What is Website Traffic Generation?

Website traffic generation or Website traffic, simply put, is the number of visitors that your website gets. The more the visitors to your website, the greater are your chances of making a sale or attracting a client. The issue, therefore, is to attract more and more visitors to your site, and further, to ensure that the visitors are actually interested in buying your product already, before they come to visit. Such potential customers are called “targeted traffic”.

How to Generate Website Traffic?

There are a number of ways of generating traffic for your website. Here is an overview:

• Search Engine Optimization:
Optimizing your site for high search engine rankings is crucially important for attracting interested visitors. This way, when a user searches for products or services related to your business, your site comes up in the top few results, so there is a good chance that the user will visit your site. SEO is done by using keywords repeatedly in the text on your website, placing external links to your site, and tagging images with your keywords.

• Online Advertising :
If you advertise yourself online, using software such as Google Ads, the ads link to your website, so that becomes another way of increasing your website traffic. You can use pay-per-click schemes, in which you place your ad on a website and pay that website for the number of times your ad is clicked. There are other advertising arrangements too, such a cost per thousand impressions, under which you do not pay each time the ad is clicked. Some schemes even allow you to pay only if clicking the ad has resulted in an actual sale. This is a good website traffic generation technique.

• Email Marketing:
In this, you send emails to potential customers or to people who you think are likely to be interested in buying your product. They can forward the emails to friends, who can then visit your site for details. They themselves can visit your site if the email offer interests them. Hence your website traffic is increased.

• Writing Articles or Blog Posts:
This is a great way to get interested visitors to your site. Write helpful, informative articles in online article directories, or in various blogs. In author information, place a link to your website. People who find your articles interesting are likely to visit your website to find out more. Further, since other places will now be linking to your website, this will improve your search engine rankings, helping even more traffic flow your way.

Market Research Surveys

• Quantitative Approach: this deals with measurable quantities. For instance, questionnaires asking how many units of a certain product you consume per week, how much you would be willing to pay for a new product, how many people use a certain service and so on are all examples of quantitative surveys.

• Qualitative Approach: this deals with the analysis of things that cannot be associated with numbers, for instance the level of satisfaction of a customer, what improvements should be made to a product or service, or the best features of your business in customers’ view. Such questions require either verbal interviews or long answers in written questionnaires.

Sampling

Since you cannot interview all the members of your target market, you try to select a sample that is highly representative of the general views of the wider market segment that you are aiming at. There are two things to keep in mind while choosing your sample:
• Sample Size: The larger the size of your sample, the more valid your research results will be. Interviewing a very small sample would lead to too many variables in your research and hence affect its validity.
• Cost/Effort involved in reaching a representative sample: Since very large samples are difficult and expensive to reach, you often have to restrict yourself to smaller samples.

As the choice of the right sample is based on both these factors, this becomes something of a tradeoff. A larger sample size will give you greater accuracy, but will increase the cost and effort involved.

Some Tips to Carry Out Good Market Research Surveys

For Questionnaires:
• Keep the questionnaire anonymous, short and relevant to ensure that people give complete and truthful responses.
• Do not ask personal questions or anything that could offend the respondent.

For Interviews:
• Be careful of interviewer bias – do not introduce your own ideas. Let the interview openly state his/her views
• Do not ask leading questions. Make sure that your questions are completely neutral and you give no indication of what answer you want. This will ensure that the interviewee states his own true views.

Market Research Surveys are essential for every business. Take the time to do it correctly and your business will thank you for it.

Online Database

An online database is much like a regular database – a set of records in essence – except that it is maintained online, and not on a system inside your own company. Hence your data is maintained somewhere on an online database company’s server, away from your company office. The primary advantage that online databases have over offline storage is that they are accessible from anywhere on a network such as the internet.

Why Does Your Business Need Online Storage?

The primary advantage that online databases have over offline storage is that they are accessible from anywhere on a network such as the internet. You can give your clients, partners or other stakeholders password-protected access to specific files stored on the remote server. It is a hassle free way of sharing information; there is no need to email large files or consider other ways of sharing them – all you have to do is ask the person who needs access to your files to log into your database.

However, there is one drawback: access to data can be slower when you are using an online database as opposed to local data storage. This is particularly true if you are attempting to transfer or access large files. This may require you to invest in high speed internet and network devices. If your data storage and access needs are sufficiently great, however, this is probably a worthy investment.

Which Online Database Software to Use?

