Previously, we’ve touched on some ways to keep your visitors loyal by providing content that will be relevant and useful to them, in addition to keeping your website updated on a regular basis. But there are also a few ways to not only attract website visitors to your site, but to keep them coming back for more, thus increasing the profit that you can make from your visitors. Here are some more methods that you can use as a webmaster:

• Use Social Media Buttons

Social media is all about staying in touch. While the primary purpose is obviously staying in touch with people, social media can also be a very good tool for businesses that want to stay in touch with their customers or visitors. Take a look at any website for a large company. You will often see a “Follow Us On Twitter” or “Check us out on Facebook” type of link and a social media button. If the top companies in the industry are doing this, why shouldn’t you? It doesn’t take much. Simply create a social media page on the networks you want to use and then place the buttons on your site. Interested visitors will then follow you on these social networks if they want to.

• Maintain a Blog on Your Site

It may not always be easy to highlight new updates, depending on the configuration and layout of your website. But a blog is perfectly designed for that. Simply including a blog on your website will allow visitors to see recent updates, as well as get information on things that are relevant to your niche. It also has some great benefits for SEO. People see blogs as a more “personal” way of communicating, so they are more likely to read them than the content of a “commercial” website.

• Add a Forum to Your Site if You Can

Of course, this will not be a solution for everyone, but it will work for many webmasters. Create a forum and add it to your site. There are plenty of free forum scripts available and many webhosts already include a few in their web hosting packages. Set up a discussion forum on your site which will contain categories such as FAQ’s, new announcements, industry discussions, etc. You can populate the forum with stickies containing tutorials on how to use your products or services, frequently asked questions about your business, etc. Your website users can then create threads if they have questions or if there is something that they do not like about your website or business. This gives you an insight of what your visitors think about your site and also opens up another avenue of communication with them.

These are all excellent methods if you want to make your visitors come back to your site often. But the main element that you must remember is this: give your visitors what they want. If they like your content, they will naturally want to come back.

Some websites are more designed for visitors to only visit the site once to make a purchase. After that, there is really no more reasons for the user to visit the site again. This is usually the case when it comes to eBook sales pages or landing pages for CPA offers. However, there are many other types of websites where you would want the user to come back often. This includes e-commerce sites, as well as many other sites that do not directly sell anything, but are there to provide content to the user, such as informational blogs or “arcade” type sites that provide flash games. Usually the webmaster profits from these sites by including CPA advertising banners or pay per click ads on their site. Now one question that webmasters often ask is: how do I make my visitors come back? There are a few ways you can accomplish this. Here are some of the most important ones:

• First, provide useful content

Obviously, for a user to come back later, they must have enjoyed the site and found it interesting. So your first responsibility would be to give your audience something that they are interested in, something that they would want to look at. Also, make sure that the content that you put on your site is of high quality. So if you have an informational blog on a certain topic, make sure that the posts would actually make someone learn something, are well written and well presented. Nobody wants to read a blog that is filled with poor grammar, contains tons of information that is just copied from other places on the internet and stuffed with keywords.

• Update your content regularly

Having a site that looks “dead” will not do much to bring back visitors. If a visitor sees that the last update that you have made to your site was several months ago, they will not be too inclined to come back, thinking that the website has been abandoned and will not be updated. As such, it is very important that you add fresh and new content to your website on a regular basis. If you have an e-commerce site, feature some different products on your home page every once in a while. Or better yet, offer some special promotions on some merchandise and advertise this on the main page of your site. Put in some news about upcoming products or promotions. If the user knows that you will be adding new things to your website in the future, they will be more likely to book mark the site and will come back later on to check out the new things that you have added.

These are all basic things that you can do to increase visitor loyalty. Tomorrow we will explore some additional items that you can add to your site to increase repeat visits and potentially make more profit from your website‘s returning visitors.

Many small business owners have one main website which contains information about their company and their products. Sometimes it is an e-commerce site where customers can make purchases directly through the site. Obviously, having a website is useful, but what about a blog? Including a blog has many benefits. In fact, some online marketing studies have shown that sites which incorporate a blog get more traffic than a site without one. After all, who doesn’t want to attract more visitors to their website?

