The Easiest Way to Get More Traffic

Get traffic!

It doesn’t matter what kind of site you have. You must
get traffic to your site!

If you don’t get traffic you might as well not develop and
maintain an internet site.

What is the best way to get traffic to your site without having to
spend a million hours on Twitter and Facebook to let people know about
your site?

Before I answer that question I’m going to talk about Twitter and
Facebook for a minute.

Twitter is great because there are so many people out there who use it. If you send a tweet there could easily be thousands of people who see it!

Twitter has about 160 million monthly users. Granted, only a
few of them may click the link to your site; but still, that’s better than
nothing. That’s free traffic!

Facebook is great for virtually the same reason. Facebook has about
500 million active users [Check both of the links above for stats.] When people comment on Facebook the comments are not as ignored as they are on Twitter.

Twitter is like almost blindly hunting with a shotgun and Facebook is more like hunting with a scoped rifle.

My advice for getting traffic to your sites without having to work too hard is to add tweet and like buttons to your
pages. [I would add the like button to my blog but it’s not
available for WordPress.com.] *There is a like button that is automatically built into WordPress.com.

This is important because every time someone sees something they
like they can shoot the shotgun and rifle for you. This means
you have people encouraging their friends [people you don’t even know] to visit your site.

All you have to do is post interesting content, add a couple of
share buttons and let your visitors do the work for you.

I would still recommend doing your own tweets and
Facebook status updates to let people know about your updated content, but don’t do it alone. Let your visitors help you.

I’m sure you will see how helpful this is. Also, keep an eye on what
people are tweeting. This will help you have an idea of what
type of content your visitors like. Keep this in mind as you prepare more content for your site.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Check out my Facebook and Twitter categories and “Tweet” them if you like them. I’d like more traffic so feel free to fire the Twitter shotgun and Facebook rife for me. =)

Why You Shouldn’t Let Everyone Follow You

Let’s pretend you own a high-end women’s sunglasses store. A mysterious yet magical man comes up to you and tells you he will drive some traffic to your store. You can either have a flood of traffic in one day but cannot
select the traffic demographic or you can have a custom picked list of fashionable women, but would have to wait a whole week. Which would you choose?

Obviously you would choose the second option. Why spend time selling expensive women’s glasses to a crowd of men, children, homeless and uninterested people?

This same principle is true with using Twitter.

If you are wanting to have a successful Twitter campaign you need to locate your primary target audience and find out how to effectively communicate with them.

You want to have as many followers on Twitter as possible but there are some key points to remember.

1. If you follow too many people at once you could appear as a spammer. Limit yourself to no more than 1oo followers a day.
2. You want to keep the follower/following ratio close. Not more than a 10% difference.

Takeing a little extra time to find your target market is well worth the effort.

Develop a quality following.

1. Go to Twellow and follow your target audience. Follow 50-100 people a day.
2. Know your key audience so that you can craft tweets that will be of interest to your followers and will likely be retweeted.

The benefits:

1. Get Google and Bing to index your tweets more often by having your followers retweet your keywords they like.
2. You can effectively monitor your followers (target market) and get to understand their needs and wants. [You can’t do this if your followers are not in your target market.]
3. Increase your brand awareness and get more customers.

Final tip: Lead your Twitter followers to your Facebook account. Facebook is where you can build the strongest relationship with them. Think of Twitter as a business card and Facebook as a one-on-one dinner.

Happy follower hunting!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Twitter Tips – Things You Should Know

“If excellence is an option why settle for anything less.” by Mike Gorman. If you are going to use Twitter you should use it with excellence. Here are some tips that can make the difference between mediocre Twitter use and excellent Twitter use.

• Make sure your bio includes keywords. Google looks for keywords in the bio. Because of this you should try to include as many keywords as possible in this section.

• You can create a custom Twitter landing page to prevent people from seeing a bunch of random 140 character tweets. You may have great content on your news feed, but the first impression a potential customer gets should be controlled. You are able to ensure that your first time visitors will see what you want them to see by creating a custom Twitter page. This is the same principle that can be found from the “Don’t let people see your Facebook wall!” post.