There are many online database software available that can reliably and securely save all the data you want. There are both low cost and premium-cost solutions available. These include Intuit’s Quickbase, Trackvia, Dabble DB and Google Docs. You can choose specific software depending on exactly what your needs are, how much you will need to customize the software, and how much you can afford to pay.
For instance, QuickBase is best for those businesses that require a very powerful application, with programming capability. If you are employing a separate database management staff then this is the ideal application to use and allows you to create exactly the database that is optimized to fit your business needs. Dabble DB and Trackvia are good for beginners – they do allow some customization and are similar to QuickBase, but they are quicker and easier to work with.
Google Docs is probably the simplest, quickest and most user friendly online database application you will find anywhere. It is a good option for beginners and has the additional advantage of being free. The downside is that it does not have the functionality provided by the above mentioned applications.

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Social Research has thousands of outlets!

In the context of businesses and the internet, social research is a method of learning about your target market. Social research uses social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, or a blog to ask questions, to find out customer preferences, and to generally learn your target customers’ opinions about any aspect of your current or future business.

Benefits of Social Research:
Why go for social research as opposed to more conventional forms of research? Here are its advantages:

• It is easier, quicker and hardly costs you a cent: Most blogs and social media sites are free to join, and once you join them, you can search the groups or fan pages where your target market is most likely to be found. As a member, you will be allowed to post your own content free of cost. This is infinitely easier and much cheaper than designing and printing out questionnaires or forms and going out in the marketplace or door to door to get them filled.
• It helps you identify the target market and build a reputation before even launching your business: This is why carrying out social research before launching a business can be a great idea. The people on social networking sites get to know your idea, and if you present it in the right way, you can make it appear intriguing enough that they will want to buy from you when you actually do start. You get to know which people are most interested in your ideas, and you can with their permission use them as leads in marketing later on.

How to Carry Out Social Research:
There are several ways to do this. Here are some of the quickest and easiest ones:

• Use your Blog:
Simply post your questions on your blog, if you have one, and let people answer. If you don’t already have a business blog, this is a great reason to create one. This way your business can develop an online following, popularizing you among your target customers.
• LinkedIn:
LinkedIn has a separate section where you can ask questions and get responses. Sometimes the number of responses can go up in hundreds. Thus you learn a lot from different people’s opinions.
• Yahoo Answers:
As this is a website dedicating to posting and answering questions, you can not only ask people questions about upcoming business ventures, but also reply to existing questions by introducing your business idea or existing business websites.

Social research is one of the easiest and most effective ways of discovering the market for your product or service.

Advantages of Internet Marketing Businesses:
Internet marketing businesses are getting increasingly popular owing to their many advantages compared to traditional brick-and-mortar establishments. Here are a few:

Cost Reduction: Internet based businesses remove the need for a separate office so traditional costs such as travel expenses, insurance, and office rent and bills are removed. Communication is cheaper over the internet too.
Convenience: You can work according to your own schedule and comfort, as well as that of your clients. Every aspect of your business can be handled from home, both from your end and your employees’ and clients’, hence the result is all-round convenience.
Harness your skills: With the large variety in the types of online businesses, you can pick and choose your venture in accordance to your tastes, your skills and your interest, giving you the ability to give it your best.

Types of Internet Marketing Businesses:
There are several types of internet marketing businesses. With the growing reliance on the internet, and an ever increasing desire for ease of purchase and transactions, more and more businesses are basing themselves online in order to fulfill the needs of modern day users. Here are some of the businesses that are conducted completely online.
• Marketing Businesses:
With this type of business, you create a webpage to market the products of other businesses, on which you include their product description and buying details. Other types of marketing is also possible, for instance there are firms that handle email marketing, and others that handle the entire online marketing campaigns of other businesses.
• Internet Services:
You can provide online consultancy or advisory services, for instance, health care advice, financial advice or computer software or hardware troubleshooting.
• Selling Downloadable Products:
This type of business can be easily conducted online. You can sell software this way, for instance, or e-books. This is a minimum hassle business. The products you sell can be your own or other businesses’.
• E-Book Writing for Clients:
With good writing skills, you can provide E-books to clients who want to sell them. Go for subjects that already interest you, to avoid having to do lots of research. As you gain expertise, you can even consider starting and selling your own e-books.

Database Software

A database is basically a set of records – any kind of information you want to maintain and at some point view, edit, delete or add to, regarding any aspect of your business, will go into your database. For modern businesses, this task of record keeping is much facilitated by the availability of database software – applications that are especially built to cater to your record keeping needs. There is a great variety of applications available, and choosing the one that is best for your business is a daunting task.
Here is a review of the top three database software packages available in the market, to help you choose the one that is best for your business.

