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How to get more hits

How to market your web site. What it takes to get more hits
By Calvin Herl,
CEO Start an ISP

The old adage "build it and they will come", is not one that applies itself to the Internet. I have seen but many a great site never generating enough traffic to warrant a 3 digit counter. One of the common misconceptions people have when building a web site is that people will miraculously find you. This is just not the case.

I have long considered writing an article about how to market a web site. Since I own Start An ISP writing it now provides a double-edged sword. Not only will you make more money, I will also line my pockets being I that have such a vested interest. I could almost put up a sign on the office door with the answer "Work Harder!!!" on it, the question you ask? How do I market my web site?
As the family of ISP's that get their ISP resources from Start an ISP grows, I thought we should give our customers the benefit of our own marketing experiences. After all, the more success you have with your own web site, the longer you are likely to stay with us as a happy customer.

In this Article there are no "for 29.95 a month..." I have nothing here to empty your wallet, only to fill your minds. My goal is to help you succeed so I may succeed, as truly my success is based upon your success. Many of you use our branded site for your ISP, so some of the facts and ideas will already be done for you. If you have your own web site listen up! Marketing a web site is not for the meek of heart. I want to stress that unless you are willing to put some hard work into marketing your site, you might as well stop reading now. Marketing does not have to be expensive, but it will involve a desire to be successful and a willingness to do some hard work.

The Dot Com Dumb Syndrome

Every year we hear about how many millions of dollars it takes to advertise on the Super bowl. Last year was no different. I always seem to find myself thinking to myself how can a dot com company afford to spend millions of dollars on one commercial? Will enough people see their ad, visit their Web Site, and purchase their service to break even? How can companies like Priceline.com run commercials every few minutes on radio and TV paying William Shatner as their spokesperson? Do they really make enough money on these bargain basement airline tickets? In just a few months I was reading how priceline was losing millions, guess that's the answer these people don't want to make money.

The last few months have hit the dot coms so hard some of them have had to scream "no mas" (For those of you that do not speak Spanish the they are out of business) Many a Dot.com has turned off the monitors and locked the doors. Others, like priceline.com have shown huge losses. These companies were great at raising money from investors and spending the money very quickly. Once the money ran out, the investors were not quite so quick to give them a new bankroll.

The Drip Method is much better

Lets try a little experiment set a glass under that leaky faucet the better half has been pleading you to fix for months and grab a second glass and run out the garden hose. Now open the hose full force and fill the glass. (No cheat keep it at full throttle now.) When the glass is completely filled by the hose come bring it back to the glass under the drip. Set them beside each other. Are they both full? If you did not break the law the one from the hose is maybe half full. Great job! And that only took maybe five gallons of water! While the one under the drip can be full with not a drop wasted. OK, how does this relate to marketing? I forgot to mention each drop cost one dollar. Now you just spent a lot of money to wash off the sidewalk I am sure the marketing firm of your choice loves you for it. While your drip glass is full of paying customers with no wasted money. I think a steady consistent growth is the key to an on-line businesses success. I would advise firms that have the funds to avoid the tempting flashy ad campaigns that may give you a brief spike in traffic. The traffic soon disappears and you are left with no customers and a large bill to pay.

We have built our business from its profits instead of relying on money from investors or banks. We do not pour thousands in to advertising. This approach is not easy and takes patience and time to succeed. If you have a regular business or job, you can continue life as usual while you steadily grow your new on-line business.

We have been profitable from just about day one. Because we were able to do most everything ourselves without paying outside services, and we did not spend a fortune on marketing. We decided to start the site with a minimum investment of our own money and expand using money generated from the site. Slow and steadily we have filled not only the glass but also the bathtub, the dogs water dish and the swimming pool! We have established a steady consistent stream of new customers. As our exposure grows through our own low budget marketing efforts, this stream increases. We strive to keep our customers by providing the best customer service we can.

In recent months a form of marketing has blossomed into a major Internet battle, it's the Internet version of Roe vs. Wade. (Link provided for the younger generation generation that doesn't have a clue.) This is not a reflection beliefs or the marking plan of my sites. The battle is Call SPAM, no not that god-awful canned meat (Is it really meat?) SPAM by a loose definition is an unsolicited e-mail message. This means you go out and find a list of e-mail's and start sending an ad about your business. Does this method work. Well sort of if you send 1000 e-mails you may get one customer. And probably 15 complaints, along with your Internet service provider shutting you down in most cases. If you are one of our family of ISP's that buy my services you will be out of business! So in the long run NO. Spamming is quickly becoming illegal, and already is in several states. It is a violation of the terms of service of any real ISP in the nation.

