Role Models for women interested in technology were pretty hard to find growing up in the 60’s and 70’s. When I started my career in technology in the 80’s they weren’t any easier to find! But now there’s a group that’s changing this, NCWIT.org or the National Center for Women in Information Technology offers numerous resources to women who are interested in information technology. My favorite is the Heroes Campaign, with interviews of some extremely successful entrepreneurial women and how they achieved their success. Two of my favorite interviews are with Heidi Roizen and Kim Polese, but all the interviews are quite interesting!

Growing website traffic is like growing your business, it’s not easy. BUT, you can do it with a little hard work, knowing your market and getting help with various online marketing tactics. So let’s cut to the chase! The top 5 tips I recommend to implement and test are listed below.

Top 5 Tips to Growing Your Website Traffic

1. You can only grow what you can measure! Get a good web analytics package on your website. You need to be measuring traffic, conversions, where your visitors and sales are coming from and lots of other metrics. Google Analytics is free, and it does a good job. There are other packages that do a better job and they cost you more than free. Yahoo just bought a company called Index Tools and I use this package with one of my customers and it has some very nice functionality. Most web analytic tools have similar functionality, just be sure to get one and use it.

2. Start testing various traffic generating methods and see what works for your market. Test, Measure, Tweak and Test again. It’s really a no brainer, it you are generating sales and it’s a positive ROI, go for it. OK, so I guess you want to hear what to test ;-). The first thing everyone with a website should work on is SEO. Say no more!

3. If you are selling products to consumers you want to check out affiliates and shopping sites. Think of these sites as being your resellers and helping you to sell your products for a fee/commission.

4. Search Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search, is something you want to test. Not only will you find out which words people are searching on to find products like yours, you will find out which words people are more likely to buy on. There is also a wealth of information on what your competitors do with search. As in most businesses, it’s important to know your competitors extremely well. I give all my clients detailed information on which words their competitors are buying, which works their competitors are optimizing organically and what are their most popular words.

5. Last but not least, email campaigns to your house list. Your house list consists of your customers and people who have signed up to get your newsletters, information on discounts, sales, etc. Constant Contact is a great service to manage your list and email campaigns. Continue to grow this list, keep it updated and use this list to stay in contact. If you want to do direct mail or need business cards printed, Vista Print is good a low price option.

I love having events to look forward to, and as my business partners know I also love change and learning new things. My vacation with the kids to La Jolla, CA is coming up soon. It’s the next thing on the horizon to look forward to, but being in Internet Marketing keeps one always on the look out for new and novel ways to help grow our clients business. This morning I read the following:

“According to a recently released study by IDC, the U.S. Internet Advertising 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis, overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. During the forecast period, Internet advertising will grow about eight times as fast as advertising at large.

The Internet will go from the number 5 medium all the way to the number 2 medium in just 5 years, says the report, making it bigger than newspapers, bigger than cable TV, bigger even than broadcast TV, and second only to direct marketing.

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising during this time, as its revenue grows sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate of 49.4%. Brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television. ”

Put on your seat belts, it’s going to be a great ride! But back to the beach vacation, I need to get just….a few new things, luggage and a great bag from Kate Spade at the sale at eBags and tickets for a fun event, Beyonce or Hannah Montana are the top choices at TicketsNow But don’t forget the Chocolates, I’m going to the Beach, maybe I do forget the Chocolates just this once!

The Online Optimist is brought to your screen courtesy of the women in business at TriCalyx. We believe that to grow your online business you need to look beyond the simple tips and tricks you often read to trick the search engines to find your site. Our goal with this blog is to coach small to medium businesses on how to look across their online business to increase sales and retain customers year after year.On this blog you’ll learn techniques for how to meld the many concepts of online marketing and business best practices. You’ll learn what really works in the areas of search engine optimization, pay per click tracking, e-commerce, reporting, and other insightful areas from which we think will best serve your online business.

Stay optimistic and do what works!

- Kathy and Trina

In early 2007, three women technologists founded TriCalyx, an online business optimization and web development company. At that time, we also started this blog, the Online Optimist, as a way to share our online business knowledge with you, the readers. Business has been great and now TriCalyx has been nominated as one of Startup Nation’s Top 100 Home-Based Businesses of 2007.

