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Advertising
Free Advertising
Advertising can cost money or be free. The free kind of course
is appealing. An example of free advertising is this web page.
It is said that many people browse the net looking for free information.
Well, if so, why not give it to them? Create a web site or a
section of your web site that gives away free information - on a subject
or subjects that you know something about. And then also advertise
there - in a professional manner of course. Who is better to
advertise your products than you yourself?
Other examples of free advertising are leads that come to your site
from search engines or links.
Non-Free Advertising
Non- free advertising, the other kind, may also be helpful. The
best advice is to be sure of what you get exactly for your money before
the money leaves your hands. Just getting hits may spin your site
counter, but may not make a lot of money for you. Advertising
money is best spent when it targets likely customers for your product,
but also when it is done economically and the benefits appear obvious.
Results
web site stats
And so, how is your site doing? How much traffic? If you
have a good web host that gives excellent statistics as my web host
provider does, one can check traffic to the site on a daily, weekly or
other basis. It can tell how many hits of course at those times,
or even what day of the week, or hour of the week brings the most
traffic. One can also find (from a good stats place) what kind of
browser was used (microsoft, netscape, mozilla (linux)), what search
words were used to go to your site, what link partners sent business to
you, and even what operating system (such as Windows 98, 2000, XP, ME or
Macintosh) was being used. A good stats service will also tell you
what bots have visited your site. I personally am spoiled and
would not even consider going with a web host that did not provide a
good stats service. One can pay separately for stats, but
then one would need to ask - why pay two people? Just get one
place that provides the service that you need - for both web site
hosting and stats.
The feature of knowing which link partner is sending you business is
also of great interest. Sometimes it is surprising to find that
small sites by hobbyists that recommend you can send you the most
traffic. That is true right now as I write this for my
www.rpsoft2000.com web site. A hobbyist with a personal page is
sending me more traffic than any individual search engine or the high
powered sites with many links. So, my advice would be to be nice
to everyone. It does not hurt, and it in fact, could help a lot.
Google page rank
Google is often the search engine many webmasters pay attention to.
And at the heart of the Google concern, is what does Google think of
each site? Google uses something called page rank, a ranking of 0
to 10, to tell which site it thinks is more important than others.
Google look at text at the site, and relevance to search words. It
also includes links to your site as an important "voting" technique.
Basically, each time another site links to you, it is considered a
"vote" for the importance of your site. Links are looked at
logarithmically. This means that you might need a large change in
links (factor of ten) to get a higher page rank. I am still
sorting through the page rank formula, but I think a good relevant site
might be a page rank of two or three after Google finds it and catalogs
it. If Google sees that same relevant
site having ten links to it, then perhaps it is a page rank of four.
If it has 100 links to it or more, than perhaps a page rank of five.
And one might need 1000 links to get to a page rank of six. This
is not precisely the formula, since the formula is much more complex and
also includes relevance of each of those sites that link to you.
For example, www.rpsoft2000.com
today at this writing, has a page rank of 5. Yet this site has
over 600 recent links approved both directions, checked and in place,
and more on the way. So my guess would be that it could become a
higher page rank when Google's bot spider the links of it and the other web sites.
My understanding is that google may only update a site's standing once a
quarter.
To check out your current status of Google page rank and ranks for other
sites, consider adding the Google search toolbar to your Microsoft
browser - and also turning the advanced features on (The advance
features are needed, Google says,
in order to see page rank). Also ensure that your Microsoft
browser under its menu under view/toolbars has checked the Google tool
bar, and not the other. One can get the Google toolbar for free
(at the time of this writing) at:
http://toolbar.google.com/
Dont Get too Big or Snooty
Not getting snooty would be my advice regarding other
sites. I had a site recently tell me that they would not link to
me since they only link to sites that are page rank 5 by Google or
higher. Interesting. They also neglected in one month's time
to say "no thanks" to my proposed link exchange and seemed quite content
for me to link to them with no reciprocation whatsoever! One wonders how many sites are linking to them that never
checked to see if there was a reciprocal link.
