<![CDATA[Are you one of those internet marketers who faithfully believe that if they could only increase the traffic to their site they could make a killing?

This is the way most people think. More traffic = higher profits.

But that's not always true. If it is going to do you any good, it has to be 'targeted' traffic. What's the difference?

Targeted traffic consists of people who are interested in your product or service and would be more likely to spend money to get it from you.

Non-targeted traffic consists of the rest of the world. These individuals are not interested in buying what you have and, therefore, will not part with their cash for it.

Since time and money are valuable resources, don't waste them trying to promote your site to people with no interest in your product. Instead, find out where your targeted visitors spend their time. Then you can promote your site there.

For example, let's say you want to promote a site called thebeachesofaruba.com and one way you will do so is by posting messages in online forums and including a link back to the site in your signature.

Now think about which forums you can post in. There are many popular forums that discuss internet marketing and they have thousands of members. That's a large market, but it is not targeted to your website. Sure, some of them may be interested in an Aruba vacation, but its more likely they are on the forum to read about internet marketing.

A much more efficient choice would be to find forums that actually discuss Aruba, the Caribbean, travel, or some other related topic. The forum you find may only have a few hundred (or even a few dozen) members. But 100% of them are interested in the product, service, or website you are promoting.

Just two more important things to consider:

1. Always read the forum rules before posting. Not all forums allow links to be posted.

2. Do not just write one sentence posts just to get your link posted. That's considered spam.

Instead, write useful and informative posts that will portray you as an expert on the field. People will be more likely to click on your link if you build a reputation on the forum first.

Mike Collins is the owner of http://www.top5affiliateprograms.com which ranks the best, highest-paying, and reputable affiliate programs on the internet.]]>

<![CDATA[Many people who join traffic exchanges are website owners looking for free traffic. There are also many affiliate marketers who join traffic exchanges because they want to drive traffic to their affiliate links as well as internet marketers who want to increase the number of their opt-in e-mail subscribers. There are hundreds of traffic exchanges on the Internet...The traffic exchanges who have the most members usually provide the best results.

A traffic exchange is a service that enables you to visit a member's website, and in exchange other members of the traffic exchange will visit your website. You will earn credits when you view someone's website, and then those credits will be used to have the other members of the traffic exchange visit your website. Most traffic exchanges will allow you to advertise more than one URL so it's possible to promote websites, affiliate links and opt-in landing pages with one account. Most of them also allow you to refer others and earn traffic credits automatically from their efforts.

There are 2 main types of Traffic Exchanges: Manual Surf and Auto Surf. With manual surf, you will need to click on a button to visit the next website in rotation and earn credits. With auto surf, you watch the websites on your computer as they appear automatically every 15 or 30 seconds and you earn credits automatically without having to lift a finger. Although both of these traffic exchanges will bring visitors to your website, the use of a manual exchange is much more likely to bring visitors who will actually read the content of a website and then subsequently take a desired action such as making a purchase or subscribing to an e-mail newsletter.

Some Traffic Exchanges have an option to upgrade or "Pro Membership". Pro members receive extra traffic credits, more benefits and even commissions from the traffic exchange.

Edward is the owner of http://www.traffficswarm.com where you can join one of the most popular traffic exchanges. Over 250,000 members are getting millions of targeted visitors every month. It really works!]]>

<![CDATA[So?I?m looking through my awstats like I do at least once a day. I have always found server logs to be full of useful information, and it?s important to try to glean as much as you can about your visitors from reading them.

Last week there was a very interesting spike in the number of visitors that came to this website. One day my traffic was more than double the average, even considering how traffic has been going up like crazy since I revived this domain last month.

I figured it might be the articles I have been writing and distributing. I have seen my byline all over the Internet lately, which I think is terrific. That day a new article appeared on a bunch of new sites, so maybe that was it. I went over to Isnare to take a look. Isnare is the foundation of my article distribution service ?they?re good and they?re inexpensive.

I?m a good author (says me), but I had only been viewed 39 times, so that wasn?t the source. Even my email messages from people who had visited the site had increased. When I replied to one of the emails (I try to respond to all of them), I asked the person how he had come to the web site. He responded that he had seen my signature in a sitepoint.com post.

