Your "Quest for Hits" starts now
You're at the start of a virtual journey, a quest that has as its goal a steady, ever-increasing flow of traffic to your website.
As you work your way through the material on this site, you should find that your pageviews start to build like snowflakes, gradually accumulating until they trigger an avalanche of traffic.
You'll need a well rounded approach to push the needle of your site's success-o-meter into the black. While more traffic is one path to more sales or leads, if you're ignoring what happens to your visitors once they're on your site, you're missing half the picture. That's why we're going to be talking about stuff that impacts the visitor experience, such as the usability of your site (how easy is it to use) as well as promotion.
The Harmonious Triangle : Your Key to Success
The rather poor triangle graphic above (I'm no artist, as you can easily see) illustrates the 3 elements that contribute to successful promotion. Each can be substituted for the others:-
- If you've got plenty of money to work with, you can start to see results quickly by investing in pay-per click advertising and other sources of "instant" traffic.
- If you don't have much money available, you can make up for it by learning more and working harder.
- If you know how to promote your site effectively, you can save both time and money.
As you approach each tip of the triangle, the shaded area (representing incremental benefit) gets thinner. An extreme example would be if you had almost unlimited time on your hands, but no money and no idea how to go about promoting your site, you're not going to get very far. Similarly, if you have a lot of promotion experience but no time to implement it or money to pay someone to work on your behalf, you're going to find it pretty slow going.
This site is primarily focused on the needs of small business owner and individuals. As such, I'm assuming you won't necessarily have a lot of money or time you can devote to geting results. So I'll concentrate mainly on relatively simple, cheap things you can be doing to improve the ROI of your website.
Parting thought: despite what many expensive "web success" manuals suggest, there's no "silver bullet" to making a site productive and profitable. Learn what you need to do, put in some time and a splash of cash, and your efforts will be repaid in full by higher traffic.