From the category archives:

Website Traffic

5 Mistakes Your Website is Making

by Vinny on November 17, 2009

I bet you can find at least five things that your website should be doing or doing better. Odds are you have built a site and you are getting some traffic but things are not exactly how you thought they would go. Well lets take a look at five things that may help you get better results. Some are so simple it may surprise you that you haven’t thought of them on your own.

1) Does your site help the user solve a problem? This is either a yes or no. In this day and age the consumer is looking for an answer for their problem, if your product does that then explain it any way you can. This may be a video or a white paper or something of the sort. Give away the information so that the user remembers how helpful you were, they will end up telling people through word of mouth.

2) Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? Odds are you think you do but you could be wrong. You need to get some sort of analytics set up and see how a user is navigating through your site. You may not even know what your most popular pages are,or even what your worst pages are. You may be focusing on the wrong things and wasting time.You also need to know how people are finding your site. Get a neighbor to sit down in front of a computer and put them on your site and see how they navigate it, it will not be what you thought. get a pen and paper and tell them to give you the honest truth.

3) Do you have an email newsletter? Getting traffic is hard enough so once you get a customer you should try and make them a returning customer. This saves you the worry of trying to rank in search engines and also decreases your advertising cost as you already have that customer. A lifetime customer is the best investment you can make for your site.

4) Do you have a FAQ page? Whenever you get an email asking questions about your site or product make that question into a line on your FAQ page as it will be looked for again on your site. Your answer will help others find you and use your services. It will also end up being keyword rich content that will attract the search engines and get you good long tail keywords.

5) Do you have trust pages? Every website needs to develop trust with the potential customer. Your site needs a page for privacy policy, contact us, terms of use, disclaimer, and let the customer know what you are doing with their information and what they can expect from your site.

I bet if you are not doing these things your site is not doing what you want it to do.

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Sponsored Tweets – Not So Much

by Vinny on August 8, 2009

Just had to delete someone from my Twitterstream as they decided to use sponsored tweets. As much as the next guy I like to monetize what I am doing but sponsored tweets will not be happening in my neck of the woods. Here is why.

By sponsoring tweets I feel that you are using your twitter stream as a way of making yourself look spammy. All you want to do is get my followers to see your sponsored tweet. I will not let that happen, my twitterstream is as important as my opt-in email newsletter list and I will not subject the people that follow me to think that you are someone I would think is follow worthy. (thanks Seinfeld)

Here is the real kicker when it comes to unfollowing you for having sponsored tweets. I will no longer buy any product you are pitching on your website, you have become a spammer in my mind. Not worth my time to see what you are up to since you violated the confidence that I had in you to follow smart people that I could actually learn from or have my twitter stream learn from.

There is also no way I would sign up for any newsletter that you run as how do I know you wouldn’t sell that list to someone, heck if you sold out your Twitter odds are you would sell your opt-in list also.

My Time Is Valuable

You are only on this planet for a little bit of time and if I have to look at your twitter sponsored tweets it is time I could be doing something else, like follow someone that will add to the conversation and not be running adds in my face and the people that follow me.

Most of the time I use my cell phone to receive text messages from people I follow. Not only does your tweet become useless as I cannot click on a link from a text message on my phone but you have wasted my time tweeting about some product odds are you don’t use in the first place.

So you are making pennies on your sponsored tweet but if you were ever to put out an actual product that I may be interested in telling my twitter follows about it is not going to happen. So is it really worth the peanuts you are going to make when you use a service like that.  I also like to spread the word about good people and their products if someone ask me for a referral odds are your name is not going to come up, odds are it isn’t going to come to my mind anyway as I am not following you any longer.

The big picture far outweighs any money you could make by running sponsored tweets. I have stopped following a few people I had respect for in the online world and I am sure some friends will be mad but they chose to make the choice to become an unfollow.

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