Web Traffic Secrets for 2004 is a free ebook.
You may share it with anyone you like.
You may send it by e-mail.
You may distribute it via your website.
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You may fax it.
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You may do anything you want with it
EXCEPT sell it or change it.
(Compliments of Jacqlvn Easton and www.ExecNetConsulting.com )
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
Host a Teleclass on Your Expert Topic (and Its Free to Do, Too!)
................................................................................................................................................................................
CHAPTER 2
Capitalize on Off-Beat Calendar Events .............................................................. 10
CHAPTER 3
Create Exclusives ................................................................................................... 12
CHAPTER 4
Offer Fabulously Unique Content ........................................................................ 14
CHAPTER 5
Contests Will Increase Traffic
(But Only If You Do Something Different)16
CHAPTER 6
Niche, Niche, Niche ................................................................................................ 19
CHAPTER 7
Testimonial Magic ................................................................................................. 21
CHAPTER 8
Auto-respond to All Your Public E-mail .............................................................. 22
CHAPTER 9
Your Best Source of Quality Traffic
Is Found in the Money Moment ............................................................................ 24
CHAPTER 10
Market Your Venture Via Business Cards ........................................................... 27
CHAPTER 11
Consider Domain Name Speculation ................................................................... 29
CHAPTER 12
Be Your Own Affiliate ........................................................................................... 31
CHAPTER 13
Create Less-Obvious Affiliates ............................................................................. 34
CHAPTER 14
Give Your Affiliates Much, Much More ................................................................. 36
CHAPTER 15
Go For Singles and Score a Promotional Home Run ......................................... 37
CHAPTER 16
Five of My Favorite Quick Tips ............................................................................ 39
CHAPTER 17:
Buy Your Second Most Important Domain Name
(And Its Not .Net or .Org) ..................................................................................... 41
BONUS CHAPTER
Jaclyn Eastons 9 Word Secret to Online Success ............................................... 43
CONTACTING JACLYN EASTON ...................................................................................... 45
JACLYN EASTONS DETAILED PROFILE ........................................................................ 46
This book is dedicated to David Rothwell,
the best editor of my career.
Version 1.1 November, 2003
2003, 2004 Jaclyn Easton and Publishing 180
Web Traffic Secrets for 2004 |
INTRODUCTION
By now you must be wondering why I would write this book and then give it away when I could easily sell it to a major publisher.
The short answer is I wanted to raise the integrity bar.
It seems to me that free ebooks about internet marketing are penned by people who only know how to make money from selling ebooks about internet marketing. They have never been truly on the front lines as you are every day. They may be able to sell ebooks, but can they sell goldfish bowls?
On top of that, these ebooks are so infested with affiliate links that you can never really be sure why a product or service is being recommended. Or even why the book was written at all. Some are so lean on substance that I believe they only exist for the author to spike them with his paid referrals.
That is why this book is 100% free of affiliate links.
My opinions are based solely on my experience, not on how much I get paid for a referral. This ebook is based on sound journalism, not speculation and not on who I have an affiliate deal with. The ideas I will share with you are tried-and-true methods from website entrepreneurs on the front lines or just-born concepts based on sage principles.
So what's in it for me? If after reading this book my ideas and expertise impress you and give you the confidence to call me on my By-the-Minute Advice Line (as low as $1.88 per minute), well...I guess I can live with that.
That said, I want you to bear in mind that not every tip is going to be a fit with your web venture because I am writing broadly to accommodate so many different web business models. But this is a good thing. Ideally, pick the five ideas that speak to you the loudest, and implement them. I promise this will keep you busy.
You'll also notice that I don't focus on search engine optimization, payper-click opportunities, link exchanges, pop-unders, pop-overs, or
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interstitals. While these may have value for your business, you are already familiar with these devices. I want to introduce you to some options that are truly out of the ordinary.
My goal is for you to have a fresh perspective in the coming year on traffic-generating possibilities that require little or no money. Im fascinated by web marketing ingenuity it's a landscape that's constantly changing and I love sharing the information. Let me know how it works for you.
All the best,
Jaclyn@JaclynEaston.com
Web Traffic Secrets for 2004 |
CHAPTER 1
Host a Teleclass on Your Expert Topic
(and Its Free to Do, Too!)
This is a promotional strategy I've yet to see anyone do I'll tell you why in a minute but that's precisely the value to you. This concept will get noticed, people will respond to it and, most importantly, it will generate high quality, targeted traffic.
Okay, so let's talk about why no one is doing this. The two main reasons are that (1) conference call lines cost at least $125 month, and (2) your in-bound callers have to pay for the long distance call to the conference line (unless you use a really pricey toll-free in-bound line). But those two objections are about to vanish. Poof. Here's how:
Solution number one is FreeConferenceCall.com. After you sign up you are e-mailed an access code which is good for 30 days. When it expires you can immediately get another one. There is no catch. My friends and I have been using it for more than a year.
