Web Design Tips and Tricks

Build It And Build It Cheap! Part II

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If you are familiar with my work, then you have probably taken a look at the first part of this article, and may well be on your way to having your website up and running. Congratulations!!! It's hard work, but having pride in the accomplishment is worth it! Now you have to find the people who want to see it, AKA--site traffic.

There are many things you can do to achieve your goal of generating site traffic. As a cheapazz oficionado, I am going to give you the easy and cheap ways. If by chance you did not catch the first part of this article, let me reiterate that I am not a pro at web design. I am a professional CheapAzz, certified at maxing out the free stuff in life, and occasionally the stuff that is not free--but cheap. I'll give a few tips and resources, you can do a little research, and with a little effort we can get some traffic flow through that sweet piece of virtual reality you've built.

First things first...what the META is a META? A little computer science trivia for ya. A META is a hidden tag you build into your html that tells the search engine 'spider' what to do (and what not to do), with your site. There are probably libraries of books written on this subject by people that are much more qualified than I am, so I am going to give it to you in my layman's terms. If these terms are too general this may be one of the parts you will have to research.

You should start by finding some keywords that describe each piece of your site. You should choose specific words and try to include some for every section. Another part of your research---you can look around the net at sites that will help with these tags. Once you have your tags in order, analyze a test page or your index page before you add them to every page on your site.

You can help drive traffic to your site by teaming with other sites of a similar size and content and exchanging banners or links with them. The more links the better. Super Tip: This will also help with your rating placement with your google search, it gives points to the sites that link back to them.

As I said in part one of this article you can offer free content. You help other sites fill their web pages, but you also get your content out there. Visitors to their sites are always potential visitors to yours, and links make this super easy for them.

Learn about search engine rankings. These are no secret and important in your initial visibility as a web site. You can find these rank pages right on the search engines site. Start with the most popular engines and work your way down. A note of caution: Play fair! Beware of sites that give you tips to fill your html with lists of popular words that the spiders will find instead of words that are relevant to your site. These tricks could get you barred from the engines and than all your hard work could be for nothing!!

Small things to do... word of mouth, email signatures, newsgroups, and newsletters are all excellent tools in your quest for site traffic. Get some Free or cheap business cards printed and give them to EVERYONE. The more people that hit your site, even just to see what you're doing, the better. Take advantage of email signatures.

While making a nice and tidy little end for your website they will also go out with every email that you send. Join newsgroups and online groups such as aol, msn and yahoo and list your site on those profiles. Find out each groups' rules for msg signatures and be active in groups of similar interests. Start a free newsletter and offer it monthly (or bi monthly, or yearly--whatever floats your web boat). Even with thousands of newsletters out there, they still seem to be a popular tool in showing people what you and your site are all about.

These are all great ways to get people to your site, but you also need them to return to your site. Treat them how you want to be treated. Have a strong privacy policy, post the policy, and never violate their trust. Not only does selling visitors information keep possible repeat customers away, but it also keeps prospective customers away.

Remember that word of mouth is important, and people will not refer your site if they feel that they or their referrals will be attacked by e bombs, snail mail with some of your links' names on it, or telephone calls that have a little too much info. Yes, even phone calls can result from selling peoples private information, and many people are afraid to give this information to websites because of this. People don't want your newsletter coupled with ads for angina and toilet paper, colleges and colustrum. They signed up for your website, and your ads are all they should have to expect.

The quality and quantity of what you are emailing your customers is important also. First be sure that they have requested your ads, if they have not, don't send them. If they do ask you to email them with offers, etc., than make sure that they receive the offer only once. If you are sending the same information over and over to them in the hopes that they will eventually take notice--take heart, they will...and than they will block you from their email box. This defeats the purpose of all that you are striving for, to generate web traffic, to keep web traffic and to generate MORE web traffic!

Super Tip: Save request forms and/or emails for offers from customers so you can produce them if needed to show that they asked for your offers.

Last but not least, make sure there is an easy way for subscribers to choose not to receive your offers. Many people look first for this option before they even sign up. The highest concern, of course, being that you will spam them. Everyone wants to be sure that they can easily avoid the ever present spam on their computer, and they definitely don't want to bring it on themselves. This option will also make you look more legitimate. You are not trying to push people into things they don't want by allowing them to choose when and if they want to receive your offers.

There are many other tactics such as Forums, Free For Alls (FFA), Opt-in lists, Safe lists, site rotators, ad and banner rotators, ad & banner exchanges, submissions to free directories and on and on. As you can see, there are too many to work into a couple short articles. Again, a little research can save you a ton of money and headache.

Thus far all these tips have been free for you, but with online advertising rates coming down, these are great options to look into also. Just weigh the pros and cons of spending some money towards achieving your goal. If you have the money to invest and the potential to profit from paid ads, than there's no question as to which choice to make. However, if you're a little low on funds and not so sure, try the free ways first and see how well they work.

Hey - maybe you'll make enough off the free advertising that you can get some paid ads! Either way, at paid ads we have exceeded my already limited expertise, as the Official CheapAzz I try as hard as possible not to pay for what I can almost always get for free.

Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot of the cool things we learned and developed over the last few years.

This happened because we changed our business model from agency style to "plug us into your operations and we will be your dev crew" style.

Anyways, every once in a while we like to take stock and see where we may be able to gain some time so as to try and work in our next direction or new model, whatever that may be. The applications that we use are often places where we can find cool new stuff and gain time.

What things have you done to find extra time? Please, share below!

Here are three things that, in the last year point five have helped us find some extra time.

1. Navicat: we moved all of the bits of PHPmyAdmin accesses over to navicat at about the end of 2007 and this was an excellent move. Tonnes of time gained.
2. TeamViewer: for quick support and desktop sharing with remote staff.
3. Buying a netbook and using Maxivista and Ultramon: adds two new monitors to my existing setup. I now have a 4 monitor two computer setup which allows me to not only have two more monitors but I can also have open two versions of many of the apps that I use (useful for multitasking with teams etc.)
4. Moving simpler client sites to WordPress: now that it has one step upgrades and almost doesn't require the use of an FTP client to get up and running on some hosts.
5. Dictation Software: I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for writing some course and blog materiel lately (pre-writing for my new blog). I find this is saving me a load of time and I am getting more written then ever before.

So what solution have you implemented lately to buy you some extra time?

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