TIP: At Start an ISP we think customer service is the thing that makes us different than our competitors. People can reach us quickly and we do everything possible to help them. I think it is important for any business to identify why customers will use their service or product. What makes you different from your competition? Do you talk about this on your website? Let your customers know why they should use your services! The little things like when a customer calls and need a little helping hand, remember they may not be as computer savvy as yourself, they are looking to you for help. Many of my customers use my dial up service because a real person (many times myself) answers the phone.

In contrast to when we first started we now have enough funding for expensive short-term marketing campaigns. But why do that? That type of marketing has little hope of breaking even let alone generating additional income. These campaigns typically produce a large splash for the day or month that they run, but what happens when the campaign is over? For a case on point AOL the worlds Largest ISP claims to be losing money. How can that be when they have millions of users? I know they did not read this artical, imagine how much AOL has spent on TV ads and those nicly packaged CD's you get in the mail 2-3 times a months (often when they come i get 2-3 in a day)

When marketing a Website you should be more concerned with daily marketing. Don’t expect a huge short-term campaign to make any difference, other than wasting your money (or your investors). New people will be looking for what you offer everyday. These people may have missed your expensive ad campaign that finished last week. What are you going to do to stay in front of people every single day? Set a goal for yourself whether it be one customer a day or one a week. Write it down and make note of it when you archive it, or when you do not. When you do not, look at the reasons why you did not, did you make enough contacts? Did you respond in a timely manner to requests you may have had? Is there something your not doing that you could do to improve your chances?

TIP: If you are planning ad campaign, you must know how many customers it will take from the campaign to break even? Forget about esoteric concepts like Brand Building or Name Recognition unless you have a bunch of investor money you need to get rid of (in that case send it to me). I think the purpose of your advertising is to generate new immediate business. If an ad is not paying for itself stop running it immediately!

Get Listed on the Search Engines!

OK, so spamming is not an option. So just were are people going to start looking for your site you ask? I think most on-line business needs to concentrate their efforts toward getting good listings on the major search engines. About 95% of our customers find our site through one of the search engines, such as MSN, Yahoo, Hotbot, Altavista, Google, and others. They sit down at their computers, bringing up their favorite search engine, and type in a phrase, such as “Internet Service Providers”. If we come up on the first or second page of the listings, people might visit our site and see if they like our service. If we’re not there, they choose someone else. No complexity there, sheer reality.

Getting listed on the search engines
First off, I must explain to all my customers that are using our sites to market their ISP, I do set up meta tags and do run submission software for each of them. I DO NOT do hand submissions for them, I simply run the submission software. Hand submission is the preferred method, and I do personally hand submit my websites. If you wish to do this please inform me so I can drop your site from the submission Que. Many search engines will call it spamming if you submit to many times. I suggest following these steps to get listed:

1) Figure out your key search phrases
Take time to think about what people might type in a search engine to find you. This is not as easy as you may think. You call your business an ISP, but the future customer may not know the term "ISP". He or she may type in the words "connect to the Internet". Now if you do a little research you find the word "ISP" gets used 363 times for every time "connect to the Internet" gets used. (Believe me I did the math). I will explain a little more on this further into this article. For now, write down a list of keywords or phrases you would use if you were looking for what you offer. The Next step: is VERY important go ask 2-3 of your friend, who doesn't know as much about your service, what he or she would type in. Have them to come up with at least 5 words or phases (more is better). In most cases you will find out you are too close to the business to come up with phrases that people really use. I Have friends and business associates to send me a list of phrases they would use if they were looking for our services. Now depending on the number of friends you should have a long list of phrases to consider. Now, lets put the math that you loved in school to work.

Don’t Guess! After you get this list, try out some of the phrases using this free website to check their popularity. Try Overture.com's premium listing suggestion tool. Look at the number of times that word has been used. Do this for every word on your list. And for each word, scan the results for other related words that rank very high in the list. Jot them down. The advantage of this is you are now getting real live data from millions of real surfers. When you are done you may have accumulated a list of words that is in excess of 50. This is great! Rank them like this. (Normally when I do this I come up with 500 or so phrases I kept this list short just make an example).

