With so many big video sites on the website – including, but not limited to YouTube, UStream.com and TinyChat – there has been a new method of gaining traffic revealed. It’s known as video marketing and is still in its infancy. Because of this, it is important to dedicate funds for this method of advertising because it is only going to grow in size and the sooner you get in on it, the more reward you’ll be able to reap. However, using it properly can be a little intimidating, especially for those that have never done it before.

This is a guide to make it easier to use video for traffic.

1. Decide what type of video you want to make or have made. For example, do you want it to be a video that is humorous and spreads around because of humor or do you want it to be a video that provides detailed information on a very specific topic. If you owned a political site, do you want something funny about the President or something detailed about one of the policies he is trying to get passed?
2. Begin making it. For most videos, you can do it simply from your computer by using the webcam or setting up a video camera on a tripod so it is aimed at you. However, the video is going to be very rudimentary and demonstrate how amateur it is. Therefore, getting someone to handle the camera for you or having a third party company make the video will allow for different angles and shots to be taken resulting in a more professional look.
3. Add a section at the end of the video that details who you are. This could include an e-mail address or a website URL. While it can’t be clicked, people can see it and type it into their URL bar at the top of their web browser.
4. Submit it to video sites. YouTube is obviously the best because they have a considerable amount of traffic and, because it is owned by Google, is continuing to grow. Therefore, submitting the video there is a good way of getting people to see it.
5. Create a channel for your website so that people can check in when you submit a new video. This way, you can submit a new video and the people will get an e-mail update that you have submitted a video. This way, you’re developing a little community within your video submissions.

Getting in on the amount of traffic that comes from video marketing is an incredibly important decision and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is necessary that you create videos that provide worth for the person watching it. Whether that worth is through humor or through general information is irrelevant; so long as the viewer walks away remembering it even a little bit, the video has been a success. They’re more likely to come back to check out your site as well as your videos.

A quick search will yield thousands upon thousands of websites with tutorials on how to build websites, most offer solid concepts and ideas, but which teach you why and how you should do things?  Moreover, how do you know your design and coding is in the best interest of your client and the viewer of the site?  Here’s a list of common mistakes made in Web Design so you can avoid them when building your own site.

Leave the visitor’s web browser alone!  Don’t force a new window to open and don’t resize it.  Sure, it frames the content you’re coding perfectly but it’s a total disservice to your viewers and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of them.

Skip the welcome screen. The welcome screen or Enter Here screen is 100% pointless and serves no purpose for your website viewer, regardless of cool you might think it looks.  Furthermore, because no content is on it, it looses ranking in search engines.  Aside from being a web design mistake, it’s an SEO mistake too.

Let the visitor turn music on. Never force your visitor to listen to music, they might be in a public place that it’s not appropriate for music to play or may just not care for it.  Either way let them decide if they want to listen to it or not.

Don’t forget the contact page. An emerging trend recently is the lack of a contact page.  I don’t know how this happens, but it’s one of the most important pieces of nearly any web design.

Use readable fonts in graphic design elements. Because the number of fonts that can be used as plain text is very limited for the Internet, many web designers create graphical elements to represent fancy text into site designs.  Make sure they are not too big or too small and are easily readable.  No sense in creating content that no one can read.

Test your site in multiple browses and at multiple screen resolutions to ensure it not only works, but also is readable across all. Horizontal scrolling is not an acceptable way to view a page it just never caught on.  Most web designers are smart enough to not use Internet Explorer as their default browser but it’s still installed on millions of computers, spending the time to double check it works can be crucial to the site traffic and flow.

Never use pop-ups. For that matter, never use pop-unders either.  Advanced web browsers like Firefox block almost all of these by default but visitors to sites don’t want to be forced to to another window.  Tabbed browsing is available in all browsers – pop-ups are dead.

Avoiding these common web design mistakes will ensure your site keeps traffic and is readable, fresh and fun for all who visit it.

The reason Google has succeeded as a business is because they developed a model where advertisers only had to pay when they got something in return: traffic

Pay per click isn’t that new anymore, but even to this day, it is still an incredibly used type of advertising. Unfortunately, many people don’t understand how it works which is the general purpose of this article. Understanding how it works is a better way to generate sales on your site and make more profit.

The first thing to do is pick the right company to work with. Typically, this is Google Adwords; however, there are other companies that provide an incredible service. There are some that are niche PPC sites that can send traffic only from sites that are in the same niche as yours, but typically, Adwords is definitely the program to work with.

