compliments of Martin Pavion -- http://geekcrets.com/
5 Marketing Strategies To Avoid
There is a huge market online for people who have just begun an online business and are now completely overwhelmed with bringing visitors to it. There are products, services, e-book and consultants who will tell you about how to get millions of people visiting your site and - not surprisingly, they'll also be trying to get money for it.
There are a lot of scams out there when it comes to bringing
visitors to websites so today I'm going to outline methods you should
either avoid completely or understand how to be careful with them.
Not Recommended: Paid Search-Engine Submissions
There are companies offering to submit your website to thousands of search engines. Realistically how many search engines do you think people really use? Search engines only become popular if they can provide the most relevant search results and any small search engine that does not have a way of finding your website unless you manually submit your information is not going to work very well.
Realistically you only need to make sure that your website is indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask. If any other search engine is worth using it will find you through the listings of the main search engines anyway.
Don't confuse paid search engines with paid directory submissions though. Directories tend to require you enter a lot more information about your website such as the postal address, owners name etc. These can take a lot of time and paying for directory submissions might be a good idea.
Not Recommended: Banner Exchange Networks
Banner exchanges work by asking you to display member's adverts on your website and, in exchange they will display your banners on theirs. Banner exchanges are usually free but they are generally a waste of time.
Free banner exchange networks usually give you very poor ratios. Often you'll have to display 2 banners on your site to have just one of yours displayed elsewhere.
Another big problem with Banner exchange networks is that you have no idea where you advert is being shown. You can't be sure of the target market of the site nor can you be sure if your banner will look appropriate or if it is placed in a visible part of the screen. 0.2% has been cites frequently as the standard click through rate for a 'normal' banner campaign. With banners in a banner exchange I'd expect that you'd probably have to get over 5,000 page views before you get one or two clicks.
If you are considering banner exchanges, you would be better to use the space doing a banner exchange with a site within your industry.
Big Scam: Guaranteed Search Engine Placements
It is extremely easy to get a top #1 ranking in any search engine - as long as you are not fussy about what phrase you are ranked for.
To give you an example, do a search for any of the following phrases in Google and see which website comes up #1. Make sure you include the quotations so that Google searches for the exact phrase.
"worlds most impressive man boobs"
"worlds most passionate lover"
"worlds most productive employee"
As you'll see, the results are my own web page. I created it for a joke. I'll be extremely surprised if I ever get real visitors who come to my site by typing those kind of phrases though.
When you see companies advertising for top ten Google positions it
is very likely that the company is going to either get you listed in
Google's top ten for a search phrase that nobody ever types in, or
they'll simply run with your money.
Big Scam: Pay For Millions of Visitors To Your Site
These offers are available everywhere. What is never mentioned is exactly where these visitors come from. What actually happens is that you do receive millions of visitors to your site, but no more than a handful will ever be genuinely interested in what you are selling.
These companies generate these visitors in a number of ways, they might use Autosurf advertising for example which will bring people to your site but they'll probably not even be in front of the screen at the time.
Don't pay money for this type of opportunity when you'll not receive any genuine targeted visitors.
Not Recommended: Alexa Boosting Software / Services
As your website begins to attract search engines you'll find yourself listed in the Alexa Directory. Alexa is a website ranking service which provides each website with a number which relates to how many visitors their website receives. The number is your ranking on the internet compared to other websites and Alexa #1 is currently Yahoo.com. Your site should hopefully start off with a high number and gradually get lower as your site grows.
So what's the point of an Alexa ranking? There is very little value associated with it. It's a status symbol perhaps to say "my website is in the top 100,000 internet sites" but if it is already doing that well then you'll already be making money from it.
There are services and computer programs which you can use to constantly visit your web pages so that Alexa will increase your ranking and yet they don't do anything of use. There really is no point having an artificial Alexa ranking if 90% of your visitors are also artificial.