Besides the increased traffic, blogs can have many additional benefits for your site. Here are some of them:

• They can increase your search engine ranking

Search engines such as Google love high quality blogs and having one on your site can do wonders to increase your search engine ranking. It can also provide you with useful backlinks back to your main site as well as relevant parts of it, such as product descriptions.

• They can establish you as an authority in your niche

The purpose of a blog for a business is not really to sell anything, but rather to show you as an authority in your niche by providing content which your readers will find useful. You can give information about how to best use your products, news about your industry, as well as any advice or tips that your readers will appreciate.

• Blogs give you another place to interact with your visitors

When you post articles on your blog, you can allow readers to leave comments. This is a great way to get feedback about your blog and your business. It is also an excellent way to answer questions that a customer might have about a certain product. Blog comments give your visitor an easy way to get in touch with you should they be interested in something that you offer, but might not be ready to buy it just yet. Of course, with blog comments there is always the issue of comment spam. However, there are various WordPress plugins that you can use to limit the amount of spam comments that you get. Of course, you can always approve each comment manually, thus eliminating most of the spam. Putting a notice that comments are moderated and approved manually will also serve to deter spammers.

Getting the Most out of Your Blog

To get the most out of a blog, it needs to be updated on a regular basis with fresh new content. This will not only help you when it comes to SEO, but will also be very useful at keeping your readers interested. After all, nobody wants to read a blog that seems “dead” and hasn’t had an update in several months. A good thing about blogs is that you can now include multimedia content such as video on them as well, so if you have a video that you would like to share with your readers, you can put it up on your blog as well.

If you want to make some money online by promoting affiliate offers, then there are various ways for you to accomplish this. You could building landing pages for each offer you push, or even link directly to the offer depending on which advertising channel you use. But one of the ways to push affiliate offers online is by simply creating a blog.

Blogs have many advantages. They make it very easy to add unique and new content, which will help them remain interesting with readers and also make SEO easier. With blogging platforms such as Joomla and WordPress, creating your own blog has never been easier. So how do you make one for affiliate marketing? Here is an example scenario:

Let’s say that you are promoting web hosting affiliate offers. The main topic of your blog will be web hosting, or issues that are of interest to other internet marketers or webmasters. You would make regular posts such as: web building tips, reviews of particular web hosts, comparisons between different types of web hosting, SEO advice, etc. Basically, anything that is related to being a webmaster.

There will be various ways for you to “plug” the affiliate ads into your blog. You can, of course use classic banner ads, or text ads placed in prominent locations. But it is also possible for you to include affiliate links inside the text of your blog. For example, you could link the name of a web host that you talk about in a blog post to the affiliate offer.

But one important thing to remember when you are creating a blog for affiliate marketing is to not make it look like this is the only purpose of your blog. Sure, for you the main objective of your blog would be to generate money for you. But your readers come to your blog in order to be informed about something they care about, not simply read post after post that is singing praises of various different companies and products.

So back to our example of a web hosting blog. Sure, it is fine to have certain posts talk about how great a certain web host is, or that inform readers of a special promotion that a hosting company is having at this time. But you also need to include some informative content as well. So you could make some posts that talk about web design tools or posts that explain how VPS web hosting is different from shared hosting, etc. If your readers notice that your blog is nothing more than an advertising platform, chances are they won’t trust it very much. They will probably leave to go to another site and the chances that someone would click one of your ads and sign up for one of the web hosts that you are pushing are quite remote if your blog is structured that way. Basically, the key to success is having regularly updated and informative content.

If you are thinking of putting up a blog on the internet, one of the main things that you would be thinking of would be how to make some money from it. Perhaps you may have heard about some bloggers earning good money from their blog and were wondering whether it would be possible for you to do the same. Well, the answer is yes, but just like with anything else related to earning money online, you will need to put a lot of effort into it to make it work. Here let’s explore some of the easiest methods of monetizing your blog first:

• AdSense and other pay per click ads

This is considered by many bloggers to be one of the easiest ways to monetize a blog. It is also the most simple and straightforward. Essentially, you would be putting pay per click ads on your blog and will be receiving a certain sum of money whenever someone will click on one of the ads. These could be text ads, or banner ads. These days, advertisement distribution networks will automatically cause ads that are related to the topic of your blog to be displayed, so they will be more relevant and thus more likely to be click on by viewers. For example, if you have a blog that talks about politics, the ads that are displayed are likely to be more or less related to this topic, such as political polls, websites for candidates or political parties, etc.

