Money Online

Like many other subjects that I have approached on this blog, the issue of “new visitors vs returning visitors” has been highly debated. I see people asking about this on forums quite often, so I thought it was time to share my opinion about it.

Don’t bark at the moon!
When you first decide to start blogging you must struggle to find ways to attract visitors and at the same time provide quality content to make them come back. The best idea would be to have a bunch of posts saved and publish one each day, while you concentrate only on promotion.
Every blog owner knows how difficult it is to make his presence noticed on the blogosphere. But what happens when you run out of pre-made posts?

When is it enough?
If you keep allocating too much time for promotion you will find yourself in a position where either you are not updating often or not producing quality content. If this happens, there is a high chance that you will lose your small group of loyal visitors that you have worked so hard to get. I am NOT saying that you should stop promoting your blog, but you must chose your promotion methods carefully, so they don’t take up too much of your time. I know people that spend around 4 hours a day, only to submit their blog to directories. This particular method may be a little useful at the beginning but you won’t get very far with it. Directories drive an insignificantly amount of traffic, and the link popularity that you gain from it may be useless if you are in a slightly competitive niche.

Your first priority must be to keep your returning visitors happy by providing them with the same quality content that made them return in the first place.
They can increase your popularity in various and natural ways (linking, submitting your articles to social media sites, word of mouth, pigeons, paper planes, etc) a lot more than you alone could. Even if they will not link to you after 2-3 visits, keep doing what you are doing and it will be impossible not hit the jackpot from time to time. Eventually people will not only post comments on your blog but also they will start to spread the word around.

Good things come to those who wait
“Loyal visitors don’t click on my ads!” - Yes, this is true. They are familiar with ad placement and within a period of time they develop a “syndrom” that many people like to call “ad blindness”. The best traffic for this purpose is coming from search engines, but since ranking in SEs is directly related to the number of anchored links, how will you be able to get it? This is why blogging is not for people that want to make money quickly…

It is almost like in the restaurant business: Build the restaurant, advertise a lot to get you started, but always try to improve your quality standards, don’t disappoint your clients, and the word will spread around.

So far I have only talked about blogging as a way to directly generate income; but the advantages of a blog go further than that.
If you own an online business, no matter if it is based on selling products or services, you may benefit from the numerous advantages that a blog has, and considerably increase the number of sales or clients portfolio.
Although it is absolutely necessary for an online business to have a “classic” presentation website, nowadays, a blog that would work together with your main site may prove useful from several points of view.

Traffic
You may benefit from specific services to drive traffic that are only available for blogs (such as blog directories, technorati tags, and google search for blogs) and bring your business a plus of visibility. Also, the percent of visitors”converted” into clients that comes to you through your blog will be higher because the traffic generated by a blog is usually more targeted.

Know your market, get in touch with potential buyers and building brand recognition
As a blogger it is far more easier to make connections with people that your business may benefit from, by approaching them in a more friendly manner. This may include affiliates, former clients that may post a positive review of your services or products, or simply people that are impressed enough by the quality of your work to post links to your website or blog, which will translate in pagerank improvement. Although many of you may say that you actually don’t need to be a blogger to achieve this, it is actually easier to do it if you are part of the blogosphere.

There are many bloggers out there that at some point don’t have subjects to blog about, so if the services or products that you provide, have the necessary qualities for catching the attention of some people, you will benefit from tons of free advertising. The down side to this is that some of the reviews may not necessarily be positive, but the controversy itself will create the buzz you need. On top of that, if your services are original in someway, you will probably hit the jackpot because these kind of news spread like fire in the blogosphere.

Keep your potential clients close to you
By posting articles and information related to your business on a regular basis, you will keep your potential client’s interest raised. People will make a habit from visiting your blog and there is a far better chance that they will buy from you when they need a product or service that you provide and not go someplace else.
This will also take the business relationship of seller-buyer (or potential buyer) to another level, by evolving from the cold and formal manner of a business relationship to a more friendly and familiar bound with your contacts on the market and potential clients.