Sure enough, right up near the top of referring URLs was the SitePoint script that spits out the forum posts. Awesome. Want to see my signature? Here it is:

___________________
affiliateblog.com

Pretty fancy, huh? By the way, I posted because someone asked a very good basic question that no one was answering. I didn?t want to leave him hanging, so I answered it. That?s all. And I got a ton of traffic. I even got a private message from someone asking me if the domain was for sale. The bonus is that the post is also good for my Google pagerank, as the forum?s PR was way higher than mine (which isn?t difficult these days). I also noticed that a lot of the Sitepoint people were checking out affiliateblog.com using whois and SEO tools, just to find out more about me. I guess that is the Internet equivalent of dogs sniffing eachother (I won?t say where).

So go out there and find a forum or two that fits the theme of your site, and then go bail someone out who needs a question answered. Here are two forum directories for your posting pleasure:

InvisionFree
Big Boards

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.]]>

<![CDATA[Part of blogging for profit is making sure you show up in search engine searches. There are a number of ways to make that happen. Some are simple and obvious, while others take a little know-how. So what should you do to get your blog blasted through the internet? Here are a few tips that may be able to help you show up higher on search engines and thus generate more traffic. You know what more traffic means, right? It means a better chance at making an extra buck with your blog.

First of all, as much as it may seem like a hassle, you need to do your own marketing. When you generate more traffic on your own, the search engines start to notice and your ranking will improve. The first thing you should do is get your blog registered everywhere you can register it. Go to all of the lesser search engines as well as the more popular ones and register the site everywhere you can. In addition, register with all of the blog directories you can find out there. You can barely log onto the internet without bumping into a blog directory. So, with that in mind, make sure that all of those have your blog in them so that those searching blogs will have a better chance of finding yours. Remember, this is about getting traffic and getting a search engine ranking. You can do neither if nobody knows you are out there in the first place.

It gets said over and over again regarding blogs, but make sure your content is high quality. That quality comes from writing in proper style. You should make sure your sentences are complete, when capitalization is needed make sure you do it, put your commas in the right place, and use periods. In addition, make sure you are putting interesting and useful information out there so that you will get as many return visitors as possible to your website. In addition to getting people to look at what you are saying, you want to get them coming back. If you want that search engine ranking, then you need to keep the hits to your site coming and coming often.

Another seemingly obvious thing you can do to drive up traffic and thus your search ranking is to update regularly. Make sure your blog is something you are caring for regularly, like you would anything else. People will come back if they know that new and fresh content could possibly be there. You should be posting at least once a day if not twice to ensure that new visitors are getting good content and that returning readers are seeing something fresh that makes them want to stay. Again, get those visits up and the search engine rankings will come right along with them.

You also want to make sure that when people log onto a search engine seeking out information that they find you as often as possible. To do that, you should make sure that many of your posts are search engine optimized. Have certain keywords and keyword phrases in mind as you start each post. When you go to revise, then, make sure they are appearing early in your post with frequency, and then sporadically throughout the rest of the post. This is an important move since most people on the internet find their information through the use of search engines. If you have specific phrases they are looking for then you are more likely to get more hits from those seeking information on the subjects about which you are writing.

If you are going to blog for profit, then it is crucial to get traffic to your site. To get traffic to your site you want to rank as highly as possible in search engines. There are a number of ways to get your ranking up, but it does require your dedication and work. First of all, make sure you do your own marketing. In one of those cruel twists of irony, the best way to get your traffic up is by getting your ranking higher and to get your ranking higher you need to get your traffic up. So register with blog directories and search engines, update your blog regularly, publish good clean content, and optimize your information with keywords and keyword phrases whenever possible without hurting the quality of your posts. Get that traffic up, market your site, and follow the simple tips above and you can blast the internet with your blog.

Internet marketing search engine positioning blogs]]>

<![CDATA[There are a number of keys to making sales online.

Obviously, there is the product itself. Is it something that people actually want? Can they afford it? Are they willing to pay for it? Is the market reachable online? These are all questions that have to be asked during your marketing research, before you pick your product.

Then there is the sales copy. The quality and power of the sales copy is another very important key to making sales. It the copy is flat, then even if the product is wanted in a good reachable market, then sales will be low.