While Google AdSense is the most popular of pay per click advertisement networks among bloggers, there are several other smaller ad networks out there such as AdBrite and Bidvertiser. The amount of money that you will make from having these ads on your blog will ultimately depend on how many visitors click on them. So the more traffic your blog gets, the higher the amount of revenue that you can generate from pay per click advertisements on it will be. This creates a good incentive for you to promote your blog well and to have regular interesting updates on it.

• Putting up a “donate” button on your blog

This is quite straightforward. You can put a PayPal (or Moneybookers, or AlertPay, or any other payment system) button on your blog that will be there to let users donate a bit of money to support your blogging efforts. If the content of your blog is very interesting and it is read by a lot of people, you can make some money just by donations from readers. However, don’t expect to make thousands a month, unless you have a REALLY high traffic blog. Sure, it’s possible that a billionaire will stop by your blog, really like it and then decide to make a six figure donation. This has happened. But the odds of that happening to you are roughly equivalent to the odds of winning the lottery. Still you will probably make a few bucks, enough to cover your hosting fees and maybe pay for your internet connection.

Blogs are increasingly being used by businesses, who are making it an important part of their overall internet marketing strategy. Thus, blogs are not only a tool for individuals to share some information with their friends, but can also become a very effective business tool. Even though they can be effective for business, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind before you put together a blog with the goal of promotions your website or your business.

The primary advantage of using a blog is that it will serve to give your business some personality as well as originality. Unlike a website where the primary purpose is to sell the product or service that you are offering to the visitor, a blog gives you the chance to connect more with your visitors and provide them with some useful information about your line of business. So, let’s say that you own a web hosting company. In that case, you can make a blog and make posts about the various types of web hosting, the differences between them, providing web development and online advertising advice, etc.

This will give you the opportunity to better connect to your audience and not sound like you are trying to sell them things all the time. Your blog should also feature images, graphs and videos where applicable. Don’t choose a bland template as a design for your blog and simply make it a wall of text. Many readers would be turned off by this and even though the content may be very interesting, they will not be very inclined to read it if it is not presented in a good way to them.

Another important point that every webmaster needs to keep in consideration when building a business blog: don’t start a blog with the simple intention of advertising your products, services or websites. While you can include links to your website and your offerings, don’t make blog posts whose only purpose is to promote what you have without adding any real value for the reader.

The rise in popularity of affiliate marketing and CPA offers has had the effect of also increasing the number of fake blogs or “flogs”, which are websites that are designed to look like a normal blog, but where all the posts are actually thinly disguised advertising. If a user is web savvy, chances are they have seen such pages a few times before. So if you make your blog look too much like a flog, readers will assume that it is one and will simply move on to another site. Obviously this is not something that you want.

The best thing to do is to create a blog that is informative to the users, friendly and does not contain too much advertising material. Your site visitors will be more likely to find interest in it if the blog looks attractive to them and provides them with information that they find useful.

These days, there are many people who earn a living online through various ways. While there are plenty of methods that allow you to make cash online, providing services to businesses and other internet marketers is one of the top ways to get cash flowing in very quickly. There are a few reasons for this. Basically, there is a huge demand for services that help others market their products on the internet. You also have the advantage of being paid right away. No more waiting for months for affiliate checks to arrive in the mail.

If you would like to make money by providing services, there are plenty of things that you can do, such as:

• Creating short online videos
• Building Backlinks or other SEO work
• Web page design
• Article writing
• Blog post writing
• Sales page creation (copywriting)
• Any other service that is in high demand and useful to those who conduct business online

Now, we all know that providing services to other participants in the online business industry is something that can bring in a lot of cash right away. So, why aren’t more people doing it? Do they not recognize the potential that it has?