Once you’ve decided on the company, determine what keywords you’re going to be using. What are important keywords that you want to drive traffic to your site with? By understanding those, you can create the copy for the ad much easier. If you own a site on motorcycles, you might want to try and sell your specific type of parts. So, the keyword could be “motorcycle engine” and the ad copy could be “State of the Art Motorcycle Engine lubrication.” When someone searches motorcycle engine, they will see your ad.

Pick your bid per click. This is where you are going to have to experiment. With Adwords, you can pay as little as five cents a click; however, if someone else is willing to pay ten cents a click, their ad will appear instead of yours. Therefore, you’ll have to experiment with your ad. However, you don’t want to pay so much that you aren’t making profit. Not every click is going to result in a sale; therefore, you need to do a little experimentation and find the ideal price for you.

Finally, set a daily budget. This might be a high budget in the thousands, or it might be a small budget with less than $50 a day. Whatever you decide to do, though, make sure that the budget can last for at least a few weeks so that you can work on optimizing the ad perfectly. You’re going to be experimenting and changing the ad as you research which works the best. It might take some time, but once you find the ideal ad, it’ll profit for you for a long time.

PPC is a great way of only paying when traffic comes to you, but it can get expensive. By doing research, you’ll be able to determine exactly how much to pay per click so that you maximize your profits. In the end, web development is all about tweaking and experimenting. PPC is no different.

I was recently asked a question by a colleague about the best options for creating and hosting a website for his fledgling business; I responded honestly (at the time) and said, “what do I know from hosting, I’m a lower-middle class working stiff from Jersey. The only thing I knew about “hosting” is the crappy little parties my mom would host while trying to pass off Tupperware on her friends, family or any shmuck unlucky enough to be drawn into her “multi-billion dollar” enterprise. (She later moved on to her own pink Caddy from you-know-who.)

But I digress, back to my friends question; I consider myself a somewhat curious-natured guy, so I went online to see what I could find out for the fella. After looking around for quite some time, I came across a ton of companies that offered what appeared to be pretty decent packages. With my limited knowledge of what’s great when it comes to all of the little widgets and what-nots, I was looking for a company that broke things down into single English that a guy from public school could understand. So after screening out the less than user friendly guys, I got the list down to just a couple that weren’t talking over my head, and making things difficult for no reason. These two or three companies put things into simple terms and had a lot to offer someone trying to get things going from scratch, but only one had the whole deal that I thought would help my pal out.

This outfit kinda offered to grab a guy by the hand and walk him through the thing; step by step. They had a clear-cut approach to showing how to get a site built from their ready-to-use templates – all that had to done with these nifty little sites, is to add your own company info. And they don’t just shove some bogus lil sites with a picture of a butterfly or a mountain, like some of the other companies I looked at; these things looked really pro.

So after I gathered up all of the goods on their set-up, I turned my buddy on to them. Now he’s got a website he can be proud of, and it only took him an hour or so to be up and at it. Heck, I got so interested in the whole thing that I went ahead and set one up for my business too. I would share the name of the company, but I’m from Jersey – if I tell you, I’d have to kill ya.

Does your company/site need a news letter?

It used to be that building a website and getting some links was all that was needed to start developing a successful site. To this day, doing those things will result in a growing website there is no denying that. However, there is nothing going on there that is going to continue raising the site in profitability as well as visitor traffic. You’ll be relying entirely on search engine traffic as well as direct traffic, but there is nothing to “remind” visitors that you exist. Because of this, it is incredibly important to have a newsletter on your website where readers can subscribe themselves and then you can send them newsletters.

The newsletter does two things. The first is that it collects e-mails so that when you have a new product or service available, you can send a quick e-mail out to them letting them know it exists. Since they signed up to the newsletter, there is obviously something about your company that they like so they are more inclined to purchase your product.

The other thing that it does is remind them that your site exists even when you’re not selling anything new. For example, if you own a site about cancer and you send a newsletter out once every week or every other week with a new bit of news about it or something along those lines, they are more likely to come back to your site because they trust you. You provided them with information and now, they want to check your site out again to see if there is any other information they can find. As they keep coming back to the site and gaining trust, they become more consistent customers.

