how to increase website traffic
Traffic Techniques,Strategies,and Tips

5 Keys for Getting Word of Mouth Traffic
By Jimmy D. Brown of iBusiness Owner

One of the most powerful, high-converting forms of traffic that you can generate is via word-of-mouth. Think about it for a moment…

When you use traditional advertising, you’re basically tooting your own horn. People tend to be a bit on the skeptical side with regards to your products or services. They put their defensive walls up. They think, “Well of course he’d say that – he’s trying to sell me something!”

But now imagine that this same prospect receives your advertising message from a friend. Maybe the friend says, “Wow – you need to check out that new sports memorabilia store on 10th Avenue. You’ll LOVE it!”

Will this prospect check it out? You bet! And that’s because someone he knows and trusts made the recommendation.

You understand now why word of mouth marketing is so powerful – and why you’ll want to make sure you put it to work for your business, too. Here’s how:

1. Create something worth talking about. People won’t talk about your business if it’s not buzz worthy. So if it’s not naturally buzz worthy (i.e., worth talking about), then need to create something for people to talk about.

Examples:

• A publicity stunt. Kick start the viral effect by sending out press releases, using social media to spread the word and advertising it.

• A contest. A big, exciting contest with awesome prizes tends to create a buzz. But if you create a contest that includes a referral component (e.g., “get an extra chance to win by telling your friends”), then your contest becomes even more buzz worthy.

• Something controversial or even offensive. Be careful with this one, as doing it the wrong way can alienate your prospects. But do it right, and you’ll draw then closer. For examples, just look at what partisan political commentators say on their radio shows and on their blogs.

• Something extremely unique, useful or entertaining. Here you can create a useful tool, report, video or other resource that your prospects are likely to pass around.

• An amazing deal. Create coupon codes to offer a “once in a lifetime” deal – then watch your prospects share these codes with their friends!

2. Make it easy to share. In other words, don’t create hoops.

Example: If you’ve created a viral video, then put it on YouTube.com so that people can access it and share it easily.

3. Give an incentive to encourage sharing. If you create something share-worthy (like a humorous video), people will naturally share it. But if you give people an incentive to share it, you’ll get even better results.

Example: The online bank ING often runs a referral promotion. The person who gets the referral receives $25 if they open a new bank account. But the person who provides the referral also gets an incentive if his friend joins: Namely, he too gets $25 deposited into his account.

4. Provide a call to action. Whether you’re incentivizing your word of mouth campaign or not, you still need to provide a call to action. This is where you specifically tell your prospects and customers to share your marketing message.

Examples:

• “Tell your friends about our new line of products and you’ll receive 5% off your next purchase every time one of your referrals becomes a paying customer!”

• “Give your Facebook friends a laugh – click here now to share this video!”

5. Offer tools to make sharing easy. Finally, you can offer tools to make it easy for your customers and prospects to tell their friends. Examples of tools include:

• Business cards, flyers or paper coupons that people can distribute.
• Social bookmarking buttons.
• “Tell a friend” forms.
• Facebook and other social media widgets (so people can share with one click).

And there you have it: Five keys to unleashing the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Of course this is just one way to expand your market reach. When you join the iBusiness Owner site today, you’ll discover plenty of other ways. Plus you’ll discover other ways to increase your market reach, get new customers and make more money. So visit http://www.profitabletraffik.com/ten.htm to see what it’s all about – do it now, because you won’t be disappointed!

Top 10 Tips for Building Trust and Getting Business
By Jimmy D. Brown of iBusiness Owner

Your prospects won’t buy from you unless they trust you.

Read that again, because fully understanding that deceptively simple sentence is crucial to the bottom line of your business. If you can’t establish trust, you can’t make sales. Period.

So, how do you start building trust? Like this:

1. Offer great customer service. Whether you have a prospect contacting you for the first time with a pre-sale question or you have an existing customer needing help, you need to provide prompt, professional service.

2. Start a blog. A blog gives you an opportunity to interact with your prospects and customers. It also gives you an opportunity to show value to your prospective customers. When they see what kind of help you give away for free, they’ll be excited to become a paying customer.

Tip: Don’t yet have a blog? Go to WordPress.org and download the free files.

3. Interact with prospects on social media sites. Yet another way to build relationships (and trust) is by using social media sites, especially Facebook.com and Twitter.com. There you can interact one-on-one, as well as provide good information.

4. Use your prospect’s name. Using someone’s name helps build rapport. Online you can collect your prospect’s first name when he joins your newsletter list. Offline, be sure to ask for his name so that you can use it during your sales talk.

Tip: Don’t overuse someone’s name, as that can backfire and make them feel uncomfortable. Using it once or twice during an initial meeting should be enough.