Well, the thing is, many people recognize the potential. But there are two main reasons why they don’t take a piece of the profits:

• Lack of time
• Lack of necessary skills

The thing is, providing services online takes some time. Imagine if you have to write 50 blog posts each day for a client. This will require you to be at your computer almost 24 hours, even if you are a skilled blog post writer. While this would probably bring you a decent profit of around $200 to $300 if you made 50 blog posts, what draws people to the online marketing and work at home scenes is the ability to earn money without spending too much of your time working.

The other thing that keeps some people from this activity is the fact that they may not necessarily know how to provide many of the services that their clients would need. Sure, writing good articles and blog posts may seem easy to someone from the United States or the UK, but it won’t be that easy for someone who is from another country and can’t write in English very well. Someone could be very skilled at creating beautiful web pages, but could be a complete zero at making videos.

But there is a solution to both of these problems. If you look at ads on IM discussion forums for people who provide services to other internet marketers, you may notice that some of them seem to be taking in dozens of orders a day. There is just no way that one person could do all that in a single day. What they do is simple: they outsource their work to a virtual staff. Tomorrow, you will learn more about how YOU too can do just that.

There are a lot of reasons not to start an online business. The time and money you’ll need to invest put a lot of people off, and prevent them from ever diving in to online business. Before you walk away from online business, remember, for every reason not to do it, there is an equally compelling reason to start an online business of your own. Let’s take a look at some of the best reasons to start an online business.

Expand On Your Hobbies

If you’ve ever thought about making money from one of your hobbies, an online business might be the best way to do it. Even if you just start a blog that talks about a particular hobby you’re interested in, you can still bring in advertising revenue. In fact, if your site becomes popular, you can bring in a great deal of ad revenue. If you’re really passionate about your hobby, starting an online business built around it might be the best way to take that hobby a step further.

Try Out A New Career

It’s no big secret that most people aren’t happy with their job for one reason or another. Starting an online business can turn into a new career if you handle it correctly. The best part is that you don’t have to quit your current job to start an online business. You can get started in your free time, and test the waters to see whether you enjoy it, and whether or not you can make the kind of money you want to make from it. Just remember, the more time you spend on your online business, the better it will do.

Learn New Skills

You can learn a lot while setting up and managing y our online business. You will likely learn something new about web design, and development, marketing, and customer service while running your online business. Even if your business doesn’t pan out the way you want it to, you’ll have those skills for the rest of your life, and they’ll help you to further your career.

Starting an online business can be a great way to make money for yourself. Even if your business doesn’t go as well as you had hoped, it can still provide other benefits that you will carry with you forever. Just about anyone can benefit from starting an online business, and that’s the best reason to start one.

WordPress is great. It really is, you have seen me write about it numerous times on this website, namely because it is the most popular, most accessible, easy to use CMS out there, in my opinion of course (but numbers do not lie). But there are some things that WordPress could do better. It could better integrate different code, or sometimes be easier to code for, but for the most part it is alright.

Sometimes however, there are other things you want your website to do, or you want more customization to your site. Or just maybe, you want to be a bit different and learn a new language and build a site out of something completely new to you. For whatever your reason, there are some great alternatives to WordPress, so check them out below.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the main competitors to WordPress in straight CMS terms. It is much more customizable and hacky, because of the open source nature of itself. Since Drupal is open source (much like WordPress, but in a much more geeky way [in a good way]), it begs a bit more putting together. A Drupal install and WordPress install are much different and Drupal’s takes just a bit more work.

Drupal is a great CMS, but the design and layout of it isn’t as pretty as WordPress. The designs are a bit more boxy out of the gate, and take some real work to get them to look like a typical blog.

With that being said, Drupal is a great CMS, especally for the web tinkerer. If you like putting code together and making something unique and cool, Drupal is definitely for you. With less plugins and themes available, Drupal drives creativity and some very cool projects to create their own way around a problem, or to write some code and fix it.