Of course the headline is the most important key to the sales copy. If the headline does not get the readers attention and draw them into the rest of the copy, then even the greatest sales letter in the world will not get read. And of course, if the sales copy is not read, there will be no sales.

But if there is no traffic to the website sales letter, then there will be no one reading the headline or the sales copy and likewise no sales.

So, if you want to make sales, you must figure out a way to drive traffic to your website. But not all traffic is created equal.

Random or untargeted traffic is worthless. In fact, it is worse then worthless, it consumes time and resources but returns no sales. It is a drag on your business.

What you really need is targeted traffic. That is, traffic that is actually interested in and looking for what you are selling. If you can match a desirable product in a reachable market, with highly interested visitors, then you will have a winner.

So, how do you drive targeted traffic to your website?

There are a number of ways, some more efficient than others.

Let's take a look at a few.

1. Pay Per Click. Pay Per Click traffic is targeted because it is delivered from people who were actively searching for something and were attracted by your ad enough to click on it by their own choice. Check out Google AdWords at: http://www.google.com/ads/

2. Articles. you can get targeted traffic by writing articles such as this article and sending them to ezine publishers that publish ezines in your target niche or to article directories. A link to your website should be placed in your resource box at the bottom of your article. If the article is good and gets published in popular ezines in your niche, you should see some good targeted traffic as a result. You can get help distributing your articles quickly at sites such as http://www.ArticleMarketer.com or http://www.isnare.com

3. Press Releases. A good press release with a link back to your website will also generate targeted traffic because only people who read your press release and were interested in the subject matter will bother click the link to your website for more information. For more information on this technique see http://www.PRWeb.com

4. Reciprocal Linking. If you establish reciprocal links from other sites within your industry niche, there will be some level of targeted traffic that will come to you through those links. The key to getting targeted traffic from reciprocal linking, is establishing links with other sites within your target niche.

5. Blogging. Create a blog with occasional links back to your website and blog about topics of interest to your target niche.

6. Syndicating your blog. Submit your blog to major blog directories such as feedster.com, technorati.com and blogstreet.com.

7. Publish an Ezine. If you ezine is good, you will find interested subscribers will also visit your website if you place a link to it in your signature file.

8. Give away free reports. Provide good solid useful information in your reports with a link back to your website. More information on this tactic can be found at http://www.MiniEbookProfits.com

9. Create a community forum on your site. A good forum based on your targeted niche will draw potential customers who are interested in what you have to sell.

10. Buy your traffic.

a. Create an affiliate program and pay your affiliates a share of the profits,
b. Purchase advertising on other websites.
c. Advertise in ezines.
d. Advertise offline with your website URL in the ad.
e. Purchase traffic from a web traffic service.

WARNING about that last tip. You have to be careful when purchasing traffic from a web traffic service. Many such services will send untargeted traffic to your site from expired domains, pop-unders, or other untarget sources. Some will even cheat and send what appear in your logs to be hits, but in reality no real visitor came to your site. If you purchase 10,000 visitors and get no sales, then you either have a terrible conversion problem or you have been taken by the web traffic service sending bogus hits.

The bottom line is, that all other things being equal, the more highly targeted traffic you can drive to your site the greater will be the number of sales you make. Always be on the lookout for good sources of targeted traffic and forget all the systems that tell you they will send you a large amount of traffic, but their traffic is untargeted.

George Dodge of LotsMoreThanTraffic.com offers an introductory "Pay for Results" program where you make your guaranteed sales then pay for your highly targeted website traffic only AFTER you bank your profits.]]>

<![CDATA[Cruising along 6-lane expressway that skirts east of Kolkata, the city I grew up in, my mind wandered off to my childhood days. Kolkata was then a pleasant place, not overtly intolerant or arrogant. Life was easy, schools nearby, offices not afar, amenities close at hand. Yet, on occasions when we were to visit relatives outside city?s periphery, plans had to be readied in advance. Road connection beyond city was poor, and so moving about longer distance was cumbersome.

Today, many roads have cropped up, many are in making. Places that seemed inaccessible even a few years back, can now be reached without much of a fuss. If this is called rapid urbanization, I feel it has a parallel in the way Google has transformed AdWords. Just as I hardly thought swanky roads would ever come up in so large numbers in my city, it was similarly difficult imagining AdWords would one day be what it is today.

