The Don'ts of Gathering Traffic

A dear friend who was also a participant in one of the seminar I attended asked me yesterday regarding how to attract traffic to her shopping site. To her, whatever you do Kak Nur, just don't do these...
1. Buying e-mail list - no matter how cheap it seems $29.90 for 100,000 emails or whatever, don't buy it. Because...

• You'll be a spammer - strictly unacceptable in some countries
• The e-mails could be obsolete or several emails own by the same people

2. Advertise at free advertisement site, unless it is really an established one.
3. Buy traffic - because usually it is not a targetted traffic (i.e. targetted to those who are really searching for products such as what you're selling)

So, I hope some of these will help.

IM: Content | Blog & Sales Letter

Content is King...

...in driving traffic to your site. No matter what type of website you're building. Either it is a blog, a sales letter, a shopping site or whatever it is... CONTENT IS KING. Even if you know how to pull new visitors to your site through search engine optimisation, or using whatever backhand tactics, does that going to pull in the visitors for the second round? Remember, what you're looking for are quality visitors. Those who visited for the first time, who came back and eventually who will buy your products.

In order for you to make sure that your content can pull visitors to come back again and again, you have to make sure that you design your article in a way that will impress the reader with both the article, and more importantly, with you, the author. This is particularly true if you're building a blog. So, in my post today, I'm going to talk about blog/newsletter articles first. Mainly because shopping site are more dependent on designs rather than text. We'll focus on text for today.

So, how are you going to design a "Quality Article" ?

1. Make sure that you create a compelling headline - to grab your readers' attention.

- Make sure that the headline is targeted for the type of reader you want to attract, so you have to identify your target first. It has been proven that you only have a few seconds to grab your prospects attention, so you have to make sure that the headline SPEAKS TO THEM. Make sure your headline can answer this question from your reader - "What's in it for me?"

2. Give away enough basic information to help solve one piece of the reader's problem, but to keep back some information and leave at least one piece of their problem unsolved.

Build this technique into your articles. Make them informative, but leave the reader asking for more. This gives you an opportunity to offer them even more information via your resource box on your article.

Once they have followed the link in your resource box, make sure that you capture their name and email address, so that you can continue marketing to them once they have completed their initial visit to your site.

3. Built trust - follow up by email with additional information that they will find
interesting

4. Once you have completed your article, submit it to several article directories, and start building up your credibility as an author.