Rank	Number of searches	Word
1	92663	Website design
2	92411	ISP
3	59225	Hosting
4	53111	Internet service provider
5	38701	Internet provider
6	30152	ISDN
7	3866	Service provider
8	3856	Dialup
9	1971	Cheap ISP
10	1945	Internet access provider
11	1336	Corporate web site design
12	1283	Cheap Internet service provider
13	1047	ISP Internet service provider
14	977	Best ISP
15	955	Low cost ISP
16	794	Local Internet service provider
17	753	Virtual ISP
18	660	Dialup numbers
19	543	Local ISP
20	422	Wholesale ISP
21	362	Nationwide ISP
22	298	Best Internet service provider
23	289	Dialup Internet access
24	234	Internet service provider
25	157	Web service provider
26	147	Wholesale dialup
27	127	Dialup service
28	59	Visp dialup
29	53	Affordable ISP

2) Use Your Keywords on Your Site!
Now comes the real work! Thought it was hard getting some keywords put together? You have just begun! For the front page of your site simply use the first 30 words of your list for your Meta tags. Work on your Website and make sure you use the phrases you picked out. Without being obnoxious, try to include the phrases you are targeting throughout articles on your home page. Be careful not to repeat the key phrases too many times in a row, or some search engines will think you are trying too hard, and they will not index you at all. Just write your page naturally and make sure you include the phrases a few times. My trick that I used to use to work was putting text at the bottom of the page that was the same color as the background. Today this method can be considered SPAM by some search engines. But, I have worked out a variation that still seems to work. If you page is white which in HTML code is #FFFFFF you can write a few lines at the bottom of the page and instead of using #FFFFFF use #FFFFFE the search engine does not pick it up as a color match. The it is so close to white the naked eye cannot see it. Look in box below you can see what I mean

Welcome to Start an ISP, you Wholesale provider for Internet dial up. We provide quality wholesale dialup at a affordable price. Have a new or existing business you want to expand? With start an ISP you can be sell account in just a few days. Our service offer billing, 56k, ISDN, website, pops, and e-mail.Wholesale ISP

In this box is the following

OK I know the next question why so small? Well no one is suppose to read it! In reality the word Wholesale ISP is in the Heading H1 this tells the search engines is Very important. While the others have no heading tags and all are in font size 1 text. I try to limit each page to one word or phase that has a Heading of H1.

Now I told above that I normally get 500 search phases, why you ask? Well I do not discard any word that generates traffic. I make what is called a gateway page and use words 31-60 on that and another for words 61-90 and so on. Here is an example of a gateway these pages; must also be submitted to the search engines. Briefly here is how to do this. Take your front page, make sure all the links are absolute (the whole http:// blabla.) Then add the words from 31-60 and post the page somewhere other than your site. You can do this as many times as you like.

TIP: If you are selling products or parts, try to include a list of some of these, so people might find them when searching. Many people will search for a part number. I suggest creating an article at the bottom of your home page with the headline “here are some of the items we carry”. Type in a long paragraph with a list of all of your parts and part numbers separated by commas.

3) Use Meta Tags
If you are not familiar with Meta tags Click here and use this meta tag generator.

TIP: I think the most critical part of getting seen on the search engines is to start your title, description, and key words with your most important phrase you are targeting. Most search engines pick up on the first words you use. In the case of an ISP should be the first word.
Tip: You don’t want to repeat the same phrase too often in your Key Words section, but you can include different forms of the phrase (plurals or upper/lower case), and you can also break the phrase apart into separate words.

4) Submit your site!
Now you should be ready for your first try at submitting your site.

I highly recommend taking the time to manually submit your website to major search engines. I have had the best success hand submitting to the most important engines instead of using an auto-submit tool or submission service. Many of the major search engines are beginning to ignore submissions from the auto-submit tools. Websites like AltaVistahave added security measures to make sure you actually submit your page from their website.

Yahoo Submission
Note that Yahoo only offers free submission to noncommercial Websites. They offer a paid submission service for commercial sites. Listings from Google.com will also show up on Yahoo's results, so make sure you get listed on Google, if you don't want to pay Yahoo.