What it is that makes AdWords so dear? I?m not too frequent an advertiser, so I wouldn?t be commenting on campaigns, adgroups and suchlike. Instead, I?ll tell you how the keyword tool of AdWords will make you forget you ever used anything else.

How it started

For long an open secret, but barely touched upon till recent past is that keywords used by surfers have demographic variance to a largish extent. What this means is except for some obvious terms, surfers from different locales of the globe will most likely type in different search terms to look for information on the web. Even in big countries like US or India, search terms used by surfers vary from place to place. Search engines knew this for long, but it took them awhile to chalk out suitable products tailored to be effective in serving aggregate needs on the net.

Talking about Google, products like local search or, for that matter, the advantage of geo-targeting in AdWords campaign are all part of strategy accrued from search behavior pattern, accumulated and studied for nearly a decade.

What are ways to get you the most promising keywords? I?ll attempt answering this formidable question in 2 parts. In this part, we?ll discuss how AdWords? keyword tool can help you get going. In the next part, we?ll compare AdWords? keyword tool with some of the best out there. On to AdWords now.

AdWords opens up

Admittedly, AdWords is meant to maximize revenues to Google. What pleases the most is Google?s fatherly approach to ensure that AdWords maximizes returns to advertisers too. And how? Look at how easily you can fetch your choicest keywords from Google?s vast repertoire.

Start at AdWords Keyword Tool and after selecting the country and language you?d like to target (English and United States by default), slip below and select one of the 2 tabs, namely Keyword Variations and Site-Related Keywords. Now on, let?s go step by step to unravel a real wonder that the tool is.

Keyword Variations

If you select this tab (by default selected), just type in some keywords in the box, one in each line (pressing ?Enter? after each keyword to go to next line). If you want similarly meant keywords, do not forget to select ?Use synonyms?. A good idea that, since it broadens your keyword search. For example, I found ?top 10 ranking?, a very popular key-phrase, as a synonym for ?top ranking?, which would have otherwise remained unknown to me. Another point stressed upon frequently by veterans is that it is better to begin your keyword search with general terms. As you progressively narrow down your keyword selection, you?re more likely to discover promising phrases along the way.

So you have a long list of keywords presented by Google based upon your few initial keywords. Watch closely, you?ll find Google saying that it?s a list sorted by relevance. What?s that? It?s Google?s way of gently prodding you to begin an AdWords campaign, for the keywords that appear at the top are the most relevant ones, should you consider ad campaign with them.

What would you do now? Well, you may start adding them as necessary, search for more related keywords (link at the bottom of the list), or even download them in your chosen format. But wait before you do anything of these. Look around and see how Google helps you with excellent tools to further fine-tune your list of keywords.

Refining your keywords

Move to ?Show columns? and in the accompanying drop-down list, you get to select eye-popping options. Wow! What a help! Choose the first option, ?Keyword popularity? and you?ll simultaneously see 2 adjacent columns of data. Click a column heading, the list re-arranges in decreasing importance. In the column ?Advertiser Competition?, the list shows which of your keywords are hotly sought after. Similarly, the column ?Search Volume? gives you a measure of popularity of respective keywords. Still want more specific info?? The generous Google is there for that. How? Amble to far right of the columns and alongside ?Match Type?, select ?Broad?, ?Phrase? or ?Exact? and watch how the scenario changes. What are broad match, phrase match and exact match? Help is just there (a question mark). Click on it to know more.

We?ll now move on to third option in ?Show columns?, which is ?Global search volume trends?. This is a recent addition. When you select this, you?ll get to see an amazing display of how keyword popularity changes globally (not only US) through the year in the form of bar-charts. Once again, hook on to ?Match Type? (spoken above) and refine your search further.

Start an AdWord campaign?

If you do not contemplate starting an AdWord campaign, you may skip the other 2 ?Show columns? options. In case you do plan one, first select ?Cost and ad position estimates? and in the ensuing page, choose your currency and mention your maximum CPC. This is the maximum cost you agree to bear each time your ad is clicked on when displayed for your chosen search terms (note this is different from another oft-used term, CTR, the click-through-rate). As you finally hit ?Recalculate?, your list will turn up myriad combinations of ad position and average CPC for your keywords. If your max CPC is too low, you may not see any value for average CPC.

