Month: November 2010

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What is Your Website Traffic? What’s Low?

That’s the question everyone wants to know… is my website traffic high, low or in between. For small businesses that are not start ups and have been on the web for over a year, I feel that traffic under 50 unique visitors a day is low.

If your website figures aren’t even in the double digits on the average in a 30 day period, you really need to start working to build your website traffic. Why have a website if no one visits it and if it does not generate leads for you?

Here’s another benchmark if you have over 100 unique visits a day and you are a small business your traffic is definitely in the normal to good zone. Higher than that around 200 visitors a day and you are doing great. If you have 30,000 unique visitors a day, you’d better be on a dedicated server before you give yourself a big pat on the back.

So if your numbers are low what should you and what can you do to boost them. Here are just a few suggestions to consider:

  • Start blogging but only if you can install a blog under your own domain name on your parent website’s server. That is really key! Offsite blogging won’t help you in this area.
  • Think about writing and syndicating articles at Google Knol, Go e-articles, ezine.com and other sites. The key here to your traffic will simply be the quality of your writing and the timeliness of your content.
  • The easy path is to drive traffic to your website with Google AdWords or MSN adCenter (for Yahoo and Bing). When you don’t have time to do the other things this is very workable. Pay per click costs but the traffic you can generate immediately to expose the world to your services and products is well worth the investment. Just make sure you are targeted and don’t create a branding campaign that just brings your impressions and clicks.
  • Work all your angles! Do you have friends with websites on the Web? Get links back from them to your site. Consider doing guest blog writing. Tap into your network. If you are a member of a national or regional association ask if you can guest write for their online archived newsletter or blog. You want links and exposure.

These are just a few ideas to consider. Typically pay per click as it is the easiest is the route most people will pursue when they have little web traffic. Take some time to make sure your website is generating the traffic you need to feed your business.

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Google Boost Looks a Lot Like Yahoo Local

Google Boost Ad Image

If you’ve been around for a while you will know what I mean when I refer to the now defunct Yahoo Local, but Google Boost sure looks a lot like it!

That being said, I am really watching Google Boost carefully. Google Boost a new monetization tactic being used for Google Places aka Google Maps and is currently being tested in Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston. If you use it, you set up your account, add your credit card and select one of three click levels for a month. Google does the rest. It creates pay per click ads, keywords, manages your cost per click. All you do is pay.

And pay you will, with a totally automated ad serving and automated click costs don’t expect Google Boost to be saving you any money. In the Yahoo Local model, you selected how many clicks you wanted to get each month and Yahoo delivered. You even tied up the top spots in organic-looking placement on the Yahoo Local search engine. So far in the beta testing the Google Boost ads are differentiated only with a blue map icon. They look similar to an organic listing.

Additionally, Google Boost ads will appear on Google Places, Google Maps searches and even on Google.com. My feeling is that this will never replace Google AdWords, but that Google is looking to sop up the market when it comes to Mom and Pop shops with low budgets that don’t want to get into AdWords or users who think AdWords is so complicated. Google Boost is a step below even the Google Starter Edition.

But Google will make tons of money off of this new vehicle and this is why I am really watching Google Boost. You should be too!

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Our November e-Newsletter is Posted

We’ve published our November e-newsletter and wanted to share it with you. Topics in this month’s issue are:

Preview of Facebook Business Pages Demystified for Business Owners

I have been working hard on a new white paper that helps business owners understand how to get the most from Facebook Business Pages. My new easy to understand guide titled “Facebook Business Pages Demystified for Business Owners” is previewed in advance of syndicated release to you, our newsletter subscriber. The paper won’t be syndicated until later this week. Read more…

Yahoo as We Know It Was Retired in October

If you go to Yahoo.com there is still a search engine there, so what do I mean when I say that in October Yahoo was retired? Although there is a “Yahoo” still there, the search results and sponsored ads supplied are all being delivered by Bing.com and Microsoft adCenter. The final change over took place at the end of October.

This means that there is no longer a Yahoo algorithm that drives search results – it is a Bing algorithm. There is no longer a Yahoo advertising control panel – now you use the Microsoft adCenter control panel to place, bid, and change ads that appear on both Yahoo.com and Bing.com. It also means that Google finally gets some real competition when it comes to advertising and that is good news for you! Read more…

Inflating Your Daily Budget to Force Clicks on AdWords Can Get You In Trouble

You may say this never happens, but as I review all AdWords accounts that are running when a new prospect comes to me looking for a new account manager, this happens fairly frequently. Personally, I do not recommend this action.

What I am speaking of is when an AdWords account is in trouble and an account manager cannot get clicks for the client. The account manager sometimes gets desperate and tries to force clicks. Here is the common scenario. The actual client wants to spend $1,000 in clicks a month. They typically will be in a business that has a high click cost auction. The acting account manager has decided not to set the cost per click in the account to a level that Google will consider the account in the AdWords auction and so as a result AdWords serves the ads infrequently. The client may be then spending only $200 or so of a $1,000 click budget. Read more…