AOL and Netscape Search
To submit to AOL and Netscape, you need to get listed on the Open Directory system. Click the link below with instructions on how to do this:
Open Directory Submission

Ask Jeeves:
To submit to Ask Jeeves, you need to e-mail them. Here is a quote from their website on what they require:
"Please send us the URL and a brief description of the site via e-mail. But remember, inclusion in our knowledge base is not automatic. We do not guarantee that our human editors will put a suggested URL into the Ask Jeeves knowledge base. We include URLs in the Ask Jeeves knowledge base only if we think sites provide good answers to questions our users want answered. For more information on how Ask Jeeves finds answers, visit Editorial Guidelines"

Be aware that it will take 4 to 6 weeks for most of these engines to index you! Don’t expect to find your site right away!

Altavista.com is one of the more popular search engines on the Web. Unlike many of the other search engines that take 4-6 weeks, they will index your site within 7 to 10 days!

Here is a link to a free service that will submit you to many of the major search engines all at once, if you don't have the time to submit manually:
Submit Express

5) Re-submit if you aren’t high enough
To see if I am listed, I visit a search engine, such as HOTBOT and type my company name (StartanISP). If nothing comes up, I try pasting in the exact URL that I submitted, such as http://www.startanisp.com
if you still don’t come up, then you are probably not indexed yet. If you do come up, then you should go ahead and try out your targeted phrases. If you show up on the first two pages of the search results for your targeted phrase, you did very well for your first submission! If you don’t show up, it’s time to start again. You need to go back and change around your Meta tags. If you chose a phrase that was too broad and had too much competition, maybe there is a phrase you can use that is more specific to your site. Sometimes these specific phrases will actually generate more targeted visitors, who will be more likely to purchase your product.

Looksmart's Paid Submission Service
So far, I have discussed free ways to submit your site. This works well for most people, but if you are in hurry and want some immediate results, I highly recommend Looksmart's paid submission service. For $200, they will index your site within 2 days. You will have immediate listings on MSN.com, Excite, AltaVista, iWon, and CNN.com. You don’t have to worry too much about your Meta Tags, because their staff will review your site and write their own for you.

MSN.com is the second most popular search engine next to Yahoo. Yahoo also offers a similar service with Yahoo’s site; I have trouble going through their categories to place our listing. I do not recommend their $200 plan.

With the Looksmart service, they do not guarantee where you will be placed, but I think you can expect to be placed high for the words they end up using in your title to describe your company. You can help this by doing a good job on your home page explaining what you do. When the Looksmart staff visits your site, they will use the information on your home page along with what you type on the order form to describe your site. Click here to see their options

Buy Your Way to the Top!

You may have noticed the "featured listings" that show up at the top of your search results on Hotbot, Lycos, AltaVista, and other search engines. You can now pay to show up at the top of the search engine search results for the phrase or phrases of your choice. This can be a great way to get immediate traffic. It is one of the not one marketing tools we are currently using for our own website. Buying "featured listings" can be very profitable, but it can also be a quick way to lose money, if you don't keep a few rules in mind.

overture.com offers their Premium Listing service. These listings are seen by 75% of Internet Users, and show up at the top of popular search engines, such as AOL, Lycos, AltaVista, Overture, Netscape, Cnet, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, and others.

The way that it works is that you bid on how much you want to pay "per click" for the search phrase or phrases of your choice. Overture.com provides you with the current bids. Bidding starts at 5 cents per click and goes up as high as the market will bear. Don't be surprised if some of the more popular phrases are going for two dollars or more per click. Overture.com also provides you with a way to check to see how many people actually typed the phrase for the previous month, to give you an idea of how much traffic you should expect.

To do this, you give Goverture.com your credit card, and they charge you for each time someone clicks your listing. They will bill you $50 at a time or more, depending on the billing method you choose.

Shop Smart and Don't Waste your Money!
I would suggest a few rules to keep in mind before you find yourself owing Overture.com thousands of dollars and getting nothing in return. When placing your bids, I suggest following these rules:

You need to figure out your conversion rate. How many customers a signing up from these engines. Figure out how many qualified visitors it takes before someone buys something from your site. You may need to get a month or so of history before you know this. For our ISP look at how many click you are getting and talk to your customer ask them "how did you hear about us?" they will tell you.
Make Sure You Pick Highly Targeted Phrases! This is critical. Don't be enticed by general phrases that may bring you thousands of clicks, but may not bring you a customer who is ready to buy. Spend time picking phrases that only people who would be looking for your product would type in. This should help lower your cost, since many of these specific phrases will be less expensive than the broader less targeted ones. If you don't do this, you could be paying thousands for people who are just looking!