The remaining ?Show columns? option is ?Possible negative keywords?. This is a tool that assists your keywords to maintain a sharp focus in an ad campaign. Depending on campaign strategy, one has to decide whether or not to include negative keywords. To give an example, for my web marketing website, if my keyword ?top ranking? fetches other probables like ?top 10 ranking?, ?uptown top ranking?, ?top ranking universities? and so on, I might decide to include ?uptown? and ?universities? as negative keywords, but certainly leaving out the term ?10?. This would mean that if I select ?top ranking? as broad match or phrase match, my ad will not show up for search terms that included negative words ?uptown? and ?universities?. More often than not, expert campaigners will choose one-word broad match and then work on a long list of negative words to disallow unwanted ad impressions.

Site-Related Keywords

Till now, we?ve spoken about keywords you chose and ways of refining them. Suppose you are eager to know what keywords your competition is using! Well, why not? If indeed so, AdWords Keyword Tool comes to your assistance. To start, click the other tab ?Site-Related Keywords?, enter the URL of your competition in the search box and hit ?Get keywords?. Don?t forget to check ?Include other pages on my site linked from this URL?. As you set Google to work, it dutifully comes up with a list of keywords, grouped by common terms with number of occurrences in the entire website within parentheses for each group.

Grouping keywords by common terms is a great help as you?ll find, and each group lists related keywords as in earlier case. If you uncheck grouping option, Google will fetch you a scrolling list of keywords, which may often be uncomfortably huge if you happen to spy on a giant competition. Once there, similar to Keyword Variations, here too you can start working on your keywords with abundance of tools at your command.

AdWords, a facilitator

Keyword Tool is great because it is very easy to use. No doubt Google intends it that way so as to make AdWords less and less daunting for potential ad-campaigners who are afraid to cross threshold for the fear of making unknown mistakes. Let?s remember, businessmen incline to take risks on known parameters, and not something that is difficult to comprehend. To that extent, the newly-designed keyword tool is a good facilitator.

In the next part, we?ll look at how AdWords? keyword tool fares with other keyword finders.

A freelance content writer, Partha Bhattacharya runs blog on search engine marketing. Contact Partha at prioriti@gmail.com for your next content writing assignment. Get quality writing at reasonable rate.]]>

<![CDATA[Getting visitors to your website has been the ultimate dream of internet marketers. More traffic equals more money, so they say. But how can you do it without spending a fortune?

Unknown to many there are a few ways of getting visitors to your site without risking a lot of money. But remember, it's not that easy. It takes more work. So, if you would rather work instead of pay to get visitors to your site, then here are a few things you can do:

1. Submit articles to article directories. This is probably one of the most effective ways of getting traffic to your site. By submitting articles with a link that points to your website, you are assured of long term traffic. As long as your article stays in the directories that you submit to, people can find it and the chances of getting traffic to your website is increased. A few of the article sites where you can submit to are goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, ideamarketers.com, articlecity.com and articlesfactory.com.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It's not really rocket science. SEO is simply a technique that you implement on your site to rank higher in the search engines. Here are the things you might want to implement right away:

a) Your domain name should have your keyword in it.
b) Title tag of each page of you site should contain your keyword.
c) Your keyword should be on the first paragraph of your page.
d) The image alt tags should contain your keyword.
e) The file names of each page of your site should also have your keyword.

3. Create a blog then link it to your site. Postings at Blogger are easily indexed by Google. Updating your blog is feeding the search engines. Each time you put fresh content out, the search engines will notice it and come running to eat it all up. Putting your keywords in this fresh content will help you rank higher in the search engines. Your site gets updated a lot if you link your blog to it. Blogging is easy and it adds a lot of pages to your site. You can get free blogs at blogger.com and wordpress.com.

4. Posting in forums related to your topic. By participating in forums you'll have the opportunity to place your link in the signature line and get traffic from forum members. You can find a forum related to your topic by going to a search engine and typing your keyword + forum. Make sure the signatures you post in forums are catchy to attract readers and make them click on your link and come to your site.

These are simple, cheap and very effective ways of getting visitors to your website. Implementing the above would guarantee a stream of traffic not only for the short term but also for the long haul.