But as I say, my links were very recent, and Google has
not seen them all yet. As it turns out, my site is google page
rank 5 now - but not at the time that the person looked. But I did not argue with the person. Also, how
did that person get started? Did not a more established site give
them a break at one time? And now they are unwilling to do that
for someone new? Also, where is the new site going? I saw a
site today with a Google with a page rank of 0 that wanted a link to me.
I gave them the link, and thanked them kindly and wished them the best
with their site. I have seen this website owner before. He
is serious about growing his site. So, it is page rank 0 today,
maybe page rank 3 a few weeks from now, and page rank 5 or better in few
weeks after that. A quick look at his site told me that at least
100 links are in progress. Also, please keep in mind as I said
above, that sometimes the small sites with the sincere people will send
you the most business.
The first site that linked to me, when I was page rank 0
was a page rank 5 site. The website owner was also polite.
Imagine the wonderful impression that that website owner left on me.
If that website owner asked me for a favor, I would really try hard to
consider it. Again, my advice, is just simply be polite to other
sites - including those just starting out.
Software for Site
Handling
Even though rpsoft2000.com is in the software business, I would be
the first to tell you that you don't necessarily need specialized
software to get to a high traffic site. The methods are the
methods, and can be done by hand. First one ensures good content
at their site, and then ensures that their title and meta tags are
right. Then one goes after search engine submission. Then
one gets links. Then one considers advertising. Then one does more of the above.
I would advise, however, early on deciding the right title for your site
in order to
advertise it, and a good description of it in 250 (or even 200)
characters or less, and have that stored somehow in a file that is
retrieved easily. I would also over time get and store a bunch of
form letters - that you customize just a little for each event. I
use form letters for link requests, to tell another webmaster what page
their link is installed on, to explain that I found a problem on the
link on their site (politely of course beginning with an apology that I
could be wrong), and more.
As for storing page descriptions and even the cover letters, I am storing and advertising 14 web
pages at the time of this writing. Again, there are a number of
ways to store 14 sets of titles, descriptions and keywords, but I use my
own software product membank to save short
phrases that I use time and time again. As for verifying links at
other sites, that also grew to be a bit of work. So I have also
written software, site-crawler, that
is becoming available now for windows 2000 and xp systems, that can search other
sites for key phrases - such as your link. It works on about 97%
of the cases we have checked it with now, and is a time saver.
That program which also includes a meta tag checker, can count external
links per page, look for email addresses on your site or others, count
keywords (density) and more. With the cleverness (not a good idea)
that some webmasters put into their site links, site-crawler software
cannot follow all site links. But the ones it finds can be found
automatically and it leaves much less work to be done manually.
For new sites linking to us, we will use site-crawler as a guide.
If that bot (software robot) cannot find the link, then perhaps the
search engines will not also, and those sites would not make good link
partners.
Done Now?
If you have reached this point, you might ask if you were done.
But as the section says that it is hard work, it just means you get to
start again and question everything and improve everything again - your
product or service, your web site professionalism, your search engine
status, and your advertising / links.
General
e-books
E-books on internet marketing abound. But buyer beware.
Some books are good. Others seem to say little. The other
disturbing thing is that some are not even edited well and almost make
no sense. In one, the author seemed to spend most of the book
congratulating himself. Still another I saw was only one page
long. There seems to be no standards. For those of us who
think an e-book should be as long and as well done as a regular book, we
are often disappointed. Again, there are some good ones.
But be careful.
beware of offers that "look too good"
A wise person once told me "if it looks too good to be true, it
probably is not true". Yes, that seems to be good advice.
Most of the quick and easy hype that I have seen has not worked out - at
least for me. The hard work part does seem to work, but one must
put the effort in. This advice seems true for the e-books that
seem to scream "get rich quick". Well, the one getting rich quick
is the one selling the e-books.
If I do find good deals I will post them here. Right now, it
seems that there is some good free advice in spots on the net -
including this article here. Nice.
I will continue to look for these good deals and pass them on.
Best of luck on your web site.
owner - rpsoft 2000
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