The best part is that FreeConferenceCall.com lets you have up to 96 people conferenced at once for up to 6 hours at a time. And the quality is as good as the paid lines. (If you are a technie, know that this is not voice over IP, which uses the Internet and makes everyone sound like they are talking underwater.)
Why is FreeConferenceCall.com free? Well, this is what's posted on the site: "We believe, if you start using our FreeConferenceCall.com service, you will keep coming back and eventually become a pay-forservice customer even though it is not required."
Now that we've gotten rid of the pricey conference line, lets get rid of the long distance costs for in-bound callers. Thanks to cell phones, we can eliminate that problem altogether. Schedule your calls for 9:00pm or later on weekdays, or any time on a weekend and for most people, the entire call will fall into their "free night and weekend minutes.
Next, you want to announce your calls by either posting the information on your site, including the access code information, or you
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can require that people must e-mail you for the access code. I prefer the latter because it allows you to maintain a dialogue with the potential participant. And when you send the access code (you can use an auto-responder for this), you can include more information about your product or service in the event that the person doesn't make the call. (For my own teleclasses I offer the access code information in my free monthly marketing report, which encourages sign-ups and keeps my administrative tasks to a minimum.)
What I love about free teleclasses is that it works for virtually any type of web business. You can even have a "guest" on your call giving it the feel of a radio show. Be sure to give your guest the download link so he can announce it on his high traffic site giving you near-permanent exposure and an excellent association.
For example, if I had a website that sold barbeques and I was hosting a teleclass on hibachi grilling, I would invite the guide from About.com who specializes in barbequing (http://bbq.about.com) to be the guest. Of course, about.com is one of the most visited sites on the web and gets a gazillion hits a day, and having them post an announcement about their appearance would give my site even more publicity.
If you don't have a guest, ask people to email you questions ahead of time that you can respond to on the call. You can also field questions from the "audience" during the call, You're welcome to join one of my teleclasses to hear how I do it. Keep in mind that you also have the
option of recording them on your PC. Offer past calls for downloading or streaming off your site. (As an aside, if you decide to record the call, be sure as a courtesy to your participants to disclose that you are recording the call before you start.)
If you don't have a guest I recommend hosting the call for two or three consecutive days to maximize the opportunity for people to join the call. For example Friday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon.
More important is the length. Keep it to 45 minutes. This time frame is short, sweet and low-risk. If the call is going really, really well you can always extend it.
Lastly, be sure to announce your teleclass with a press release. PRWeb.com is a free service that will disseminate your announcement
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to the editors of newspapers and magazines across the country. You will also want to contact media that specialize in your niche.
Remember, a free teleclass is an attention getter and that's why it has a good chance of getting covered by the media. Free PR is always the brightest green light in your traffic crusade.
Web Traffic Secrets for 2004 |
CHAPTER 2
Capitalize on Off-Beat Calendar Events
Did you know that the month of May is Older Americans Month? Bet you didnt know that Be Kind to Animals Week comes around every May 1-7 or that May 17th is National Playday for Health.
Whats the big deal?
Well heres an opportunity to solve a common sales problem while generating some free publicity at the same time. Not bad, huh?
No matter what you sell, when you offer a special sale, one of the biggest considerations is the consumers perception of the sale. Too many sales project a desperate attempt to dump inventory or are simply not believable.
Offering a special because it's a holiday or national event, however, comes off as a celebration rather than an act of desperation.
Now consider the sales and specials you can tie into these wacky holidays.
Even better, you can issue a press release about your unusual tie-in, which in turn should result in more traffic to take advantage of your sales and specials.
Keep in mind that your tie-in doesnt necessarily have to be about selling product. For example during July, also known as Anti-Boredom month, your site could offer a printable word search puzzle that includes words related to your products or service. Be sure to put your site's Web address on the page so that when people print the puzzle and are working offline, they have your web address directly in front of them. You can generate word search puzzles for free at DiscoverySchool.com, specifically at http://puzzlemaker.com/WordSearchSetupForm.html. When you are done generating your custom puzzle, cut and paste it to your webpage or use your software to save it as a PDF. (By the way, you can see mine at http://www.JaclynEaston.com/wordsearch.pdf ).
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For reference, there is a book that focuses on these special days, weeks and months. It's called Chase's Calendar of Events, a 750-page tome with 12,000 entries representing every cause for notoriety or celebration on the planet. Literally. The book is a bit pricey at about $55.00 (on Amazon.com) but worth it because the information has a long shelf life and you will use it often.
Speaking of which, for these tie-ins to be effective, I recommend limiting them to no more than four times a year to prevent overexposure.