Brent is a regular writer for www.the-best-business.biz - for more business and money making ideas please visit www.the-best-business.biz]]>

<![CDATA[Do you have a mailing list that you refer to often? If not, is it because you do not know how to properly build your mailing list? Most people that are trying to develop a mailing list are unsuccessful because they do not know exactly where or how to start. They take a scatter gun approach and end up putting in a lot of time to only get a very few amount of responses.

Traffic exchange is one of the best ways to build a mailing list. List generation via traffic exchange is very popular, and should be tried out by anybody that is looking to develop a mailing list. A lot of people are scared of trying a traffic exchange site because they are not exactly sure of how it works. But there is really not much to it.

A traffic exchange site receives submissions from website owners who are looking to increase traffic, and in many cases put together a list generation strategy. A website owner will be able to sign up for a traffic exchange network that will allow other interested parties to view their site. But when you submit your website, you also have to visit sites of other people in order to increase their traffic. After you visit a certain number of sites, your pages will then begin to get more traffic from other people. This works for everyone involved by increasing the traffic on each site.

In order to use traffic exchange programs to increase your list generation odds you will want to join up with a program that has other sites similar to yours. So for example, if you are trying to drive traffic to your site which is about home improvement, you will want to make sure that the traffic exchange program has other home improvement related sites. This way you will not only be increasing your traffic, but you will also be garnering traffic from people who may be truly interested in your site.

Your list generation strategy will come into play when you start to get a lot of traffic. You will then be able to compile a list of all the people who have visited your site and add them to your list. You may also want to add a place on your sites home page where people who visit your site from the traffic exchange program can leave their information. This is relatively easy to incorporate into your site, and will go a long way in making your list generation strategy successful.

Another benefit of using a traffic exchange site is that most of them are free. This means that you will be able to drive a lot of traffic to your site, while also finding a way to improve your list generation strategy. A traffic exchange site is one of the best ways to market your website without having to shell out too much money.

If you are serious about using a traffic exchange site you may want to seek out a couple that offer paid programs. Many times, if you are a member of a traffic exchange site you will be given special benefits that free users do not have access to.

Almost all traffic exchange programs encourage people to compile their own referral networks. These are the same people that you will use when building your list generation strategy.

Overall, traffic exchange programs are a great way to develop mailing lists. A traffic exchange program can be used for free, and will definitely increase the traffic to your site, as well as help you develop your mailing list.

Paul Foley is the webmaster of Cash Sense .Com The Traffic Exchange that we recommend is Traffic Swarm (it's free)]]>

<![CDATA[The blink of an eye! That?s how long it takes a visitor to assess the overall look of your website. Research has recently shown that a site visitor will decide whether or not they like your website in 1/20th of a second. That?s less than the time it takes to blink! And in less than 10 seconds they decide to stay at your website or leave!

The report, published in the latest issue of Behaviour and Information Technology journal, claims that ?if the first impression is negative, you?ll probably drive people off. It really is just a physiological response," Gitte Lindgaard told Reuters. What the report does not conclude, is what actually makes a successful, aesthetically pleasing website, but only how much time it would take for a visitor to make that decision.

In the 6 years we have been developing websites, we have had the ability to test many different styles and looks of websites. We have also studied successful sites, to find out what the secret really is. What we found out is astonishing. Ready?

There is no secret! That?s right, there is no single, right way to build a website. There are however many ?wrong? ways to avoid.

The real secret of a good website, is to eliminate anything that drives your visitors away. And how does one do this you ask? By understanding your target market. That?s the real trick in designing a website that is successful, and more importantly a home page that will retain your visitors.

Too many times new website owners think they need every bell and whistle available. They tend to pack their home page with too many components that are simply ?eye-candy? and have no real value to the viewer. Others strip their site down and all you see is miles and miles of content, and no appealing graphics to get excited about.

What is needed is a site with the right balance of graphics and content. By ?right?, we mean whatever is most pleasing to your target audience. If you are trying to attract elementary school children, then having a bunch of flashy images, bright colors, and huge fonts would more than likely pull them in. However, if you are attracting Fortune 500 companies those strategies would be a sure turn off.