Drupal is free, so check it out today at http://www.drupal.org

Typepad

Typepad and WordPress have always been a pretty big rivalry, not quite like Apple vs Microsoft, but pretty close.

Typepad is owned by Six Apart, a company that has had some major ups and some major downs. But Typepad has remained and still remains a huge competitor for WordPress.

The difference is the opensource vs proprietary debate. Typepad is only available as a hosted service from Typepad.com.

For true customizers, this may be a huge deterant, but for average users that want an all in one package that isn’t http://www.wordpress.com then Typepad is a great alternative.

If you have a product of your own to sell, then you’re not going to have a lot of trouble making money online. Just set up a website to sell your product on, and then work to promote it. Of course it’s a little more complicated than that, but the concept is simple enough – promote and sell your product. If you don’t have a product of your own, you can still make money online. There are a few effective methods for making money on the internet that don’t require you to create a product of your own.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of selling products for various advertisers. One of the easiest methods is to sell ebooks and other digital products available on Click Bank. Just create a page that pushes the product, and do a little advertising of your own either through an ad network, or by using social media sites, and you’ll be on your way to affiliate marketing success.

Blogging

Set up a blog that covers a particular niche. Put ads for a variety of products related to that niche on that blog, and as your traffic grows, so too will your advertising revenue. Update your blog frequently. At the very least, update it several times a week, though, ideally, you should update it daily. It’s going to take some time to make your blog profitable, but if you stick with it, you’ll get there eventually.

PLR Products

Private Label Rights, or PLR products are digital products, usually ebooks, that you can buy, edit, and sell. You don’t have to do the full work of writing an ebook from scratch, but you can earn money as though you had. It’s important to take the time to edit the PLR products you buy – you don’t want them to appear too similar to someone else’s product. With a little bit of money, and a little bit of work, you can start selling a modified PLR product in no time.

If you have a product to sell, you’re going to have very little trouble making money online. If not, you can keep these things in mind to help you get your online business off the ground. Affiliate marketing, blogging, and PLR products can all help you to get your business up and running without having a single product of your own.

Commenting on other blogs in your niche is essential in order to get readers to come over to your own blog and to build relationships with other bloggers. This is sometimes an overlooked area of internet marketing and promotion for your website, and usually, it is done horribly wrong.

Readership

When going for readership with your commenting, make sure you create engaging and thoughtful arguments and conversation on the blog. If you disagree, disagree politely and state why you think it is wrong and what you think is right. Engage in the conversation. Don’t simply write “nice post,” but instead give insight into the topic, add to the list of reasons “x is so great” and offer some sort of value. If readers always see your name popping up next to smart responses they will be more likely to click on your name to see what you are about.

Build Relationship

Building a relationship with the author is essential. Reach out to them on social networks, on their blog comments, and through their contact form. Introduce yourself and state that you are in a similar niche and really like their work. Creating this relationship will help them recognize you on the blog, be more likely for them to subscribe to your blog, and will increase the chances of them linking to your blog and adding to your conversation as well.

Great Content

Give the people what they want – great content. It is no different than creating content on your own blog, give value and you will get value in return.

Real Name

Don’t use your niche or keywords as your name, you can on some occasions but trying to be more personal can go a long way. Don’t hide behind an alias, as you will have a hard time getting any response from that. If you want to use your keywords, insert them into your reply, or leave a link to your website in it’s entirety at the bottom of your post (make sure you have awesome content or you will risk being marked as spam, and even some spam bots will register you, so be careful with this one).

Never, Ever Spam

Don’t spam other bloggers. Think about how much you hate when you have people spamming your articles on your blog, so don’t do it to them. Create engaging content that will create a sense of urgency and interest in checking out your own work.

Video can be a great way to enhance your blog or product because it helps put a face or voice onto the voice that normally just shows through the text. Video can be a very engaging way to interact with your audience, and when done right, video can make or break a website.

Using effective and well designed video is extremely important. If you are going to be recording it via your webcam, make sure your background is uncluttered and that you proper lighting. I would suggest putting a table or desk lamp to the side of your monitor if that is the case, to make sure you are getting proper lighting on your face. It will make a world of difference.