We have been placed into the “Greenest” category since we all work virtually from our home offices, carpool to customer meetings, and are virtually paperless in addition to all three founders driving high fuel-efficient vehicles!

We would love it if you could help us win by placing a vote for us at the following link. We are listed as “TriCalyx”. You can vote once daily for us, and we would definitely appreciate the votes!

Vote Now! (http://hb100.startupnation.com/hb100topten/)

Thank you for your vote!

Link Building is the term used to describe the creation of in-bound links to your website for the purpose of increasing visitor traffic to your site.

Search engines, like Google, see these in-bound links and consider them to be an endorsement of your site by the linking website. If the sites endorsing you are high ranking and considered to be providing high-quality, related content, then this raises your site’s standing in the eyes of the search engine (and thus positively affects your search engine ranking).

If you can use the link-building technique to raise your search engine ranking, then “more in-bound links is better”, right? No. The links to your site need to be relevant to the content your own site provides. For example, if your site sells a natural eczema relief cream, then inbound links from sites about disk storage software reporting are not going to be “relevant”. Instead you will want your site linked to from natural product and eczema information sites.

There are many online “link submission services” out there. Many of these sites simply have 1000s of sites with links about every topic and they will charge you (a lot) for submitting your site to these link-sites. Yes, this will give you 1000s of inbound links, but the vast of majority of them will not be relevant. Also, the search engines will see this as link-spamming and will actually downgrade your website’s ranking as a result.

The most effective link building strategy includes establishing quality relationships with relevant sites and content across the internet. This will take time and effort on your part, but over time you will be rewarded for your efforts with more visitors and higher search rankings.

Here is my link building strategy that I utilize with my clients:

Write and Submit Articles

Create quality articles that provides useful information for readers about your product’s domain area. These articles are not meant to “sell” your product, but rather to provide educational material for readers to learn more about the domain your product will address.

Then submit your articles to Article Directory sites. There are lots of these sites which are set up just to collect content. These sites allow visitors to copy the content and use it on their own websites. A well-written, informative article will be picked up and distributed to numerous related sites.

With each article you write, you will be able to add bio information to the bottom of the article where you can link directly to your site. These links will be the inbound links to your site that will get distributed across the internet.

Press Releases

In the same manner as articles, Press Releases are an effective of getting inbound one way links as the news wires distribute your press releases across the internet. If you’re lucky, sites like Google News will also pick up your release release. Any time you have something newsworthy to share, consider publicizing the news.

The best place to start submitting Press Releases is to PRWeb.

Web Directories

Web Directories are a great way for building inbound links. Fees for these sites vary widely (and many are free). If you are going to pay for a link, ensure that there will be amble traffic resulting from that link. Yahoo! Directory is a good fee-based directory which can drive a lot of relevant traffic.

Make sure the links you are submitting to these directories are relevant and send people to the appropriate place on your site that will provide them relevant information. Creating all links to your home page might or might not be relevant.

Social Networking Sites

Much like Web Directories, many of the social networking sites provide ways to store links to your site and create relevant context at the same time by providing some words and terminology around the link that you are adding to the social networking site. Consider participating on a regular basis in the following social networking sites:

• Facebook groups
• LinkedIn Answers
• Yahoo Answers
• Digg
• De.licio.us
• StumbleUpon

I am sure there are many others that can be added to the list!
Blogging

If you decide you do want to create a separate blog about your product’s domain area, there are two approaches:

• Create the blog on your existing domain so that you are creating more indexable content for your site.
• Create the blog on a different domain that you can create more relevant inbound links to your own product site.

Either way, you will want to market your blog in the same manner that you market your site - by creating quality inbound links to your blog.

Buying Links

You can also buy inbound text links. Now while this sounds like the easier option, these links are often costly and are charged on a monthly basis. Make sure any links you do buy are only from relevant content sites and are prominently displayed.

These techniques are easy to implement into your online marketing strategy, but they do require an ongoing commitment from your and your team to create a steady stream of relevant content that can be used to link back to your site.

Just like with your garden, “continuous care and feeding” of a good link building strategy will help is grow and blossom into a steady traffic flow.

I can’t believe how many times I’ve seen companies select a hosting service for all the wrong reasons and then end up with severe server issues as a result. When selecting a hosting service it’s important to focus not only on the fact that you want to deploy your site, but also how you want to manage it.