I like to think of a website as a house. Take your house for example. You probably have a nicely colored front door, and possibly a wreath or other decoration (even just a fancy door knocker) hanging on that door. Chances are you have some sort of welcome mat that you spent time picking out just to give your visitor?s a welcoming place to wipe their feet. You keep the area around your front door clean and tidy. Your front door is welcoming and warm, making your visitors feel like they want to come in, that they want to see more.

In the same way, your home page is the front door to your website. This is the page that you should spend the most time constructing, because if visitors don?t move beyond it then the other pages won?t matter! You want this page to be eye-catching (but not overwhelming), easy to navigate (but not boring), and have the right amount of content to grab the attention of your visitor.

Let?s start with the visual appeal of your home page.

First and foremost you should have a professionally designed logo. Your company name displayed in plain Arial text just won?t cut it for most of your visitors. A nicely designed logo is the first part of establishing credibility with your visitor, and as such should be shown prominently at the top of your website.

Along with a memorable logo, your website should incorporate colors that your audience will respond to. For an explanation on selecting colors, please see our ?Color Theory? article at http://www.nicmedia.com/color_theory.htm.

Graphic images are also important to help the viewer relate to your website. Professional photographs can easily accomplish this and still be affordable. There are numerous stock photography houses that provide high resolution images for very affordable prices, or you can hire your own photographer for custom work.

When using images of people, keep it down to earth. Research indicates that while viewers like to see attractive people in their own age group, they should not necessarily be identifiable as models. It?s more important that the images portray someone relatable that looks like them or ?real? in their eyes rather than made up.

Your home page should be organized so that visitors quickly understand what they can accomplish. The typical website has logo on top (in a banner sometimes called a masthead), along with navigation either horizontally across top or vertically along the left hand side. Yes, this may seem old and boring, but it?s what visitors have come to expect and rely on. When that gets changed too much they don?t feel comfortable and tend to back away.

Navigation is the key to the flow of your website. Your navigation should have links that can be easily identified. Home, About Us, Our Products, Our Services, Contact Us ? yes those are names we?ve seen a hundred times and we think we?d like to fluff that up ? but don?t forget that is what your visitor is looking for. Remember, newspapers are written on an 8th grade level in order for the majority of it?s readers to be able to read and understand, and that same principal should apply to your navigation and entire website.

Make sure that your navigation flow makes sense for your viewer, ordering your pages with the most important pages listed first followed by the lesser important or least likely to be viewed pages. This helps assure you get your audience to the meat of your website quickly. To avoid confusion, consistency is key, so whatever navigation you use on your home page should be carried on throughout the remainder of your website.

Last but not least, is content. Content has to be rich and exciting enough to draw your visitor in, and short enough to grab their attention! Research suggests that the average reader can read approximately forty words in ten seconds.

The paragraph above is exactly 40 words. If you only have 10 seconds to pull your viewer in, that?s roughly the amount of content they can take in during that amount of time.

People tend to scan websites rather than read them entirely, so adjust to this fact. Use eye-catching headlines, bolding, bullet points, anything to break up the monotony of a plain paragraph and draw attention to the stuff that is most relevant for them to see. Plenty of white space helps to pull the reader?s eye along through the content of the page. Faced with a large block of text, our eyes tend to skip past it.

In short, you really have no choice but to make your website?s homepage an attention-grabber. Let your visitor know right away they are in the right place, that you have THE answer to their problem, that your company is credible, and that your site is easy to navigate.

Once they find the basic components that are expected they will be drawn in to more of your content and navigate deeper into your website. That?s the foundation for a solid call to action so your website achieves it?s goal. Remember, you only have a second!

Angela Nielsen is President of NIC Media Group, an award-winning web development company located in southern California. To find out more about Angela Nielsen or NIC Media Group visit http://www.nicmedia.com. Copyright 2006 by Angela Nielsen. Professional editing provided by http://www.sharpediting.com]]>

<![CDATA[Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Matrix of ancient Greece, suggests that the totality of our perceptions conspire to divert us from larger truths and my experience at ad:tech New York would support its argument. Garish memories of catchy doo-dads and occasional run-ins with kooky characters once again defined the event as I experienced it while blotting out the greater reality of the event. I’m not saying I spent two full days in a surreal funhouse, but for the rest of the week I was calculating the shame/profit ratio that would ensue if I were to start wearing bright suits festooned with punctuation marks. I needed some time to dissociate from the glitz before I could go back and start tackling relatively mundane issues, such as how today’s interactive trends will influence tomorrow’s advertising dollar.