Top Five Database Software Applications:

Microsoft Access 2003/2007

This is probably one of the most popular and most powerful database applications available. It combines powerful programming capability with a user friendly interface and is the perfect solution for medium sized businesses that want to optimize their database but do not want to hire a lot of technical staff just for database administration.

Additional features:
• Passwords for different levels of access providing high degree of security of data
• Ability to import data from other database applications as well as from HTML, simple text and spreadsheet formats
• Templates for common database uses such as Contact Management

Filemaker Pro 10

The best feature of this is probably that it is easy to use and applications can be made quickly and conveniently. A large number of templates are available and there are several themes to create visually appealing database applications.

Additional features:
• Drag and drop Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and create instant databases
• Report assistant helps you quickly and easily create reports and graphical representation of data and reports can be created in PDF format too.
• Easy to share information over the web and over other networks
• Data security – you can control even the minutest details of what data other people see

My SQL Embedded Server 5.1

This is the solution for you if you are looking for database software that does not require any administrative staff. If you do not want to hire a separate database administrator and still want to manage your data efficiently and easily, this is the software for you.

Additional features:
• Low Cost
• Fast and easy to use
• Manages large volumes of data
• Flexible – can be used on most hardware and operating system combinations
.

A successful business is one that knows exactly who its customers are, where they live and what they do, so that it is possible to focus your marketing, product launches and business expansion on their demographics. Hence, an updated, detailed and organized customer database is, among other things, the basic requirement for your marketing efforts to bear fruit.
Here’s how you go about developing your database.

Decide What Data You Need:

Database development is about the getting targeted information, so, first you decide exactly why you need data about your customers. This is important because this would affect the type of data you need about them and the method of collection. You could need customer information for the following reasons:

• Keep your existing customers: For this you would need qualitative data more than quantitative. The database needs to be linked to forms containing detailed opinions expressed by customers regarding what they like and dislike about your products, their opinions about competing products, and other information to judge their level of loyalty to your business. Database development includes this.

• Attract new customers: For this you would need existing customers’ opinions about your products and services as well as how they came to know about your business, and any other information that would help you decide how to attract new customers to your database.

• Inform customers about any aspect of your business: For this you would need customers’ addresses, phone number and email ID’s, as well as data about their preferred mode of communication.

• Increase sales to existing customers: For this you could need information about the total quantity of goods that the customer has purchased from you, exactly what he likes about your products and what does not satisfy him.

Decide Database Technology:

Most importantly with database development you need to decide which database software to use and what kind of PC to store your data on. Base your decision on the following factors:
• Size of your business and number of records you need to store
• How great a security level your data needs
• Whether it is online or offline
• The search capability and presentation of data that you need
• User-friendliness or technical capability

Collect Data:

Finally, go about gathering data. Data can be gathered from the following sources:
• Sales invoices
• Firms specializing in customer databases
• Customers’ enquiries over the phone or by email/post
• Market research forms filled by customers
• Mailing lists generated by opt-in forms on your websites (where customers leave their addresses and express interest in future offers)

Now that you have your database, you can analyze it carefully to understand your customers’ needs, and take the right decisions at the right time.

I am a big fan of the Australian outdoors and the bush and I am passionate about internet marketing, especially search. They are totally unrelated but not mutually exclusive

Have your heard of search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and would you like to do some of it yourself? An SEO workshop is what you need!

Search Marketing refers to the various strategies you can adopt to increase your website’s visibility on a search engine, e.g. Google or Yahoo.
Your goal is always to get “better” traffic to your website. You don’t want window shoppers, right? You want people that are actually looking for you.
Thing is … you may need to help them a little, to make sure they find you (instead of the competition)

You can try to drive traffic instantly by buying advertising space on Google Adwords. You would pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Hence the term “pay per click” advertising or PPC.  PPC is one of the components of your search marketing strategy.

The other component is “free traffic” referring to the fact you do not pay for the clicks. Free clicks occur in the “organic” or “natural” search results section of a Google page. The art of increasing your visibility in the organic search results is called “Search Engine Optimisation” or SEO.

SEO is a long term strategy as well as a time consuming project. Many companies outsource their SEO because they need to work on their business instead of doing only SEO. However, you may not yet have the luxury to pay someone else to do this for you, but you also do not quite know if…. and if so, how… you can do some of this yourself.

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