Website Marketing Questions and Answers
Here is a recent exchange with a client regarding questions about site branding, traffic generation and marketing for their information product website. It might be helpful to other site owners who want to improve visitor engagement to their brand. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to contact me with any marketing, branding and promotion questions for your business. (Note: The names and site links are changed to protect the privacy of my client.)
Q: Dwayne - I know you are knowledgable with internet marketing and blog promotion, etc. We have been experimenting with traffic generation under the theory that it will warm visitors up to our product, but we seem to be getting luke warm reception when submitting posts to reddit. We did find that a link to our site inserted in a blog comment could generate decent hits, but I was wondering if you knew of any other sites that might give us more ideas. - Thanks! Neal
Hi Neal;
Yes sir, blog commenting works well and gives you decent backlinks. Of course you are selling a niche product so targeting is more important for you than just bulk traffic. Remember since the launch of Caffeine the three legged table rule is 100% in effect so you must satisfy all three value metrics in order to grow and maintain authority and SERPs.
I took the liberty of looking at your site. You are trying to market an information product on Seduction Techniques right? The first thing I recommend you focus on is the site experience and content. We can talk about niche traffic generation later. First develop the product and conversion scenaio...
Here are a couple of suggestions:
Landing impact:What are you doing on this site? Why do I not know at a glance? When a visitor lands on your site they should know right away where they are and what they might get here. You have less than 5 seconds to accomplish this. The back button is calling...
So how about a visual (metaphor) image - above the fold - to let me know I'm in a place where men go to learn how to approach and attract women? The blocks of text on the site are crazy long. Break that stuff up. No one wants to read pages of text in long paragraphs. Forget the grammar rules for paragraphs you learned in school and use the copy writing rule instead. No more than 5 lines of text without a full double break space. Break your copy into little info-nuggets - not big intimidating blocks of text. (People quit reading web copy in the 90's... They want bullets and short clips of text they can follow by scanning).
Conversion scenario:
Where is my gift? Give me something to make me engage the site please. Yes, you have to bribe me or you suck. Where is my free ebook? Where is my video? What about a '10 ways to attract hot girls' list? Some kind of swag please. Give me something to engage me. Also note if your free gift and bonuses are valuable enough they can be used as link bait. You then have something to blog and brag about. So consider developing a free gift that everyone who joins your list or Likes you on Facebook or follows you on Twitter gets just because you're that kind of great humanitarian. Hint: Recently video has been shown to be the absolute most effect free gift. Easy and instant! Videos also help engage the visitor. For example a video giving away the 'ultimate secret' of seduction to people who connect with your site could promise to share a really cool secret - but then give them three in the video. Don't be stingy! Over-deliver. Then use the closing section of the video to upsell into your real product. And of course the whole operation gets uploaded to Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion etc... Speaking of social reach... Where are your social signals? No feeds? No social site badges? Where are your FB and Twitter signals? Don't have time for Twitter and Facebook? Oh no problem - then your site is a relic -- like a dusty old mausoleum statue... isn't it quaint? Better get that fan page up and running and push your blog content to it and to your twitter stream using plugins (free and easy). You can't possibly expect busy people to actually visit your site every day hoping you have provided a new nugget of info for them - you have to reach out and give them an dead simple way to see your content. Hint: Social media. Aesthetics:
I understand you're going after the whole spartan blog look here but if you are trying to promote a product or service you must hype the benefits. Pictures of the sexy women your clientele could possibly attract would be a good start. You need some compelling images to tease the visitor into engaging the site and returning. Does not have to be pornographic or anything - just a couple provocative images here and there would go a long way. Your choice of design colors is fine for what you're doing. White is a trust color so the white background is fine. You will need to figure out a third color to complete the design at some point. Use this free site to play with brand color ideas and when you find something you like make note of the colors so you can try to integrate them into your site. http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Nuts and bolts:
- You are not using permalinks (search engine friendly URL rewrites) in your blog settings. This is a must to help elevate your site to bots so they can pick up your content. - Use Pages instead of Posts for persistent content. Don't put page content in a post. Make it a static page. You can then write a post about it and link it so you take advantage of the ping services, but critical persistent information should be main menu content. -- Your header image is does not link to your home page. Did you realize your visitors must use their back button to return to your index page if they drill down to article page? This frustrates surfers and they often double-click the back button because you made then use it. Don't depend on the web browser for site navigation. - Your site does not allow comments. Why would you prevent your visitors from engaging you? Comments are the easiest way to generate conversion activity on your website. You need conversion activity on your site to satisfy the third leg of the three legged table = ACTIVITY. Without visitor engagement and activity your site can have all the backlinks and content in the world and still be totally irrelevant. Hint: Let people leave comments - but moderate the comments of course using your blog settings and once you start to choke on the comment spam flip your site settings so that visitors must by registered and logged in to comment. This create more activity and conversions. This is just a quick set of suggestions Neal. We can certainly go deeper into any of these topics at your convenience. Feel free to ask questions about any of the issues. Once you have the site ready for prime time we can talk about the secrets of magnetic traffic seduction. At your servers...
Dwayne
