Today, While I Surfed the WebThursday, August 26, 2004

Today, While I Surfed the WebThursday, August 26, 2004

It was another interesting day surfing the web trying to raise my website’s link popularity, increase brand awareness, and advertise to bring in new targeted customers. I keep finding it hard to pay for advertising, as I try to find the most inexpensive way to draw traffic to my shopping cart enabled website. I keep fiddling with format of the website because what little customer traffic is coming to the website, between 5 to 20 customers a day, is not staying or buying. I need to find a way to get them to buy a product that everyone else already seems to sell. I keep asking myself, “How are you going to generate new customers that will be loyal to your storefront?” This question puzzles me because I am trying to copy what my #1 competition is doing, i.e. offering Home and Garden Articles—albeit the articles come from the same place, linking with the same websites, winning the same website awards. I can only conclude that all these websites are now reciprocally linked together with no identity and little original content. I guess all of us webmasters are trying to compete with the Big Boys (msn, google, yahoo, netscape, amazon, ebay, aol, and a few others). With all this common linking, it seems like all of us individual webmasters are spending our time with each other rather than focusing on the customer. How about spending that same time writing an article on a subject you do know about and then posting that to your website. I say this because it would reason that the website you create does have some interest to you or you would not have created it. As the creator of the website, you have some authority over what is being read there; and, as long as you are honest about where you get the supporting information, copyright protection for the author and yourself, you will start to build a wealth of original content for your current website and future websites. This endeavor will also provide you with a complete index of ad copy, words you can use in your advertising. The best free advertising is to write an article and post it to numerous ezines, magazines, newspapers, or publication needing content. If you have the time to create a website and then spend time linking with complimentary websites (websites that sell products that would go well with the products that you sell, i.e. gift store website with a card store website), then you have the time—that same time spent linking—to write a simple article about something you learned, such as this article that you are reading right now, and post it to multiple websites that need content. First, of course, find a way to get that content onto your website for your customers and then put the article out as advertisement to draw new customers to your website. If linking is not bringing in an enormous amount of targeted customer traffic, then why not give your writing skills a try? It could not hurt!

Written by eRix © 2004-08-26