Information Your Business Needs RIGHT NOW

The Adland Digest

Thanks for subscribing to the Adland Digest, one of the most effective newsletters on the web since 1998.  Find useful information on running your web business and growing your mailing list.  Learn from the pros!

  

Special Guest Articles These professional articles written by industry leaders.  Adlandpro.com has a free article library you can learn from here.
[ Go to Article Archives ]
Five Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Internet Presence By Scott Buresh                  1. Track and analyze your web site traffic. Most web hosts offer traffic analysis data to their clients, and it is arguably the most important tool at your disposal in measuring the effectiveness of your website. By taking the time to understand this data, you can begin to understand the motivations and interests of your audience. Are many of them leaving on one particular page? Perhaps you should make some changes to keep their interest. Are most of them looking at one particular part of your site? Perhaps you should make it a more featured area. Since this data updates on a regular basis, you are also able to gauge the effectiveness of any changes that you make. These are the most basic examples, as there are many more useful bits of information available- what search terms your visitors are using to find you, what sites are bringing you the most traffic, how long your visitors are staying, etc. Maintaining a successful website is an ongoing process, and visitor data is crucial to getting optimum results.  2. Exchange links with non-competing, quality companies related to your industry. This is a simple but effective way to get quality traffic while increasing the prestige of your business. Visitors that enter your site from a link that they find on another site are predisposed to believe that they will find something of value there (if not, why would the site take the time and effort to link to it?). By making sure that the companies you exchange links with are not direct competitors, you are unlikely to lose business. The added benefit to this strategy is that it can give a tremendous boost to your link popularity, which is a major factor in determining how your site gets ranked in most search engines.  3. Write informative articles about your business or products and make them available to online publications and webmasters. There are numerous sites that will allow you to offer original informational articles for others to publish. Such an exchange benefits you in several ways. First, all of these sites require anyone who is reprinting your article to provide a link back to your site, which can provide highly targeted visitors (visitors that most likely already have a good impression of you from your article). This is also another way to boost your link popularity, which is vitally important to your search engine rankings (as discussed above). Moreover, if you offer a service, a reputation is your most valuable asset. Widely distributed articles can help to establish you as an expert in your field and help you to gain credibility with your future clients. .     Adland Digest Sponsor Message Are you happy with your life? What would it take to live the life you dream of? Finally, there is a real-deal answer. Curious? Check it out.   Click here to visit Be a sponsor. Place your ad here. (Spot II)   4. Give your website visitors a clear call to action. If your site isn't intended to sell a product or gain a customer, than what is it for? Every page on your site should focus on getting the visitor to take an action. This could be purchasing something online, filling out a form or sending an email, making a phone call, or even simply moving on to the next step in the process. Your website should be more than a static billboard proclaiming that you are open for business- it should compel your visitors to follow a specific path that leads to a sale. The answer can be as simple as placing a prominent suggestion on each of your pages  (such as "Request a Free Demo" or "Ask Us a Question").  5. When it comes to your site, don't overlook the obvious. Compare your website to an actual store- is everything clean and organized, or is everything messy and cluttered? Many websites give bad first impressions with issues that could easily be avoided. Broken links are a sign of sloppiness that are fairly common. To combat this, there are several websites that will automatically scan your site and identify any broken links. Seeing little red "x's" where a graphic or photo should appear is another common problem that is easily addressed. Does your site maintain its look and functionality with most browsers? People are sometimes dismayed to learn that their site (which looks great in Internet Explorer) doesn't maintain its look or functionality with other popular browsers such as Netscape. The time and resources required to fix these problems are small when compared with the cost of tarnishing your professional image.  About the Author: Scott Buresh is co-founder and principal of Medium Blue Internet Marketing. For more helpful tips, visit http://www.mediumblue.com. For a free search engine analysis, please visit http://www.mediumblue.com/analysis.html. Adland Digest Sponsor Message   Be a sponsor. Place your ad here. (Spot III)    Basic Web Site Design Tips - Lay the Foundation Well By George Pinto   Web site designing may look an easy task, and the good news is that it is an easy task. However easy it is, you just have to keep certain things in mind. Here are some of the website design tips that are useful during the basic level of designing a website. All of them are very important since they lay the foundation stones of good online presence. The first and foremost thing to do is determine the purpose of your website. What do you have to offer your readers? The knowledge of this fact is very crucial as it would decide the design and style of your website, the content that would go in there and the overall appearance of your web site. The website design tips can be derived right from the purpose of the web site. The next and equally critical thing to know is who are your target readers? What are their tastes, preferences and lifestyles? What would they like to see in your website, their colour choices and their thoughts? Everything, absolutely everything matters and you have to keep all that in mind in order to make something appeasing for them. Now goes the content. What you write has to be something of use to them. You have to be very informative yet not be verbose. Keep it simple and easy to understand. If you beat around the bush, chances are that your reader would miss out the main points you have to make. Having done the content, now make the designs as per the above web site design tips. Do not overload the pages with flashy graphics and irrelevant animations. However, try to keep it cheerful and interesting for your readers. Gel the content with the designs and make the site something that can be glanced through without losing the message. About the Author: George Pinto is an expert in web designs and developing. He has been in this industry for over two years and is currently writing on the topics like web design and content copy writing.
[ Go to Article Archives ]

[ Go Back To Top ]