Promote New Products
One use of video can be to promote new products you are launching. For example, you could create a video tour of a new product you are launching, you could show the user interface, some of the content, and give a brief overview of what the product does and how it will help people. This is an effective way to explain the goal of your product and to try and convert leery buyers who may be a bit skeptical at first.

Promote Your Website
Video can be used to promote your website as well. If you created a video every time you posted new content to your blog, you could include the video and the transcript of the video in one post. By posting it to YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sharing sites you can then try to capitalize on click throughs from the video to your blog or product page. It also creates a way for people who may not want to read the entire post to receive your content, for example while they are cleaning their apartment they could have your video on and still be benefiting from your expertise.

Teach Something
Using your videos to teach people sometime specific can be a great way to set yourself up as an expert on a certain subject. For example if you are a WordPress guru it might be beneficial for you to create 3-4 minute videos and post them to YouTube with a link back to your website where you do consulting. You can teach people very basic things such as installing WordPress, modifying themes, etc. You then upsell them when they want to find an expert on WordPress, they think of your videos and your offering. It is a great way to establish credibility with potential clients.

One of the most discussed areas things people talk about (after social media nowadays probably) is search engine optimization or SEO. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress and so it is important for us to discuss SEO in regards to WordPress.

WordPress does a great job with SEO from a standalone perspective, but there are a lot of other things, such as plugins that can make it better. Using just WordPress you can add meta tags, insert keywords, optimize images for SEO via titles and captions, and change the permalinks structure of the website to use full titles as the URL.

But there are some limitations, which could be for simplicity sake and to not confuse new users, or it is because for most people it simply isn’t necessary.

Luckily for power users and fanatics about SEO WordPress has a huge set of available plugins, both free and for pay that can enhance your websites search engine ranking.

Check out these 4 plugins to start on your search engine ranking journey!

All-in-One SEO
This is considered THE SEO plugin for most people. The plugin sits on the post and page editor and provides users with options for title, description, keywords, and more allowing you to customize what shows up in the Title (rather than just using the default title). An extremely handy plugin and best of all it is free, so there is no reason to not have this installed and working for your blog.

WP Google Analytics
Site metrics aren’t normally talked about when talking directly about SEO plugins, but having a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to track where your traffic is coming from and from which keywords is a great way to refine your strategy and thinking about SEO. Seeing the real results will help motivate you to continue your SEO campaign. There are a few plugins to help with Google Analytics setup so make sure you search the plugins on WordPress.org to help you out.

Google Sitemap XML
This plugin allows you to generate a .xml sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google crawl your site when it visits. An easy one time thing the plugin serves the purpose great and is a must have for a new or established site.

WP Auto Tagger

If you’ve been reading this site, you probably know social media sites can be a great marketing tool. By building up a strong social media account, you can get your message out to your target audience quickly and easily. Social media can serve another, equally important purpose too. It can also allow you to give your customers a voice.

Your customers care about your products. If they weren’t interested in your products, they wouldn’t have bought them, or they wouldn’t be thinking about buying them. In short, people are looking at your social media account because they are interested in what you have to offer.

If you give them the chance to interact with you, and get to know the person (or people) behind your business, you can generate a lot of positive attention from your customers, and your potential customers. By interacting directly with them, you’re giving your company a personality, and by doing that, you’re helping people to identify with your company, and develop a positive attitude toward your products.

Pay attention to the people that comment on your blog frequently, and post on your Facebook wall all the time. If someone reaches out to you on a regular basis, return the favor. Be sure to take some time and acknowledge them, and their loyalty. By acknowledging your frequent commenteors, you’re showing the rest of your visitors that you appreciate their attention, and you are glad to have them as customers. When you do that, you generate a great deal of brand loyalty among your customers. People will continue to shop with someone they trust, and feel appreciated by.

So remember, when you’re setting up your social media accounts, it’s extremely important to get personal with your audience. By drawing them in, and showing them the personal side of your business, you can generate a real sense of customer loyalty. If your customers feel personally vested in your brand, they’ll keep coming back. Over time, those repeat sales will be great for business.