• Make every follower you get count. Don’t get followers just for the sake of getting followers. Get followers that can benefit you. This could include industry peers, customers or some other specific niche audience.

• Use a profile photo. People relate better with humans than they do with inanimate objects and logos. Do you want to relate well with your audience? Use a human face for your avatar.

• Use Twellow to find your target audience. Twellow is the “yellow pages” of Twitter.

• A word of warning, don’t become follow happy. If you follow too many people too quickly your account could become suspended. You are thought to be spamming “If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;” by Twitter.com.

• How not to get suspended – The Twitter Rules

• Putting a Twitter feed on your website can help with your website search engine optimization.

• Here’s a link to get a twitter widget

• Here’s a video about Twitter and website SEO

I hope these tips help you  as you develop your Twitter presence.

Good luck with your tweeting and on Friday I’ll explain the importance of custom selecting your social media followers and fans.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Tweet Content: What Your Business Should be Tweeting

You want to have great content that will make your appear to be an expert in your field and will also be of great interest to your readers. First I’m going to give you some tips on getting great content to share. Then I will explain how to make your tweets benefit you.

One tweet should include a tip that could benefit your customers.

Example – If I’m in the signage industry I would tweet that “You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering on the side.”

One tweet should include a quote that would be of interest to your reader.

Almost everyone in my target audience is employed. Therefore I use quotes that involve work. The quote will have to be short enough to include both the name of the author and the quote itself.

One tweet should be a link to an article or video.

This could be a link to a relevant article or maybe a video. It should lead the reader to something interesting to read or watch.

One tweet should lead your reader to an interesting fact.

If you’re in the movie industry you might tweet that “Today is Brad Pitts’ birthday.”

These tweets are of course not set in stone. It’s rather challenging to find a ton of interesting facts for the signage industry. It may be much easier and just as interesting to tweet a link to the “Pic of the Day.” (Photos of the best or funniest signs made)

Spend a few hours at the beginning of each month and select tips, quotes, articles/videos, facts and/or something else of interest.

Now that you have selected your tweets you can sit back and just post them each day.

Every now and then you will see something interesting that you think could be a good tweet. Feel free to go to Twitter and tweet it. It never hurts to share good information. Just don’t try so hard to post something that you start posting junk. Don’t post stupid content just for the sake of posting something.

How to make your tweets benefit you:

You want to make sure that every tweet has you business name and a keyword that you want to be associated with. This is key!

For example: “Signage Company Name: Vinyl lettering: Vehicle wrap tip: You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering.”

Personally I don’t care about the tip. I care that my name is in the tweet along with keywords. (Vinyl lettering and Vehicle wrap) The reason for the tip is to get my audience to retweet my name next to some keywords. This is what Google is looking for. It wants to see that people are interested in what I have to say.

I hope this helps you feel more comfortable with what to tweet and I hope it helps you with your Google rankings.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Tweet Tweet – Why Twitter is Awesome!

I used to think that Twitter was just a giant world-wide chatroom that was never offline. Why bother getting a lot of followers on Twitter? There is no good reason! That’s what I used to think. I recently learned however that Twitter is extremely valuable.

Twitter is valuable because Google indexes everything that is said in Twitter. Let’s say you just opened a new business that sells furniture in your city. How in the world are you going to build a reputation equal to or greater than the veteran furniture stores in the area? You will use Twitter.

When Google sees keywords used in Twitter it catalogues them and classifies them as important. Lets say you tweet “Your Company Name: Your City: Classic wood tables. http://www.yourcompanyname.com” Now, Google knows that your company and classic wood tables are related to each other. Then, when someone is looking for classic wood tables in Google your name [which is obviously relevant because of Twitter] will appear.

The more people tweet and re-tweet about you, the more Google sees you and the more relevant you appear. If you want to pop up first in a Google search you should use Twitter, include your name and include keywords relevant to you.

I hope this helps you begin to understand the importance of Twitter.

Thanks for reading,

Joshua Lyons