For any small business, attracting qualified visitors to your website can be a challenging task, but with a bit of creative thinking there are lots of ways that you can drive qualified visitors to your website for free.   Don’t feel that you need to rely on external companies to do the work for you.  We’ve pulled together 25 ideas to help get your creative juices flowing. Don’t be overwhelmed if you are not familiar with certain points.  You can skip those and come back to them later on when you are more familiar.

1. Search Engine Optimisation - Create lots of pages of useful written content on your website that are rich in keywords that would attract your target audience.  With more pages of content, search engines will then have more content to work on and doing this regularly will help you push your way up the search engines natural listings.
2. Twitter – Send out exclusive offers to your Twitter followers, give them information for free.  Direct your followers back to your website.
   
3. Facebook fan page- If you have a Facebook Fan Page then you can promote an offer on your Facebook Fan Page and/or create a status update for your fans about an exclusive offer, or something that adds value to them.
4. Facebook status updates – If you create new content on you website, tell your friends what you are working on in your Facebook status updates.
5. Ask those in step 4 to spread the word with a link to your website
   
6. Linked In status updates – Tell your network about a particular offer or something of value they can receive from your website.
7. Ask those in step 6 to spread the word with a link to your website
   
8. Linked In groups - Engage in discussions in Linked In and direct where relevant to pages on your website of interest to the discussion.
9. Linked In questions and answers – Look for people who have questions, with answers that you can help them and include a link to your website only if it genuinely helps them.
   
10. YouTube – Create a YouTube video that adds value to your market, or solves a particular problem. Be sure to use your keywords in your description and a link back to your website at the top of your description. And don’t forget to include a link to your website in the video itself (just in case a visitor comes via the YouTube route).
11. Free business directory – Search for business directories with free listings and place a website link.
12. Press release offline - Create a news worthy article about your business and distribute to the media.  Ensure that your article adds value to your market and that you have a link back to your website (or at least you can be found on Google from the article).
13. Press relase online – Disseminate your press release to media online to get links back to your website.
    
14. Comment on other websites on related articles and create links back to your website (even if this is a link under your signature).
15. Create articles for other websites – If you have a passion and knowledge for a particular topic are feeling creative in writing, then why not write guest posts on other blogs with a link back to your website.  
    
16. Email marketing – Distribute a message to your existing contacts via email, including an offer or something of value to your audience to encourage them to open your email and click through.
17. Ask those in step 16 to spread the word with a link to your website.
18. Social media bookmarking – Include social media bookmarking on your website pages so that visitors can spread the word about you.
19. RSS feeds - Include an RSS feed on your website so that visitors who are interested in your website can read your latest website posts into their home page or news feed reader.
20. Build relationships with bloggers online who operate within a similar target market to you.  Ultimately they may be able to help to promote your website to their followers.
21. Build relationships with Linked In Group adminsitrators and encourage them to like you enough to spread the word about your website to their network.
22. Build relationships with Facebook Fan Page administrator and encourage them to like you enough to spread the word about your website to their fans.
23. Affiliate relationships with other businesses to refer to your products
24. Don’t forget every email to have an email signature including a link to your website
25. Contact companies with a similar market (but not competing product) and if it is possible offer a free sample to their customers or a special offer.  You could also approach e-commerce companies who may be willing to include special offers for their parcels out to customers.

Remember, it is important to embrace a giving and supportive mentality for your visitor, rather making a sale with every action when you attract visitors to your website.  Your visitors are more likely to engage with you if you give to them and don’t expect them to buy on the initial point of contact.  It is no use to attracting qualified visitors if they don’t engage with you when they arrive at your website.  You can give things away for free in the form of information, or ideally a sample product.

Lewis Howes brings you a great video on adding value to your visitors on is post Increase Blog Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales With Michael Dunlop. You can take aspects of this video and apply them directly to your website. It doesn’t have to be a blog.

The other important thing is that quite naturally with these strategies you are creating links to your website which search engines love.  This in itself will help with your search engine rankings.

Don’t try and do everything as it will become overwhelming.  These are things that you can pick and choose to try and see what works for your business.  If you do more things simultaneously then you will see a greater effect on your website visitors.

A final note is when doing any of the above to drive traffic to your website it is generally more effective to take visitors directly to a specific page or offer, rather than taking an overall approach of directing to your home page.

What other things can you do to drive qualified visitors to your website that are Free?  Please give your feedback, ideas and comments below.

If you found this useful, then you might also like 27 ways to increase conversion rates from your website visitors

Ideas of Videos To Market Your Business

When I picked the brains of Kevin Lycett of CDS studio recently around marketing your business using YouTube and creating video online generally to create exposure for your business there were a number of key points for you to take away with you.

1. Video helps you to boost relationships with your visitors and customers via your website through building trust
2. Video can help you to pitch yourself as an expert in your field as you can communicate what you know to benefit your visitors and customers.
3. Video is easy to produce and relatively low cost
4. You have a number of places to publish your video including YouTube, Vimeo, Google and Face book. YouTube massively dominates the market place with over 6 million videos seen every day.
5. YouTube presents opportunities for your business to reach very large audiences.
6. YouTube presents amazing free marketing opportunities for your business.

Bearing all the benefits in mind, still many small and medium businesses are not taking full advantage of creating video to engage with their website visitors and build relationships with their customers. Are you?

Aside from the perceived technical barriers that I will be addressing very shortly in a separate article, there also seems to be a barrier or block around what types of videos to produce.

What Types Of Video Do You Have At Your Disposal To Market Your Business Via Video Today?

As I always like to take things at a very simple level, a simple answer to this question is any video that helps your target audience to solve a specific problem is great.

