Small Business Web Design

It’s a problem all website owners and marketers have daily. The struggle to get traffic to your shiny website that took you ages to design. My advice is to think outside the box and use little known unorthodox traffic sources available to us all. Here are my top website traffic generation techniques.

You can increase web traffic and make sure it is targeted traffic, and what is more all of the following methods won’t cost you a single penny, so it will be free web traffic in return for a little effort on your part.

1/ Join a forum or online community that fits your website or site you are promoting, post to the groups and build a reputation as an expert in your chosen field. Use your signature line or whatever method they allow to plug your website url. It is amazing how fast this method will get people visiting your website and what is more it is laser targeted traffic because if you choose your forum well they are pre sold on what you have to offer.

2/ Unorthodox traffic means by definition methods the crowd do not use. Try writing a short report or e-book about the subject your site covers. It doesn’t need to be long 7 or 8 pages made into a pdf or e-book with unobtrusive links to your site or the page you want to promote. If there’s one thing I have discovered during my 4 years on line marketing my sites it’s that this method works! It will build traffic virally and exponentially, free traffic and again laser targeted web traffic for years to come. Give your report away free and give the people you give it to the right to do the same.

3/ One web traffic driving method I use now is MySpace. Create an account on MySpace dot com and seek out friends who share similar interests. Blog about your interests and ideas on your own MySpace Blog and provide links to your website . The more friends that share similar interests with you the more web hits and site visitors or traffic you will get. Also when you have something important or a new product to share you can send a bulletin to your friends, in effect your own spam free opt in list of warm prospects worth it’s weight in gold.

4/ Make sure your content of your site is unique i.e written by you, and for maximum traffic that it contains keywords or keyword phrases that your customers are looking for. This serves two purposes, good keyword density i.e mentioning your keywords within your content will get you good rankings on the major search engines. It’s free traffic its targeted traffic if you write your own content it will stop you being penalised for duplicate content. Which can get your site buried or excluded from search results. Plus  if its entertaining and informative it will get you repeat traffic as people bookmark your site and if your visitors find your site useful and entertaining they will pass recommendations on to friends. This may not seem like unorthodox traffic and may seem even obvious, but it is amazing how many online marketers or website owners disregard or do not pay enough attention to this web traffic technique.

5/ Offline traffic generation methods. All of us are guilty of this even me. For years I was blinkered into doing everything on line then I tried placing a very small classified ad in a national newspaper, I mean very small it was basically just my website URL, and the cost was negligible. The traffic it brought to my site was amazing and it is a traffic generation method I use regularly. Find any method you can use to get your message in front of your customers if your websites target is quite local try a small local ad at a local sports venue shops leaflets anything that gets your site address in front of someone’s eyes. Trust me this unorthodox traffic technique will surprise you with the amount of site visitors it generates.

I hope these unorthodox traffic methods help you to get the website visitors you deserve. Do one thing per day use one website promotion method per day, and like planting seeds you will be surprise how fast your web traffic grows, until you increase web traffic to a level that will bring sales and success you have been striving for.

More than 115 million people login to Facebook every month. It is the largest social networking tool and a great place in the web for building your brand and driving traffic to your site. However, if you are not familiar with the viral techniques that work in the Facebook platform, soon you will find your brand tarnished. You can gain quick exposure to your businesses using the techniques discussed in this article.

1. Build a Facebook network. Before you start implementing any of the techniques discussed here, you need to develop a network of Facebook friends. To do that, join a few groups that are related to your business and a few groups that you are passionate about.

Ask people in the groups to add you as their friend. Facebook also has nifty tool that suggest people you would like to know. Send request to these people to add you as their friend. Send a short note explaining why you want to be their friend. If send 20 requests a day, you will have a network of more than 1,000 friends in two months.

2. Update your status every day. Login every day and update your status. Don’t use status messages like “I am sleeping now”, “Just came from work”. These types of status messages are not interesting. Use quotes from famous people about a specific niche, for example love, dedication, work ethics, peace, war, etc. You can also use jokes. Your aim is to draw people’s attention to your messages so that they would click on your profile to know more about you.

