ArghWebWorks

(This is the second in a series of three days designed to increase your traffic. You can Read the First day or you can jump right in here. We’re aiming at about an hour per day, but that depends on you, your attention to detail (how many titles do you want to rewrite?) and your typing speed.

Our baseline is the Quiz 4 Cash site. The current traffic to Quiz for Cash is fairly small. On day one, we looked at some of the content of the site, discussed adding a Search function, and rewriting some titles. On day two, we’re going to look at some more direct means of getting traffic to your site.

First, create an account (or log into your account) at delicious, and bookmark your site. Make sure to tag it with appropriate tags. This is useful both because it’s a social bookmark (other users may search for your tag and find your site) but also because it’ll show you how many other people bookmarked it. Then create accounts (or log into your accounts) at digg and reddit. Add links to your site to both of these services, using words from your key phrases and your tags you used at delicious (which should be roughly the same).

Go to your favorite text editor (probably notepad or wordpad). It’s usually under the start button, then accessories. If you’re using a Macintosh, then it’s probably something like simpletext. But if you’re using linux, just use whatever you normally use. Either open up your signature file if you already have one, or create a new file. In this file, put two hyphens at the top, and then beneath that your name, then your website. Save this file in your documents folder as something like “mailsig.txt”. In your email program, assuming you’re using Thunderbird, go to “tools” and then “account settings.” Check the box that says “use this signature file” and then browse to where you saved this file. Click on this and save the changes to your settings. Now every time you send an email, you’ll also send your domainname to the person who gets the email.

The last thing we’ll do today is post our web address to Usenet. There are appriximately 100,000 groups on Google Groups. Do a search for a general group that applies to your site. For the quiz4cash site, I’d recommend “rec.games.trivia. Post an announcement here. There is a “new post” link over on the right side. The more interesting you make it, the more people will follow it; people on the news groups like this can be fairly resistant to advertising.

This is the first day of a three-day workshop to increase your site traffic. The goal is to do one hour per day; but your results will depend on your attention to detail, typing speed, and wit. We’re going to do one session every other day; Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

To gauge the success of these techniques, we’ll be using the Quiz 4 Cash site as a baseline. Today, the Alexa web rank is … not calculated.. the site is not within their top one million sites. And the google page rank is 0.

On day one, we will enable search, add some personal information and examine our topic headings.

Search is very important to finding items on your site. Most sites these days are driven by some sort of content management system, wordpress, blogger, et cetera. This site, for instance, uses wordpress, and so the “search” is an easy scrap of code within the template (most templates already have it built in). Other sites might want to use the Google adsense for search. Elibratto is an example of a site using adsense for search. Google provides an easy-to-use interface to creating this simple form. You’ll need to be a member of Adsense first.

On the Quiz for Cash site, the search isn’t very comprehensive; there’s a browsing list (for the different quizzes) located here: browse list. A search tool would be useful, but it could probably wait until they have over 100 quizzes. Or we could just integrate the google search box. Let’s leave search alone for now on their site, but we’ll ask about it.

The Quiz4Cash site has some good “about us” information, but might be made more personal with a nice photo of Andrew Deal, who owns CGIPro and had the original concept for the site. He’s a smart guy, with an IQ of over 130 (according to the Tickle IQ test), and he frequently travels to India for business and religious/humanitarian reasons. I think some more information about the people behind Q4C would help readers make more of a connection.

Quiz For Cash doesn’t have much in the way of “headings” that would be appropriate to what we’re looking for today, when it comes to the quizzes themselves. However, there is a news page where exciting new quizzes are advertised, as well as general site news. Most copywriters today seem to agree that a title of a page that looks like “10 reasons…” or “How to…” seems to do well with regard to catching attention. The primary, nay, only job of a heading is to get you to read the article, and “Quiz4Cash.com Coming Soon!” doesn’t do it for me. I’d recommend something more along the lines of “How your brain can get you paid! Quiz for Cash…” — it’s a little more sensationalist, and doesn’t give you much more information, but the usage of the question words (How, Why, When, Where, What) is a good example of a catchy title. Each one of the (three) headings should be more pondered, and going forward, should be considered more.

Tune in Wednesday for Day 2 traffic-building activity!

I’ve recently pulled together a site I’m calling elibratto. It’s kind of an experiment; an unabashedly affiliate-oriented site. Most of the links on the page go to pages at Amazon.com with my affiliate key. It’s heavily templatized and very … boring on the back end. On the back end too, there is an automatic once-weekly script that runs to get the most-read books in each of the genres. Costs for putting together the site were about $8.00 for the domain and about $120 for the work (6 hours of programming that other people pay me $20/hour for). If the site makes enough to pay for the domain, I’ll be satisfied; if it makes enough to pay for the programming, I’ll be happy; if it makes much more than that, I’ll be thrilled.

This is in response to a co-workers claim that their affiliate sites bring them in excess of $3000/monthly for a few hours of maintenance a week.

I will admit that the site needs some prettying love. My timeline has that completed by Friday. I’m thinking I could also present each genre’s list as an RSS feed, because that’s one thing I couldn’t find out there in the wild (my original thought was to take an automatically generated list and then build the affiliate links from that). I’m also thinking about some more inter-links, like “other books by this author” and stuff; but for much more development like that, I’ll wait to see some traffic on the site; if it’s not getting the traffic I want, there’s no need to sink more development into it.

Portland Technology Consultant Scott Hendison has an interesting post about advertising your new (or old, I suppose) weblog; to comment on other peoples’ weblogs and websites, and maybe you would get some back-traffic.

First, he recommends, as I have evangelized in the past, “have decent content.” Second, submit it (your blog) to blog directories (see his article for his list of 11, 10 of which I hadn’t met before). And third, blog about it.

Try reading the web like Jon Walker: every time you come to a misspelled word in an article, stop and move on to the next thing in your queue. You’ll cut out an average of 90% of the web you read. Misspelled words connote illiteracy and a sense of ‘half assed-ness’. If you can’t be bothered to use an online spell checker, how is a client to know that you’ll take care and concern with their site?

Matt Cutts has an excellent post on the subject with an egregious example.