How are you doing with your transition to the web? Is your business really using the internet to drive traffic, or do you just have a static website with some content on it that costs you money to maintain? Today’s topic is about driving traffic, and there are quite a few ways to do this including search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, social media, video marketing and links.

When we transitioned to the web in 1995 and 1996 with our retail and service business, it was quite a whirlwind. In those days the internet was like the Wild West.

Due to page one rankings on Lycos, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and Excite, we were very busy answering phones and responding to emails. At one time, we had reached a solid six figures in page views on a monthly basis. The site ended up with over 200 pages, was very extensive, and eventually we had to hire a webmaster to work on it every week.

We achieved these high rankings due to SEO (search engine optimization) plus we were very early adopters. Getting on the web in the summer of 1995 we had a big jump on the competition, which enabled our business to stay ahead of the pack for quite a few years. We did this initially with a webmaster and myself then later added part time creative folks to the mix. So you don’t need a full time team to implement what we are talking about.

First we need to ask a few questions that I’m sure your webmaster and consultants have already presented, but we’ll cover again just to make sure:

1. Has your web and marketing team put together a plan to increase your traffic? This is a must so you know where you are going.
2. Is your site linking from all possible sources like vendors and other businesses you work with? Are you looking for opportunities to network and add your website and page links whenever you can?
3. Are you adding fresh, new content on a consistent basis?
4. Are you capturing leads with opt-in email?
5. Does your staff promote your site or shy away from doing this because they don’t understand the value and how this can benefit them?
6. Are you using social media outlets and a blog to create your own mini-net?

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic…

We’ll come back to this topic real soon.

Stay tuned and plugged in,

Dave Krygier
Publisher

PS – If you are building an online business, you might check out The List Building Guide. It has some good traffic generating ideas in it.