So the question is, what do I include in my newsletter? That really is up to preference. It is important, though, to not just send out new offers and try and make every e-mail about getting a new customer. If you do that, they’re more likely to unsubscribe because they’re not gaining anything. Sure, they might know that there is a new deal going on, but so what? If they’re not interested in buying right then and therefore, they won’t ever buy. Therefore, the one thing that is important to include in a website’s newsletter is more information. Provide something for the reader. For example, if you run that cancer site, mention the news every once in a while. That’ll make them remember that you helped them out when the time comes to buy a product.

A newsletter is one of the many ways in which you can develop a community. It allows you to grow your readership and, when new products and services are released, allows you to make more customers. Someone who has subscribed to your newsletter has made the first step toward becoming a consistent customer. There is obviously something interesting about you that made them want to subscribe to begin with. Now you just need to show them what that is.

WordPress & SEO

One of the things people seem to make the mistake with is that they assume that once they’ve hit the publish button, they never go back to that article again because they think the job is done. The problem with that is that, even if that brings in a lot of traffic from social media or being linked to, once the “fad” has died down, traffic will stop coming to it. However, if you take the time to do some search engine optimization to each individual post before publishing and after publishing, it could go a long way in bringing in a lot of traffic over a consistent period of time.

The first thing to consider is installing the All in One SEO pack for WordPress. This is a great way of adding specific keywords to each article so that the search engines, when they come to the site, see that your article is about those specific keywords. It helps to optimize your article from the get go.

The next thing to consider is adding h1 or h2 tags to the article. If you are writing a very in depth article, break it up into different sections and use certain phrases as those h2 tags. The search engine will see that those are important phrases and that’ll ding in the search engines. They’ll know that your site has relevance with those phrases and that right there is a way of beginning to gain traction with the search engines.

Now that the article is published, you need to individually build each post up in the search engines. The first thing to consider is submitting it to sites such as digg or reddit. While this can be perceived as spam to the sites – and therefore should be done only on your best articles – as their much larger site gets instantaneously indexed, your site will begin to get indexed as well. If they get popular, the search engines will notice that as well and pick up on the relevancy.

Link to it from any future articles if it is relevant. For example, if you wrote about a motorcycle engine and the next article is about oil, if you mention that type of motorcycle engine, link back to the article. That’ll do two things. The first is sending readers to older articles (which keeps them around longer), but more importantly, when a search engine comes to your site and sees the new article, they’ll also see the link to the older article and visit that as well, thus indexing it.

SEO on individual posts is incredibly important. While it seems like such a trivial thing to do, fixing the SEO on individual posts can bring a few visits a day. Spread that out across a hundred posts and suddenly, those few visits are a few hundred visits and it can only continue growing as you publish more posts.

A press release is document that a company puts together with the hopes of getting it picked up by the press. This document includes the latest news about your company. For example, if you’ve just released some sort of a new product with another company, you might write a press release about it. The object is to provide information in the press release that might make a media company pick it up and talk about it or write about it. However, there are two ways to approach it.

Mass Traffic

If your ultimate goal is to build a ton of traffic to your site, you’ll go the route of mass traffic. What you’re doing here is writing a press release, content not being as important as the links back to your site, and you submit it to a mass press release site. Just Google “Press Release Submission” and you’ll find a ton of them. What you’re doing here is submitting it to so many sites because if you do this, many sites might publish it and it’ll send traffic. More importantly, though, it might result in a lot of links to your site for search engine reasons. However, once the press release disappears, the traffic might be gone and that’s that.

Recognition

The other route to go with is submitting the press release to an individual newspaper. For example, you can submit it to the New York Times. In this, the big thing to remember is that the more information you provide and the easier you make it for the author to write, the more likely it’ll get published. That means include your own quotes in there. Journalists love quotes. The big thing to remember is that “who, what, where, when, why and how” are the most important questions to a journalist. If you answer these questions, they are more likely to write about you. In this press release, you might not get any backlinks (if they don’t include a link back, but just a typed link. It might get traffic, but once you’ve been published by this big paper, you can brag about that on your website with a “As seen on/in this publication…”

The route you choose is entirely up to you and, more importantly, based on your business plan and traffic building plan. The mass traffic might send more traffic and more backlinks, but it could be perceived as spam. The recognition route won’t send as much traffic, but the recognition of being on a big news media site is a beneficial route. Either way, though, press releases are very important, especially if you are releasing new information about your company.