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CHAPTER 3
Create Exclusives
Exclusives are one of the easiest and most effective ways to create a unique selling proposition, one of the three fundamental keys to online success (See Bonus Chapter, The 9 Word Secret to Online Success).
Amazon.com has capitalized on this concept beautifully.
Amazon started carrying product exclusives when it expanded its inventory beyond books and music to begin offering products like the Ceiva internet-enabled picture frame. Several years later Amazons exclusives are much higher profile, the most famous being the Se gwa y Human Transporter.
The point is that if you type segway into Google, the first result is segway.com while the second one is a deep link to Amazons sales page. Think about this: when you have a top 10 ranking especially a position as high as number two who needs pay-per-click?
More importantly, the uniqueness of an exclusive will often motivate your affiliates to give you more promotional screen real estate because its an attention-getter, and has a better chance of generating a referral fee for them.
All that said, you have many different options to offer exclusives:
If you create your own content or products, the best way to make them exclusive is to niche them, which often means have several different versions of a product. (See Chapter 6, Niche, Niche, Niche for suggestions on how to do this.)
If you sell a commodity such as toys, clothing or medical equipment, you can create exclusives by bundling products together and discounting the package deal. This way you are the only online sales outlet to offer these products together at this price which is a great value and hence worthy of promoting.
Another route to exclusivity is closeouts. For example, eHobbies can at
Web Traffic Secrets for 2004 |
any given time have up to 20 closeouts deals, many of which are remnant inventory acquired directly from manufacturers. The deals eHobbies offers on this last-to-market merchandise are amazing.
A typical example of one of these exclusive closeouts is a high-end radio controller which retails for up to $500, but sells on eHobbies for only $75. Of course news of these 85% off deals for no-longer-available merchandise spreads quickly via word-of-email and newsgroups.
My favorite eHobbies anecdote is the acquisition of 500 radiocontrolled toy trucks which originally could only be bought at Toys R Us. Now theres a unique selling proposition an exclusive of an exclusive.
A close relative of exclusivity is urgency, and a great way to create urgency is by having a limited selling cycle. For example, there are several chocolate stores online that only sell nine months of the year because they wont ship during the summer. This makes for a natural urgency when chocolate goes offline at the end of May (stock up!) and come September when it is once more available (stock up again!). Naturally, this urgency translates into notable sales spikes.
Lastly, combining urgency with exclusivity is a powerful combination. If you have only a limited amount of an exclusive product, consider putting a countdown counter on your homepage reporting exactly how many items are left, along with an e-mail this to a friend option. Be warned, your exclusives may not last long with this strategy but isnt that the idea?
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CHAPTER 4
Offer Fabulously Unique Content
How many times has a friend e-mailed you a link to some web content you absolutely must see? Remember the dancing baby? Bet you got emailed that link more than once. How about the two minute Honda TV commercial Cog? I was emailed that link by seven different people.
It seems that nothing attracts attention or makes the rounds faster on the web than something truly unique and/or entertaining.
My first introduction to attracting visitors with unique content occurred in 1997 when I interviewed Dan Harrison, founder of LIHotTubs.com, which he has since renamed PoolAndSpa.com. Dan was admittedly a bit of an O.J. trial addict so he wrote a short article called Jacuzzis and the O.J. Trial, in which he makes the point that if Kato had not forgotten to turn off the jets on the Jacuzzi, O.J. would never have gone to his guesthouse and they probably would not have gone to McDonalds together. According to Harrison, the whole series of seemingly small and insignificant events made Kato famous and helped the prosecutions case all because Kato forgot to turn off the Jacuzzi.
Such details might be overlooked by the untubbed masses, but spa owners find the concept riveting and continue to descend on the site to read the short piece six years after it was originally posted! (http://lihottubs.com/page87.htm).
So I want to challenge you to create something similar for your site. First and foremost it must be fun, but something fun and educational is even better. The more angles you cover the better your chances of getting visitors.
On the site for my latest book, GOING WIRELESS: Transform Your Business with Mobile Technology
(http://www.goingwirelessbook.com/), I included sound files as examples of v-commerce, also known as voice-commerce. These are
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basically vignettes of how v-commerce works, with me interacting with the technology as used by famous brands such as Sears and Office Depot. One in particular makes use of humor, which I am sure has helped attract extra clicks.
My point is that these vignettes have become popular enough that a Google search for the term v-commerce finds GoingWirelessBook.com ranked in the top 10 and a search for voice commerce finds the book in the top 20. (You can hear for yourself at
http://www. goingwirelessbook.com/vcom.html.)
The difficulty in writing about this topic is that its impossible to make specific suggestions because the options vary radically depending on the type of site. Instead I have relied on vivid examples to stimulate your thoughts. The most important thing to remember is to go for the truly unusual, as in the Jacuzzis and O.J. story. This is the one aspect of your web venture where taking a big risk is absolutely your best bet.
