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WHAT YOU'VE REALLY GOT TO DO TO DEVELOP MAXIMUM WEB SITE TRAFFIC, KEY INSIGHTS INTO SEARCH ENGINES, FREE LINKS AND PAID LINKS WITH MAJOR TRAFFIC SOURCES by Dr. Jeffrey Lant If you want to derive income from your web site, you must maintain a rigid focus on client-centered VALUE and you MUST maximize traffic. This message clearly has not gotten home to 99% of the people on the Internet who are acting more like "message posters" than marketers. However, since it's marketers, and not posters, who make money on the 'net, this means understanding and properly using three essential traffic-development tools: search engines, free and paid links. The Benefits & Limitations of Search Engines Start by understanding the purpose -- and limitations -- of search engines. A search engine is simply an automated index; it's a place to register key words and concepts about your web site. Searchers looking for this information can find it by going to the search engine and entering these key words and phrases. Search engines are fine so far as they go, but as a marketer you must consider just how much real benefit they give you. First, there are more and more search engines all the time. Do you have the time to 1) register with them all yourself and 2) keep your entries up to date? Probably not. A year ago it was commonplace for web site owners to handle all search engine data entry themselves. Now that just doesn't make sense, because people don't have the time, don't know all the search engines, and don't do the data entry very well, either.Thus, get a service that does this work for you. One superb service I know is offered by Incor Enterprises. Incor has been a pioneer in the development of Internet search services, is run by friendly, knowledgeable people, and offers excellent value for money. Incor will register your web site with either 25 or 50 of the most popular search engines. Get all the information by visiting http://www.incor.com Fill out their online order form for instant service. Or send a message to register@incor.com for information and a sign-up form. However, even if you're in every single search engine in just the right way, search engines are still inherently limited. After all, just because a book is listed in a card catalog doesn't mean anyone will either know it's there, much less read it. Ditto search engines. Exclusively relying on search engines to build web site traffic is crazy, because their function is essentially passive -- posting -- not active marketing. Marketers, remember, always maintain the initiative; when you're merely listing in a search engine you've transferred the initiative to the searcher, which is the antithesis of real marketing. Free Links (And Free Classified Ads & Newsgroup Posts) Lots of web site owners try to enhance traffic with free links, but this has its limitations, too. Face it. People give free links to get you to their site, to look at their ads, advertisers and content. Giving you a free link (or free classified ad) is NOT their first priority. What's more, the way free links and free classified ads are "stacked" dramatically limits their usefulness. The latest ad is always on top. In a popular site, this good position may last for a few hours, or even minutes; in a slow site, you may be at the top of the stack longer, but so what? Nobody's visiting anyway! Thus, whether you're making a free link, free classified or free newsgroup posting, the impact on YOUR traffic is decidedly minimal. As a result, while doing these things is helpful, their overall value must be placed in context. You're not going to get rich on the Internet merely by taking advantage of free links, free classifieds, and newsgroup postings -- no matter what anyone says! Paid Links: They're In Your Future If You Want Maximum Traffic If search engines and freebie sources aren't going to line your pocket, what will? Well, remember what the successful bank robber said about why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is!" By the same token, if you want to get traffic, you're going to have to go where the traffic is. The outlines of Internet Future are already clear now. A relative handful of sites will get gigantic amounts of traffic. The others -- very likely including yours -- will limp by with a few hundred, or even a few dozen, visitors a year. Unless -- and this is the crux of the matter -- you're linked with the places that have the traffic. Such places do what it takes to bring in millions of people annually -- including aggressive on and off web advertising. Reason? So that their advertisers -- who don't have the means, time, or expertise to do such promotion themselves -- will still benefit from the web and from massive traffic. At the Worldprofit Malls, for instance, we get over 4 MILLION visitors a year now, or over 100,000 times the traffic of the average web site! This didn't happen by accident. It happened because we are very aggressive about traffic development, running literally hundreds of ads, millions of post cards, providing traffic-building guidelines to all our advertisers, etc. In short, huge traffic followed significant investment and a deliberate traffic growth plan. Could you develop your individual web site traffic to this extent? With all due respect, probably not. The cost alone, to say nothing of the technical knowledge and time, would be prohibitive. But can you benefit from this massive and constantly increasing traffic? ABSOLUTELY YES! By purchasing a link from the Worldprofit Malls to your website. Is this expensive? That's the best part. ABSOLUTELY NOT! The basic charge is just about 55 cents a day, under $200 a year. Where else can you get this level of CERTAIN TRAFFIC coming to where you've either got a web site... or one or more links to your web site? That's just the point. NOWHERE! At Worldprofit, our traffic goes up daily; our prices stay the same! This makes the 10 Worldprofit Malls a better value every single day, and the decision to link from them to your web site even more sensible. Last Words Forty years ago there were over a dozen daily newspapers in Boston (paralleling the situation in most major cities). Today there's only one, with a second barely alive. All the others tried to make a go of it, but failed. One, by offering more value, being run more cleverly, never taking anything for granted and constantly going the extra mile for its advertisers, ended up dominating the market. The same thing is already clearly happening on the Internet. In the next few years, people will establish literally billions of web sites. They'll cram the search engines with hundreds of billions of key words and phrases... they'll use all the freebies -- links, ads, postings -- they can get. But they STILL won't get significant traffic and certainly will not make money. If this is acceptable to you, fine. You won't profit from the dramatic business development that is the web. Your web site will be an underutilized, over priced toy, and the people who could get benefits from your products and services, simply won't -- because they'll never know about them. What a colossal waste! If, on the other hand, you mean to profit you're going to have to link those fewer and fewer, but ever more highly visited, web sites to yours, so that you can benefit from their massive traffic... and use what they do, in tandem with your strictly client-centered site content, to make real money. Without doubt, the bigger the mega-sites get, the more massive their traffic, the more certainly you'll have to be linked to them. As far as you're concerned, the sooner the better.