Building credibility
How many times did you come by a website of an online business, liked their products or services, but hesitated to buy because you did not know if they were a legit business, or simply you did not know if the actual product that you will receive will be as good as the presentation says it will? Nowadays fake testimonials are very common, so probably you will not be able to gain a visitor’s trust even if you have real testimonials from real clients. However, if you manage to keep your clients posting comments on your blog, will add a lot more value to whatever you provide than those questionable testimonials. Bloggers can be tracked (simply by clicking on the name of a person that posted a comment will bring you to their own blog) so this will resolve the question of the authenticity. There will still be an issue with the fact that opinions may not be totally unbiased, but this will tend to fade proportionally with the increase of number of comments posted. Further more, potential clients really enjoy transparency, so even if you receive some negative comments, don’t be in a hurry to delete them! Just try to work together with your audience, take their comments into consideration and improve whatever needs to be improved; people that are interested in what you provide, will appreciated it a lot! Which brings us to the next subject…

Improving your services
As I have stated before, one of the major advantages that a blogger has over a regular webmaster is the higher level of interactivity between the owner and visitors of that specific blog. So if you use this opportunity wisely and keep the lines of communication opened with your clients, you may actually improve your services or products. Feel free to encourage them to post what they really think and even ask them to make a wish list. Don’t be afraid that you might not always receive positive feedback; think of it as another way to know if your clients are happy, and if some them aren’t, do your best to improve. You may have great products, or services, but there could be areas (such as customer support or shipping, for example) that may not totally satisfy your clients (and probably you are not even aware of that).
Again, you could probably do this without a blog, by keeping in touch with emails or phone calls, but not only it is much easier to do it through a blog, in terms of time management, centralizing data etc., but also, it is a proven fact that in direct communication not everyone will be totally honest and willing to tell you all what they think (depending on their personalities or the even the fact that you may catch them in a bad moment); by blogging, people will take the time they need to say whatever they think. Finally, there is a better chance that they will provide the feedback you need (comparing to the email method) probably because they know that what they are saying will be seen not only by you, but also everyone else that will read the blog.

Additional income
As you probably already know by now, if there is traffic, there are ways of monetizing it. Although in this case, it may be a little tricky because you may loose some of the visitors focus from your own products, with a little attention you may be able obtain a more or less considerable additional stream of income by advertising for products or services that relate to yours. Just be careful not to advertise for your competitors.

SEO
Because of the fact that blogs are updated more frequently and due their “friendly” nature they attract more links, you may even experience a higher amount of traffic generated through search engines to your blog than to your main presentation site.

Having this said, nowadays, due to it’s multiple advantages a blog is becoming a marketing tool for your business that you can not afford to miss.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, business blogs, blog for business

Ok, so you have struggled a lot to drive traffic to your website, and you finally see some results. But if you look at your analytics software stats you see that most of your visitors don’t spend more than 10-20 seconds to read… This can be very frustrating and it is a point where some new site owners quit, thinking that this is not for them.
Assuming that your site has original and interesting content, let’s try to figure out the reasons why this happens.

The Design
The design layout can be one major factor in determining your visitors to stay. If you have an inadequate color scheme, ugly fonts and composition, your visitors will leave your site the next second, and won’t even have the chance to quickly “scan” the content. Also, the design, like the content, must be unique. Don’t be satisfied with a default template; even if your starting point is a template do your best to adapt it to fit your website topic and not look like hundreds (or maybe even more) sites around the internet.

The Navigation
-Keep it simple! Nobody will spend more than 5-10 seconds trying to figure out how to navigate through your website.
-Always keep a link that will drive a visitor back to the homepage and try not to deep link too much.
-You must quickly give your audience some options after having finished reading something. Some “related posts” or “related articles” at the end of each posts could do it.

Writing and text formatting
The first thing that catches your visitor’s attention is the title; but if you fail to keep them interested within the first paragraph they will probably navigate some place else; you have to keep them focused line by line, paragraph by paragraph.
And speaking of paragraphs, it is best not to format your text as a long and continuos story; split your articles in paragraphs and people will read them all. This has probably something to do with a natural “laziness” of a human being, since un-interupted text seem to be longer and more difficult to read.
“Accentuate” some important words of your text either by color, or weight (bold, strong). This is good especially for people who are always in a hurry and don’t have the patience to read everything. They just read it “in diagonal” and if they are not able to make sense of what they are reading they leave. Believe it or not, there are lot of them act like this.

Entertain your audience
Depending on the niche of your website you can chose different kind of tricks to do it, starting from funny pictures, short movies or just a little sarcasm here and there.
Don’t be afraid to put a little humor in your content even if you have a business related website (but the humor itself must be somewhat related to the actual content, and don’t over do it). It will make article sound a little less impersonal and your audience will feel “closer” to you. I know I have to do a little improving on this myself.

Freebies
If you are able to provide something free for your visitors, do it! And do it on a regular basis, so visitors will come back to check if you have update your “free stuff” section.

Interaction
If you own a blog or a forum, interact with your users.
Try to respond quickly to their questions and thank them for the feedback.
Don’t delete the comments of people that disagree with you. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you should approve comments with vulgar language or spam. If people express an opinion that is different from your own engage in a debate. This not only will make visitors to return to your website, but it can also be a form of link baiting that can bring you more traffic.

Technorati Tags: Increase Traffic, How to make your visitors stay, Returning visitors