The key then is to find out about the needs and problems experienced by your target audience and then you have a couple of options:

a) Ideally solve these by producing videos of the things that you do every day anyway

• Video individuals within your business giving presentations that solve a need of your target audience
• Capture a real life video of your business creating a real product in action

or

b) You can take time out to address these needs.

• Video yourself talking through a solution to a problem to a camera
• Help your audience to learn how to solve a particular problem by giving a short training video using a free screen capture program such as jing. Here your audience can follow a sequence of steps that you make on your computer screen.
• Ask someone to interview you about your business on video
• Capture customer testimonials
• Create an introductory video explaining about your business and ethics

Remember that you have a mass of resources at your disposal, but sometimes you can experience a creative block. I’ll be coming on to creative blocks later, but to get things moving …

Action Step
Think about 3 situations in the next month that will be happening for your business that you could video to benefit your target audience. Get a basic handheld digital camera and video them.

I’ll be helping you to maximise this action step and opportunity for your business even further over the course of this week, so keep posted.

You have a goldmine of knowledge in your head to share with people that would benefit your website visitors and customers. Nobody knows your customers like you do and what you don’t know, you could ask your customers direct to gather more ideas. What is a frequently asked question that you could publish as a video? Chunk down your knowledge and create short snippets of video that are a couple of minutes long. Always carry a video camera with you as you never know when an opportunity arises.

And remember, it can take time and practice to get used to the idea of video, but the more you do it the easier it gets. Personally I know I have lots of room for improvement and will enjoy every minute practicing.

If you have any questions or experiences that you would like to share, please comment below.

What is a website conversion rate?

Well the answer to this is to divide the number of visitors who come to your page and take the course of action that you require by the total number of visitors to reach a percentage.

To give you an idea about the type of conversion rates that you can expect from a website are that an averagely performing website is likely to convert to at around 1% where as a well performing website is likely be around 4%. These give you a realistic indication of how it is unlikely that you are going to get a result from say 60% of visitors, because more people stumble across information in the online world and there are often many choices to visitors to jump out of your fish bowl and into another one.  We need to look at how to get visitors to stick with you and engage with you going forward.

Many businesses consider how their website looks in representing their brand, but do not think about engaging visitors and asking them to take a particular course of action. Adding features to your website to engage visitors has many benefits to your bottom line including providing the ability to engage with people who have an interest in your offering and build a relationship with them. If you don’t attempt to engage with your visitors, then you may have lost 4% of your visitors in becoming prospects and even customers and all that effort to get them there in the first place is wasted. Plus all the positive words they could be spreading about you.

In addition to this, if you engage with your visitors then you can keep them coming back to your website through your communications.  This has the added benefit of increasing the number of ‘qualified’ and interested visitors to your website.

28 Ways to Increase Conversion Rates From Your Website Visitors

Here are some ideas for you, but you don’t think that you have to jump right in there and do everything.  Consider what would work for your business.

Ask for the conversion in the first place
1. Make a product/s available to buy
2. Add an email subscription
3. Add an email autoresponder sequence
4. Add an RSS feed (e.g. blog)
5. Add social media bookmarking
6. Ask visitors to share
7. Add a prominent phone number
8. Add click to call features
9. Ask visitors to post comments
10. Ask visitors to follow a link
11. Add affiliate links/products
12. Ask for reviews and testimonials
13. Ask for inbound links
14. Create an irresistable offer that your visitors just can not refuse

The point being that conversion rates are not always about sales, but are about how much your visitors are engaging with you on a particular course of action that you would like them to take. The key is to know the outcome that you want to achieve, ask your visitors to do the thing that you want them to do and then measure it. Here are some tips and ideas for increasing conversion rates…

15. Know the outcome that you want before you set to work
16. Try out things that have worked off-line, online
17. Create a very prominent and clear call to action
18. Use different font sizes and colours to draw attention to specific calls to action
19. Use graphics to draw attention to a call to action
20. Experiment with video to draw attention to a call to action
21. Use a call to action relevant to your website within your press releases
22. Experiment with page titles
23. Use different page layouts and see what layout attracts the best results

Measure and Improve

Once you have things in place, you need to know how your website is performing for you and there are lots of tools available to you to measure outcomes and test methods for improvement.

24. Implement Google analytics and analyse your metrics
25. Create goals within Google analytics to measure conversions
26. Use the goal conversion feature within Google Adwords
27. Split test landing pages to see which generates the greater conversion rates
28. Monitor email signup rates through your email delivery programme

The key is to build relationships with visitors to your website and make improvements to how you do things over time. There is no right and wrong answer and you know best what works for your business, so experiment, measure and improve and don’t always feel that you have to take ‘expert advice’ on board. Listen to your customers, have confidence in yourself and don’t be affraid to try different things.

Share your comments and experiences below.

The  easiest product or service to market is one that solves a problem.  This probably sounds very obvious, but it is one of the most common mistakes that I come across when speaking with businesses.  All too often a product is created by an individual and then resources are consumed because it is then a battle to push the product on to the customer.

If you have an existing product then identify problems that the product or service solves.  Don’t just look at the product in it’s own right.  If you have customers using the product already, contact them and ask them about how the product has made their life easier, speeded up the job, save costs etc.  When you ask open questions, you may even find that your product solves needs that you hadn’t previously considered.

If you are in the early stages of defining a business idea or product, then you can do searches on discussion forums and blogs to find out problems faced by your target market.  You are likely to be more successful entering into a proven market and differentiating your business in some way, such as quality of service, speed etc.

The key is to be market led and geared towards solving problems.  The common mistake is to focus upon the brilliant product that ‘everyone will love’.  A lesson here is that the product never sells itself.  It’s all in how well it is marketed.  A bad product marketed well will be more successful than an excellent product with poor marketing.  So… the secret  is to understand the problems that your product or service resolves and get really good at marketing.  That is what we can help you with.