Web Traffic Secrets for 2004 |
CHAPTER 5
Contests Will Increase Traffic
(But Only If You Do Something Different)
Dot-com owners have been running contests to get people to visit their sites since the advent of the web. The problem is that most of the contests are rather boring and therefore dont generate much excitement, media attention or, more importantly, visitors.
Before the demise of Pets.com and its charismatic sock puppet, I remember wondering why the online retailer wasnt using its beloved icon for contests to generate some real buzz instead of offering lifeless merchandise.
For example, what if Pets.com had offered a contest where the prize was a visit by the sock puppet to the winners next dinner party or kids birthday celebration? It may not have saved the company from bankruptcy (that was a management issue), but you can bet it would have attracted a ton of press and extra traffic to the website.
As you have no doubt noticed, I suggested a unique prize what one of my favorite marketing gurus, Seth Godin, refers to as a Purple Cow something so fresh and different, something so memorable that people are talking about it at the office and sending emails about it to everyone they know. What I am saying is that the success of your contest will be in direct proportion to the uniqueness not the price tag of your prize.
Let me illustrate.
A few years ago I was an advisor to Arnold Schwarznegger as he launched the first iteration of Schwarzenegger.com. One day I was talking with Arnolds chief financial officer about the launch and suggested that they host a contest. Great, said the CFO, Ill have Arnold sign some crew jackets from his current movie and we can use those.
Now what most people dont know about this celebrity is that hes really into shoes. I was once told that Arnold often buys a pair of shoes
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only to wear them a couple of times before giving them away to his friends. Thats fine, I replied, But how about a few pairs of his shoes? That would really get people talking around the water cooler.
And thats precisely my point. Attention. I literally groan every time I see a digital camera giveaway. Can we get more original? Your prize must have what I call the wow factor to get people excited something so creative or unusual it gets everyones attention. Referring back to my celebrity client, Ill admit that while I do not count myself as a devout admirer of Schwarzeneggers films, I would love to have a pair of his shoes, if only to have people wonder how they ended up in my apartment.
Now if you can afford something with a high price tag, thats great, but if you are going to spend the money, spend it on something really, really big. A classic example of this occurred in the earliest days of the web 1995 and it remains one of my favorites. Cathay Pacific Airlines was giving away to one lucky person a million frequent flyer miles. It was so successful you could practically hear the mice frantically clicking to get to CathayPacific.com.
Just about now you may be thinking, Yes, contests are great, but the extra visitors rarely translate to more sales because these people are interested only in the contest. Of course you are right and thats often why sites neglect to run contests. However, marketers who think this way are too focused on a quick return on investment. They are missing a golden opportunity to improve search engine rankings through the additional visitors and links a great contest can bring.
Therefore the goal for your contest should be as much about traffic as it is about sales. If you get one million visitors and only 500 extra sales, consider it a success. The results will be apparent the next time you look at your search engine rankings.
I realize that coming up with unique and exciting ideas for contests may not necessarily be what you are good at. Thats okay. I suggest you gather up your most creative friends via a free conference call (see Chapter 1), and ask them to brainstorm.
The trick to making these brainstorming sessions work is to have each member of your group offer their worst idea first. Its a great way to break the ice and make people comfortable sharing their ideas.
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Ironically, the worst ideas often contain a nugget that gives another person in the group the inspiration for a great idea. If you come up with more than one good idea and dont know which one to go with, feel free to email me what you consider your three best options and I will be happy to give you my opinion. (Jaclyn@JaclynEaston.com)
Finally, I thought it might be helpful to describe what I consider the most successful contest in web history. The contest started more than seven years ago at JellyBelly.com, the homepage of the famous jelly bean company, and is still going. Every day JellyBelly.com gives away 600 sample bags of Jelly Bellys to the first 600 visitors to the site who request them (500 to US visitors; 100 to Canadian visitors). But heres the catch (and the wow factor): the time for the giveaway changes every day. Today it might be 1:00pm and tomorrow it might be 3:00am. And thats the fun and effective part. It takes the average visitor 4-5 tries to win. People become relentless in their pursuit of the sample. How would you like this kind of stickiness for your site?
To date Jelly Belly has given away over 1.3 million sample bags, asking market research questions as winners fill out their shipping info. At least thats what Im told. I havent won yet.
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CHAPTER 6
Niche, Niche, Niche
Its one of the surest laws of marketing and yet rarely do business people heed its principle: niche your product or service and you sell more, not less. Why? Because buyers always prefer a specialist to a generalist.
But I understand your objection.
You want the biggest possible potential pool of customers.
But wait. You can niche and still appeal to the widest demographic. I |