Theme Pages. How to Use Them. More Traffic / More sales

Theme Sites - A Fun Way to Make Extra Revenue

Remember: Mothers Day and Fathers Day are coming up. Prepare for them. Create a sense of excitement around your site. Make some extra cash.

When you do what we're going to talk about today, first you'll have a lot of fun doing it. Then, you'll begin a process of making some extra cash both now and over time.

Let’s being.
On your website, leave the top-most column under the Header blank.

You can reserve this space to highlight anything new on your site as a benefits-driven, attention-grabbing Header. Or, use it as a helpful reminder to your visitor of upcoming events.

Ideally, you would have this advert spot as text format. Text always opens to your guest before the graphic downloads. So, if you can grab your visitor's attention quickly, the better the chances of keeping them around while your site downloads.

(And, remember to insert your "alt text" in the banner itself as many surfers disable their graphics capture. Doing this and doing it right is also important for making your site more search engine relevant.)

Now, Mother's Day is coming up. (There are also a number of religious holidays coming up even sooner). But, stick with the Mother’s Day theme for this example.

What goes well with Mother's Day?
Jewelry, Cosmetics, Flowers, e-Cards, gourmet Chocolates and Treats, fine Wines... maybe a bit of Travel, And, where there's Travel, there's luggage.
We are sure you can think of a few more things... maybe even a good dating service if mom or dad is single and lonely. Get the idea?

Remember to keep the choices simple and limited for your visitor. With too many choices, say, more than four or five, they could get confused as to what to do and end up doing nothing.

About three weeks before Mother's Day, your site should have, in that empty space just below the header,
" Your Mother's Day! > Your Site Name here < Mother's Day Gift Shoppe... just in case you forgot". Ours might say “ProShop Mother’s Day Gift Shoppe” with a hyperlink to a page built long ago with the folders of the site.

Does this generate a bunch of cash from the Gift Shoppe? Well, depending upon your traffic, it should pay for itself.
Does this generate some extra volume? Yes.
Does it generate some extra sales for your main site? Yep!
Does it generate repeat visits from people who become repeat customers looking for other theme related topics on your site? Absolutely. And, that’s the key.

Your site should have theme shoppe pages, mini-sites within its folders, for Father's Day, Christmas, the Olympics, March Madness, The NCAA Final Four, The Indy Five Hundred, The Preakness, The Kentucky Derby, Graduation Day, The Great Summer Vacation, and several more.

Notice we use the Old English “Shoppe”. It’s friendlier, looks more like a boutique but without the price-tags implied by using the word: boutique.

One of our Casino sites generated excellent traffic during The Super Bowl Week-End with other theme files ready to load at the appropriate time.

Think of theme mini-sites within your site that you can create to grab a share of these huge theme opportunities. Any site, anybody can do this.

Your online knowledge base needn't be very extensive to do this. We have a lot of cosmetics ladies in our newsletter subscription base. Their products are naturals for theme pages.

We have a great clip art graphics site that could really do great with theme days. And, people in the gadgets business... my goodness! The only limit is your imagination.

A great place to post your theme sites is on geocities. Lucy says they have vastly improved the ease of working through them. And, they seem to cross-pollinate their sites. So, you can pick up some easy extra traffic there.

Further, if you plan far enough ahead, you can code your theme pages and submit them to the search engines as we do for all our sites and those under our care.

If you use paid search engine submissions, make sure you know the strength of your page and the value of your conversion ratios first.

Okay. Let's go just one simple step further.
If you code your main site page for search engine inclusion, make reference on your site to your theme Gift Shoppe and send your visitor to that page.
That said, copy the theme page in full including the html coding, and upload the page as a free standing website on geocities.

Important: Reverse the role to include text and a link on your theme Gift Shoppe back to your main site. Then promote them simultaneously in your promotional processes including to the search engines.

This creates two bi-polar sites reversing the density of your keywords on each site while giving added strength to both.

Lastly, this process should be built into your email capture as a valuable benefit for them leaving their names and email addresses with you as you grow your list.
(Remember: Keep Your List is Your Most Valuable Possession. Respect it's Privacy always!!)

In this way, you can tell your email group when your next theme shoppe is online and how it will benefit them. The biggest benefit to them is that your friendly email acts as an event reminder service.

If you know how to program your email software, you can even offer them this reminder service for their personal dates such as wedding anniversaries, birthdays, or anything else. The guys will love you for it.

Building theme sites is a little bit of work. But, it's a lot of fun. Lucy puts our theme products on geocities in about three hours. She’s a perfectionist.

Once your guests start to see the continuum of newness and added value, your repeat customer visits and customer-base retention rate will begin to rise. And, you'll have an added bonus in each of your newsletters. The net result: More Visitors, More Sales.

We hope you had some fun here today. Ciao for now.