3. Wish birthday wishes everyday. Facebook also shows upcoming birthdays of all friends in your network. Every day send birthday wishes to friends whose birthdays are due. Read their profiles to know more about them and write a nice personal message on their walls. Don’t use canned birthday messages for everybody.

When you write on a friend’s wall in Facebook, everybody in the network gets updated news feed. You need to write something that get attention. You may craft a 10 to 20 attention grabbing birthday messages and than personalize them slightly for each friend.

4. Create a business page. Besides your personal page, you should also create a business page. Creating a business page is similar to creating a personal page in Facebook. Design a nice logo and use it for your business page picture.

Next, become a fan of your business page. You can use your business page to launch targeted Facebook ad campaign. Promote your Facebook business page using blogs, blog comments, etc. and ask people to become a fan of your business. Use some promotional materials, like free t-shirts, free eBooks etc as incentives for becoming a fan.

5. Tag promotional photos using friends’ names. Upload all promotional photos to your business page. Some people tag these photos with the names of their most influential friends in the network. Your promotional photos will show up in your friends’ news feeds. Once you setup a network of friends, make a list of friends with high number of friends, preferably more than 1000. Setup your mini network to tag each others names in promotional photos.

6. Change your relationship status regularly if it is possible. One of the least frequent activity in Facebook is changing the relationship. Because people don’t change their relationship frequently, Facebook places a great deal of importance to relationship change and send the news feeds to everybody in your network whenever there is a change in your relationship status.

People have explored this loop hole to attract attention to their profiles. They change their relationship almost weekly and try to attract visitors to their profiles. It is up to you to adopt this technique because it may not reflect your true relationship status. If you do adopt this technique, don’t forget to publish some promotional materials in  your personal feed.

7. Attend Multiple Events. True to its college root, Facebook is all about friends gathering at some place for an event. Facebook gives high priority to events in the news feed. Your goal is to RSVP all the events in your network even if you miss a few of them.

When your friends see you as a frequent event attendee, they consider you as an event resource. The trick  is to show your name in all the places you can. As your friends see your name multiple times, some will be curious to check your profile.

8. Import your blog post. If you have a blog, import your blog’s RSS feed into Facebook. Facebook will publish the articles in the feed as Facebook notes automatically. Encourage your friends to comments on your articles in Facebook notes. You can also tag friends in the articles but don’t overdo it.

9. Post comments on popular groups. Visit popular Facebook groups that you have joined regularly and post comments. Just like blog comments or forum posting, Facebook   comments on popular groups will attract attention to your name and profile. Add something valuable or post a link that adds value to the topic under discussions.

10. Start your own events. Events are very popular in Facebook and if you can promote it properly, it will have viral effects and thousands will register for the event. Send invitation to your network friends who have thousands of friends in their networks and also to attractive female friends in your network who may not have a large number of friends.

If you are looking forward for creating a website to help you out with some aspects of business, you have to make yourself competent with the other competitors out there. You have to get past everyone of them before you can establish yourself. So what you have to do is have a web design that is perfect in all aspects of its design and presentation. Let’s look here on some of the authentic methods of web design that has been time and again proven successful for many…

1. The primary method of website design, the basic method for designing a website is by using coding techniques and scripting/programming language. You have to make yourself proficient in programming aspects of HTML, DTML, JScript, and server side scripting languages like perl, python, ASP, JSP etc.

2. Not many are comfortable with the first method of web site creation, there are softwares that will help you avoid coding aspect and get a neat and nice website designed for you. There are many developing tools like dreamweaver, Microsoft front page… etc. It makes life easy for the web master. What you are actually required to do is have a complete idea of how your website looks and what it does, most of the remaining part is taken care of by the software.

3. If you want more a ready made sort of designing done, you can go for the “template” based design. The templates are nothing but previously finished layout for web pages. But while you choose a template(s), keep in mind the target audience, your apt display to customers, with a rough visual of number of ads you are going to have and the size of the content you are going to have.