It’s times like this when I smack myself in the head and say “Why didn’t I think of this?!?”. Today a friend of mine sent me an instant message to one of his sites and told me to look at the captcha which had been turned from an annoying and hard to read jumble of letters that we have all come to expect from captchas, to an easy to read…advertisement. Yea, someone actually found a way to make me relieved to see an advertisement, anything that saves my eyes the damage of trying to decode some jumbled mess of words is a savior in my book. In this case the savior came as “Invisiline Teeth Whitener” as seen here.

The company, AdCopy, is a new company without any history but it seems they’re legit or at the very least putting on one hell of a show. They have offices in New York and a phone number where you can talk to real live support agents whom are not located in India.

Anyway, I just thought this was an awesome idea and I’d like to be the first to publicly say that they are going to be very successful. Too bad I have no sites which required captcha, I’d be all over this.

SEO is one of those things that is incredibly important to the development and success of a website. There is no web developer who will argue that there is no need for search engine optimization. Some might suggest that completely natural SEO is ideal, but no one will argue that no SEO is ideal. The reason for this is because search engine traffic is most likely to bring customers because they are searching for a solution to whatever problem they have. However, there are a lot of wrong ways to do search engine optimization that can have a negative impact on your site’s overall performance in the SERPs.

First and foremost, buying links on sites that are not in your niche is a guaranteed way of losing all of your rankings. Google, in particular, has spent a considerable amount of time and money developing tactics to catch those that buy links. That doesn’t mean you can’t buy links because link buying is necessary for SEO. However, what it does mean is that you can’t do it in a way that makes it obvious that you’re buying links. For example, if you own a site that sells eye glasses, it would be a bad idea to buy a link on a site about motorcycles. It might give you an initial boost because of the new link, but once the Google spam team catches on, they’ll know you’re buying links and knock your rankings out.

The next thing to avoid is blatant spam. For example, trying to build links on a forum is a fantastic technique. You’re building relationships with people in your niche and you’re getting back links to your site. However, what happens when you start to spam the forum? You go from being a helpful individual on the forum to a spammer. Chances are, you’ll be banned from the site, your posts will be removed and no one from the site will have any interest in visiting your site. While doing SEO is meant to bring in traffic from a search engine, it is also a great way to bring traffic in naturally. But, spamming can result in no solid back links and no natural traffic.

Finally, avoid getting too many links too fast. While it might be argued that quantity is important, that’s simply not the case. The most important thing when building links is to get quality ones. One quality link is stronger than ten weak links. Therefore, it is important to build quality back links to your site without spamming and without buying links on sites that are blatantly out of niche. Keeping these two simple rules in mind is a solid way to ensure you keep your SERPs positive and continue to rise in the search engines. While you might get away with spamming and buying bad links to begin with, in the end, you’ll get caught for it.

Social media websites are ones such as StumbleUpon and Digg that can send considerable amounts of traffic to your site. A front page on Digg, for example, could result in as much as 20-30 thousand people coming to your site in the matter of a day or two. StumbleUpon can send thousands of hits over the course of a few weeks and then continue sending people for the duration of your website. However, the problem many people have is that they don’t understand how to leverage that traffic to really result in the growth of your site. All of those people coming to your site is great, but if you don’t somehow convince them to come back, they’re not going to ever return.

The first way to ensure that the traffic becomes consistent traffic is to ensure that the content that they are viewing is good content. If the content isn’t good, why would anyone want to stick around? Imagine if you were the reader. If you are going to devote a portion of your day to reading that article, don’t you want the article to actually be good? Therefore, make sure that you give your readers something that is honestly important and provides some information.

Now that they have stayed on the site long enough to read the article, give them ways to subscribe to the site. Whether that means that they sign up for an account on the site or signs up to some sort of a RSS feed is entirely up to you. However, the more ways you offer, the better. For example, give them the chance to follow you on Twitter, to subscribe to your RSS feed and also to sign up for your newsletter. The more ways that they can get a reminder that you exist, the more likely this social media traffic is going to turn into consistent traffic.

Open up a method in which they can comment on the content that you publish. By allowing them to comment, suddenly they are given another reason to come back to their even if it is as basic as the selfish reason of wanting a reply. They’ll come back often to check and see if someone replied to their comment. Give them a reason to check back. Reply to their comment. Try and find something to say other than, “Thanks for the comment.” Really provide some information that they will want to reply back to.

Social media is a fantastic method in which you can get traffic to your site. However, the biggest mistake that people make is they don’t convert that traffic into consistent traffic. With thousands of people coming to your site, getting even some of them to become consistent traffic is a great way to really develop your site. The more methods you give them to be reminded of your site, the more successful you’re going to be.