And weren’t we all giddy, though? Prior to November’s grand affair at the New York Hilton when I wasn’t thinking about which cocktail socials were lined up for which campaigns, I was focused on the impeding attack of some 7,000 attention starved conventioneers. I, along with the dozen-plus scheduled to work the conference from ICMediaDirect.com, ran through what questions we’d hear and, wisely, “what do you guys do?” was the number one question anticipated. We were a conference sponsor and prominently tabled across the foyer from the registration desks so it was imperative for us to be well-prepared in response to all queries of our company’s business. And we were.

Our central positioning during ad:tech allowed me to greet the seemingly endless crowd marching back and forth from the featured speaker venues and the exhibitor floors. I hear that total attendance was north of 8,300. But even if that figure was doubled, I doubt that I could have made any more contacts — it was simply that busy. It felt like no locale mattered more to my profession than where I was then; I mean, were we not in New York City participating in the biggest and baddest convention in the interactive field? I can’t speak for others, but at times it was easy for me to forget that I was merely doing business and not changing the planet.

Diana Lee, ICMediaDirect.com’s VP of Business Development, not only coordinated the New York event for us, but was scheduled to leave at the week’s end to run our operation at the inaugural convention ad:tech Shanghai, which we also sponsored. All that this meant for me, really, was that someone was getting to go on an extended trip to China, lucky her. As far as Shanghai itself was concerned; well, come on, someone’s got to slog through the interactive backwaters, right? A fluent speaker of Mandarin and an outgoing marketing pro, Diana was the ideal candidate for such a foray.

I sat with Diana to recount her trip after she returned to the ICMediaDirect.com’s office in the Empire State Building. The level of sophistication presented at ad:tech Shanghai genuinely surprised her and she remarked that the Chinese people will certainly continue to immerse themselves online.

China’s economic ministers must have recognized that their people, like Western consumers, value innovative technology and appreciate choice. The economic boon generated by the resulting consumerism has helped to entice the government to cautiously explore foreign investment over these past few years.

And nowhere will this impact be more dramatically felt than in interactive marketing. The advertising potential for China’s online population is simply more attractive than any other market. Consider this, roughly 250 million Chinese are already online (more than ten times the number 5 years ago) in an economy that’s been growing steadily at 8-9%. This enormous audience, which will parallel the total census numbers of the US by 2008, represents only the one-fifth of their population on the Internet. Let’s recap. In two more years the number of Chinese consumers online will equal the total number of people in the US.

If there is a place to invest in business advertising, it is online in China.

In fact, our dutiful representative told me that in China, search engine marketing is the same hot ticket that it has been here recently. Although shouldn’t have surprised me, it momentarily did. Maybe I was thinking that the Chinese interactive entities, being relatively late entrants into an evolving game, owe it to the world to be heavily immersed in a few fruitless tactics, like keyword stuffing for instance, before adopting today’s darlings.

My short-sightedness has no logic, folks, except provincialism. And from such a mindset leaks notions that one ad:tech event might be of a higher inherent tech relevance than another. I was wrong. The Internet and its applications are truly universal and what matters most is who’s using it and how, not where people gather to gab about it.

Beijing’s history of disinterest in consumer choice for its people hasn’t ended without its ramifications. The Chinese, who do not share our storied and anesthetizing love affair with consumer-targeted advertiser-supported television, are more open than we are to utilizing the Internet as a primary source of information, like news. In fact, many believe that the Chinese are starting to prefer the Internet as a primary source of daily news. Obviously, many of those reading these words also feel the same way, but let’s remember that much of our country is falling all over itself in speculation over who the next anchor will be at CBS. I guess this matters to some people.

While internet advertising monies continue in a ‘break-out’ mode, the reports of aggregate advertising revenues in “traditional” mediums in China have leveled off to the rates of a maturing business. We are all given to think, perhaps, that technology’s march is sure, certain and inevitable. But we should lend this particular trend in China its own context