There are typically three levels of hosting services:

• Shared Server: The cheapest option, this is typically targeted to small sites where traffic load will be low.  Your site will be hosted on a physical machine that is shared with other customer’s websites. All of the sites on that machine will be sharing the same memory, so if one of those other sites use up all the memory through high traffic load, your site will  be affected.
• Virtual Server:  The moderately priced option gives you dedicated memory usage on a shared server.  This is a good option for sites that need dedicated memory and bandwidth but do not need the high power of their own server.
• Dedicated Server: This option is the highest priced option, but also gives you maximum flexibility.  You typically will get to configure your server as you see fit and you know that if your server goes down, it was your site that affected it.

No matter what level of services you have, make sure that your service provider can guarantee an acceptable level of uptime.  A good quality service provider will guarantee at least 99.5% uptime. The best will guarantee 99.9% or higher. Also make sure there is 24×7 support.

Make sure that your hosting service is an expert at managing the type of operating system your site runs on.  If your server is a Linux server, don’t host with a pure Microsoft shop.  You want to ensure that the person taking your call when your site goes down knows how to fix it quickly.  You should be able to expect 2 hour or less turnaround on issues, especially with the higher service level packages.

Remember, you get what you pay for. So, if you are paying less than $10/month for hosting and you want to run an e-commerce site on that. Don’t be surprised if your site is offline or slow running.  Just like with anything else, you will get what you pay for.

Optimize the overall sale price each customer spends so that you can maximize profits. You must balance this to ensure you provide value to the customer while maximizing the sale. Techniques to achieve this are:

• Up-Selling
• Cross-Selling
• Free or low-priced shipping

Up-selling will ask the shopper during the checkout process if they want a better or larger version of the same product. This allows the user to get more value for their money while bringing a higher overall sale price to your business. Examples of up-sells include:

• Get a second quantity for ½ price
• Get the larger size for 10% off

Cross-selling will ask the shopper during the checkout process if they want to purchase a complementary product. This allows the user to select items that they might not realize that they needed to go along with the product that they did select while bringing a higher overall sale price to your business. Examples of cross-sells include:

• Get a curtain rod for 50% off when you purchase two drapery panels
• Customers who bought the book you are purchasing also bought this other book

Offering free shipping to users when they spend over a certain amount on your site has proven to be a very effective way to drive users to select an up-sell or a cross-sell. While you do have to absorb the cost of the shipping, it is likely that the user selected more product which had a price that far outweighs the cost of shipping.

While these techniques are very effective, many e-commerce websites have gone to the extreme in over-utilizing them and thus driven away potential buyers due to annoyance.

Have you ever taken a look at your Google Analytics (or other site tracking) data and just felt overwhelmed?  I know the feeling, there is so much information that it’s hard to digest it all and make reasonable decisions about how to manage your website based on this data.

I was stumbling this morning through the Internet (always wakes me up on a Monday morning)  and found this interesting tool that takes your site tracking data to a visual level.  CrazyEgg will easily show you visually where people are going on your site, and with this data you’ll be able to optimize the layout of your site.  Interesting approach, and I’m going to be trying it soon on some of our client sites!

Widgets are all the rage this year. Do you know what a web widget is? Wikipedia.org gives the following definition: A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plug-ins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a web widget include gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake.

Hopefully I haven’t lost you yet, because we are getting to the good part! David Berkowitz wrote a great entry in his blog today on Web Widget Optimization, which starts out …”If Rene Descartes were alive today, rather than saying “Je pense, donc je suis” (“I think, therefore I am”), he might say, “Il est, donc j’optimise” (“It is, therefore I optimize”). By that same reasoning, if Monsieur Descartes were alive today, instead of emerging as both the Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics, he’d be trying to figure out how to optimize Web widgets — the next frontier of search engine optimization”.

David may need a little help with his French, but he’s right about widgets. Widgets are omnipresent and changing the rules of search engine optimization. We have multiple widgets on our blog and they are all very cool and useful tools. One of my favorite’s is the Lijit widget, that helps you search blogs for information. You may say “well Google can do that”, oui y non. Google has a search engine technology that gives credence and high rankings to the largest and most popular websites, but Lijit will help you find information from experts in their field. Who doesn’t want that kind of information! So, who can tell me how many widgets on our site?