The biggest headache of anyone responsible for a website is problem of how to increase the number of visitors. This article explores the benefits of increasing the content of your site instead of the alternative approach of simply buying in visitors. The content of a site can be ‘home grown’ or ‘bought-in’ and a successful site will have a mixture of both, but a major success factor will always be good content that is unique to your site.
Build it Quickly
I am a great believer in delivering something quickly and then polishing it later. There are several advantages to this approach, not least is the fact that it avoids any temptation to be forever editing and never publish. One of the greatest benefits is that other people are inspired to contact you and tell you what they like, dislike, or would like included in the future. This means that instead of trying to think up ideas that might help your readers, the content is built in a dynamic way that responds to your readers needs. The result is going to be much more likely to attract visitors than creating what you think people might like.
Buying Visitors
So you have a website with a few affiliate links, but little else, including visitors! How can you get more visitors and more importantly generate more sales? This is a question that occupies the mind of most web masters for most of their time! Let’s examine the options that are available.
Buy Visitors - There are several sites that offer to send thousands of visitors to your site almost immediately. If this is too good to be true then be aware that it is! The visitors may or may not be genuine but you can be assured that they will be surprised to have arrived at your page. One of my client sites bought visitors from a site that redirected misspelt addresses; they presumably have a list of misspelt domain names such as mcrosoft etc and then redirect these visitors to whoever pays for them. Anyway the visitors arrived, thousands of them in a single day. Not one of them clicked on anything, all of them left immediately and the site even received complaints about spamming.
Beware of fast results you that you can’t process, it is a waste of money. What you do want is a large number of visitors who have consciously decided to visit your site. These visitors will stay longer and browse and are very likely to click on links from your site. So the question is not how to get large volumes of visitors, but it now becomes a question of how to attract quality visitors. After all 20 quality visitors are worth a lot more than 1000 hijacked visitors!
Less Quantity but Better Quality
The answer to this question is quite simply content, content, and more content. It is a virtuous spiral. The more content that your site has, the more the search engines will index the keywords, the more matches and visits you will attract which will encourage the search engines to promote your site. Ideally your site should contain original material and articles, but this can easily be mixed content from other sources. Let’s concentrate firstly on the on cheapest and most effective content, articles written by you!
Structure is the Key
At this point you are probably thinking that you can’t write articles, so let us be very clear. These are small pieces of text that are normally about a single subject and are between 500 and 1000 words. Sounds a lot doesn’t it? Well there are 57 words in this paragraph up to the end of this sentence. Ten paragraphs like that and you have an article! Anyone can do it.
The structure of any article is simple, and follows a well known presentation structure:
Say what you are going to say, Say it and finally Say what you said.
This loosely translates in to an introduction which lays out the basic ideas of the article, followed by the main content, arranged as a series of topics, and then finally a conclusion that summarise the main content. I don’t think that I could make a living as a copywriter or an author, but then again I don’t want to. I do want to be able to express my views and document my experiences in the hope that they might be of use or interest to others. This in turn I hope will attract visitors.
Write it Quickly
I don’t spend too much time writing an article, as I am hoping that my visitors will pass on their comments and suggestions and that this will inspire me to update, edit or change the article in response. I will probably re-read what I have written to make sure that it reads easily and that it flows naturally between ideas. I will probably edit it to improve the structure and possibly sequence, as I have a tendency to get carried away sometimes. Part of this editing sometimes form the basis of whole new article, as I remove a section where I may have particularly carried away, and gone into excessive detail. From his article for instance, I have already edited out a section of detail related to “bought in” content, which will easily form the basis for a new article. Never throw away material but store it in a file called ‘snippets’ and whenever you are stuck for an idea, delve into your snippets file and be inspired
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Say What You Said!
So now you are ready to increase your visitor numbers by writing articles. Don’t forget to structure the article into the three main sections and in case you hadn’t realised, this is the ‘Say what you said’ section! Each article that you write should be based around a single topic and should not be very long. In fact you could probably write the first draft of an article during your lunch break! It should be informal in style rather than scholastic and should include personal experiences to make it come alive. If you can write good articles the visitor numbers will grow by themselves.
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