Traffic Questions

[seekeronline]

I would love any advice on how to effectively bring traffic to both of my sites from anyone who would like to take the time to answer.
Thank you and have a great day!

[Dnyarri]

What are you trying now?

Search Engines are one of the most popular. Placing ads in various locations
(being careful to test the results) is another. Pay Per Click is popular. It's all
about marketing and being creative. How creative can you be? What are you
selling? Etc. Internet Marketing is a broad subject.

[Hope]

Donnie, the first question you have to ask yourself is "What is my budget?"

If you have money to spend, then PPC is good. It is expensive though. You can find related websites and pay for advertising. You can work the search engines. You can post links to your sites from the forums (don't spam though, just link your signature). You can use newsletters and blogs. There are a ton of things to do.

[seekeronline]

I am trying them all but with little success so far.  I just don't understand how no sales can come at all from either site.  It is quite frustrating.
Donnie

[Dnyarri]

Post the details and maybe we can help?

[Donnie]

I have tried Kanoodle, Google Adwords, Overture, Quicksearch.net, bumpersticker on the car, search engines all to no avail.  I have some things wrong with me site but don't really know how to fix them.  Everything I do, I have been self-taught.  I need to find a new host.  For years though, everything I try does not translate into sales and I am not sure why.

[Hope]

Donnie, I would suggest you make a lot more on your site link. What I thought would be linked is not.  It is like the site i only half completed. Plus each page changes colors. It looks like you are leaving one site and going to another.

You have a comcast email address instead of an email address from the domain you  are on.

As a marketer, I see that the largest and boldest link on your entire site is the links page. This tells me you are more interested in people clicking on those, than having people purchase from you.

I would say you need to have a few internet savvy people look at your site and tell you what they see as wrong. Then make the changes as needed.

[Dnyarri]

In reality, there are 4 things we need to consider:

1 - The list of people (demographic) that you're
reaching. Are they young? Old? Middle-class? Rich?
Poor? Teachers? Accountants? Unemployed? What
size monitor do they use (great way to pay attention
to tech literacy and affluence)? Would they rather read
an article about squeezing a better interest rate on
their mortgages and investments or would they rather
download music for their Ipod? Who are these people?

2 - The medium. How are you reaching these people?
Is it an effective medium? Banners, for instance, are
relatively ineffective these days. So you need to target
them much more accurately to keep the same click ratio.
On the other hand if you're knocking on doors or calling
them on the phone, then things are going to be different.
Naturally some mediums have gotten a lot of negative
attention. Consumer-based telemarketing is one of these
(But business-to-business telemarketing is accepted,
live and well), people hate getting calls these days so even
if you overcome call resistance and factor in a diminishing
rate of return, there's a "flak factor" of people that will
write your name down and make it a personal mission to
get even with you. Spam is another excellent example of a
high "flak factor" medium. It's so bad that it has leaked
over to non-spam as well.

3 - Your offer. Is it demographically appropriate? Will these
people WANT this product? Forums are great for this. I have
a small list of people I know that I can trust to give me
HONEST opinions and feedback.  People behave wildly
different about advertising and product offers, so you really
need to get opinions, do surveys and test each little thing...
otherwise it's easy to miss big glaring "WARNING, WARNING,
WARNING!" holes. Attention to detail * 1000.

4 - Your creative. Ie: the sales copy and the presentation of
the site. If your site doesn't look professional or doesn't
reflect the promises in the sales copy, then clearly you're
going to effect your sales ratio. Probably by several orders
of magitude (ie: divide by 1000 or so). If your promises are
unbelievable or your sales copy is overused (the biggest
problem with stock mini-sites), then again... not likely to
work well. But there are other things to consider.
Presentantion is very important here. If you haven't
developed a clear and simple color scheme for your site,
DO SO NOW. People associate color with mood, and
mood with brand. Knock people around with their mood
and they'll get either confused or upset. Not a good way
to inspire people to buy. Take a look at the shape of this
post, I've cut the margins to make it look long and give
it shape. Consider how something that simple effects
the nature of your presentation.