5. Follow up with your prospects. The vast majority of people who come to your website or store are unlikely to ever return – that’s why you need to get their contact information so that you can follow up with them.

Usually this involves offering your prospects something valuable in exchange for their contact information.

Example: You can offer a free report on your website. Or if you have a bricks and mortar store, you can offer prospects a chance to win something in a contest. Just be sure in all cases that your prospects know you will be following up with them.

6. Show your value now. Don’t make the mistake of promising a lot of value in the future… but only once someone pays you money. Instead, show your value now using newsletters, a blog, social media and good customer service.

7. Be accessible. This one is of particular importance to those who have an online business. The bottom line is not to hide from your prospects. This means offering multiple ways for your prospects and customers to reach you. The more accessible you are, the easier it is for people to trust you.

8. Get personal. If your prospect or client mentions a special event (like an upcoming wedding or birth of a child), write this information down so that you can refer to it again. Then the next time you see this person (either in person or even online, like on Facebook), you can ask the person about the event. He’ll be impressed that you remembered – and your relationship will grow!

9. Give your prospects what they want. Here’s the key: Help your prospects even if it doesn’t directly benefit you.

Example: Recommend a product that doesn’t garner you a commission (maybe the product is even free). When the prospect sees that you really care about him and his problem, his trust in you will grow – and before you know it, he’ll be a loyal customer!

10. Be professional. Finally, maintain a professional appearance, whether through your own grooming, your brick and mortar store, your marketing materials or your website. First impressions count. And continued professionalism helps build trust.

Conclusion

You just learned 10 proven ways to build trust and generate more sales for your business.

To find out still more ways to grow your business, visit http://www.profitabletraffik.com/ten.htm to discover the iBusiness Owner’s Manuals. Then ask yourself: How many of these strategies are you currently overlooking? And how much more money would you make if you employed them, starting today?

How to Use Incentives to Get Extra Sales
By Jimmy D. Brown of iBusiness Owner

The vast majority of your prospects aren’t all that passionate about your offer.

Truth is, they’re kind of lukewarm. They’re interested, but they’re not taking their credit card out. Instead of making a buying decision, they decide to “think about it.”

Of course you know what happens: They forget about your offer. They don’t return to your store or sales page. Some of them may even make the conscious decision to NOT buy your product.

So what can you do to get your prospects to get excited and take action NOW?

Simple: Offer them an incentive if they order now. Do it right, and you’re virtually guaranteed to make more sales!

Generally, an incentive can take two forms:

1. You offer a discount. One idea is the straightforward discount, such as offering a percent-off. Another ideas is to offer a discount on the overall package, such as by offering free shipping.

Tip: You can even make it a limited-time discount so that your prospects feel a sense of urgency.

2. You offer one or more bonus products. Again, you can even make the bonus offer limited to increase the sense of urgency.

Offering a discount is a pretty straightforward incentive. So let’s talk about how to offer a bonus as a buying incentive.

Here then are the seven keys to offering bonuses that generate extra sales:

• Make sure the bonus is desirable. Point is, if your prospects don’t care about the bonus product, then it won’t help you generate any sales. So make sure it’s something that your prospects already want. Something that gets them excited!

• Create a valuable bonus. Just because you’re giving the product away for free with a purchase doesn’t mean this bonus should be worth little to no money. Quite the contrary – it should have a high perceived value in the prospect’s mind.

• Choose bonuses that are easy to deliver. This is particularly true if you’re selling downloadable products online, such as software or information. Point is, you want to be able to deliver the bonus instantly – right alongside the main product – without you having to manually deliver the bonus.

• Supply an exclusive bonus, whenever possible. If the prospect can get the bonus somewhere else, he might just do that. So try to offer exclusive bonuses to help make the buying decision easy.

• Offer a bonus that compliments the main product. For example, let’s say you’re selling a book about retirement planning. Offering retirement-planning worksheets and software as a bonus would be a great incentive.

• Sell the bonus. If you’re selling via a sales page, don’t just list the bonus. Instead, sell it just the way you’re selling the main product, meaning you should list the benefits of this bonus product or service.

• Remember that you can offer products OR services. Let’s say you’re selling exterior landscaping supplies and information. As a bonus you can offer a free consultation where you provide specific landscaping ideas for buyers. Or if you’re selling a copywriting product, you can offer a sales letter critique.

Conclusion

Offering an incentive is a simple, yet highly effective way to generate more sales and grow your business. To discover still more ways to grow your business, visit http://www.profitabletraffik.com/ten.htm – you may just learn strategies you never even knew existed!

Thanks to our Guestblogger Jimmy Brown for his helpful tips.

One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.

You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.

You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following  affiliate marketing tools:

A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.