from being Stumbled Upon.
Another, newer service, started by John Reese (super successful Internet marketer) over at Income.com, has been released as BlogRush and it is already taking the blog world by storm. It was released for public use a few days ago, and as of now, all the features seem to be working great — including the Dashboard stats (which didn’t quite function at launch!).
BlogRush is set up to allow each user to earn “syndication credits” based on how many folks are looking at other posts that are listed on their blog (you can see a working example of BlogRush here on HHWW, on the right sidebar). It has the potential to build traffic exponentially over a short period of time, and best of all, its free.
And, even newer (just announced today at the Techcrunch40 Conference), is an upcoming service from Adbrite (the company started by Phillip of F’d Company fame) named Spottt. Make sure you go sign up now to qualify for the upcoming Beta program while you can.
That’s it for now. I’ll be making a post about SEOmoz’s contest results and my thoughts on landing pages, soon.
Nice article very informative.