Click here to check current bids

Check here to predict hits for a search phrase

Gorilla Marketing

One of the questions that comes to mind very often is how do I compete with companies who are spending a fortune on ads on the major search engines? Well, you could wait until they eventually go out of business (after they keep spending their investor’s money on the expensive ads). Or, you could sneak up on them with a little gorilla marketing! Instead of running an expensive ad on a search engine, why not run a reasonably priced ad instead that will get you better results.

Do a search for your favorite phrase, and see what sites come up on the first page of the search results. With a little luck, you might find a site on the first page that isn’t a competitor and doesn’t look like a huge company that will want you to spend thousands on an ad. If you can find the right site, I suggest e-mailing them and asking them if they will let you run an ad on their site. In your e-mail, offer them something you think is reasonable that will work for your budget and see if they agree. Many of these smaller sites just happen to show up high in the search engines for your target phrase, and they are happy to get the extra money you want to offer them!

This technique has worked very well for many of our companies. As our long-term strategy, try plan on showing up on the first page for as many of the key phrases as possible, but for the short term, you can get some immediate business sneaking up on the big guys.

Google’s AdWords
Google.com is another popular search engine that just started offering relatively inexpensive advertising. For as little as $15 you can get listed on the first page of the search results for the key phrase of your choice! You can fill out a simple form and submit your ad and immediately show up in the search engines. You buy 1000 impressions of your ad for $15.

This is a pretty inexpensive way to try out an ad to see how it does, but it can get expensive in the long run. I recommend this type of advertising for companies with higher ticket items. You want one sale to more than pay for the price of the advertising. If you have a lower ticket item, I would stay away from this sort of advertising. With a popular search engine like Google, I recommend sticking to campaigns that you can at least get a month’s worth of exposure.
Here is the link to Google's AdWords:
https://adwords.google.com/AdWords/Welcome.html

Banner exchanges, 1000+ site submissions, etc.
There are a number of other hit generating vehicles out there that you could try, such as banner exchanges and opt-in e-mail campaigns. I personally think that most of banner exchanges look unprofessional on your site and really don’t do much for your business. Don’t be tempted to signup for the offers that submit your site to 10,000 search engines. Only the major 40 engines make much difference. Most of the other directories are “free for all links” sites where your listing will be lost among the other million and never be seen.

Opt-in e-mail is the new vehicle that is getting popular. As opposed to SPAM
e-mails where e-mails are sent out unsolicited, opt-in e-mails are supposedly sent to people who included their names in various databases. We have not tried this technique ourselves yet. If anyone out there has a success or a horror story with opt-in e-mail, go ahead and e-mail me at sales@startanisp.com.

Search Engine Positioning Services
We are tried out a few “Search Engine Positioning” services that charge a fee for guaranteeing they can place you high up in the search engines. I run one these services myself. While mine differs from many I seen, I have found that most companies simply take your page in whatever state it is and stuff it into some software and start submitting. So far, none have worked any better than our own techniques that I described in this article. I will let you know if I find one of these services that are worth their fees.

My Best Advice

When starting out, here’s what I would like to see every Start an ISP customer do:

Figure out your target phrases. Ask others what they would type to find you. Use Overture's suggestion tool.
Create a good descriptive home page that talks about what you offer (make sure to use the target phrases!)
Use the meta generator!
Submit your website manually to the major search engines.
Consider Buying Your Way to the Top of the search engines with Overture.com's Premium Listing Service. Just make sure to follow the guidelines I list in the article to avoid losing money.
If you have $200 budgeted, use Looksmart's submission service to jump-start your site right away.
If you have a small budget for running ads, try sneaking up on the big guys with Gorilla Marketing
If you have a larger ticket item product and want some immediate attention, give Google's AdWords a try.

If you have any comments or need help marketing your site, please e-mail our help line at support@ispmanager.net. We will be glad to take a look at your site and give you some suggestions on how to get noticed.

Include articles like this one on your Website and get more hits!

Although this definitely wasn't my original intention for writing this article, I am delighted that this page is getting a good number of hits per day from new people searching for marketing ideas. As another tip for getting more hits, you may want to try including articles on your own site that visitors might find helpful. Announce the link to your new page on the search engines using the techniques I outlined above.

I invite visitors who are not already Start an ISP or Net Link Plus customers to use my marketing tips. With the extra visitors finding this page, I thought I should go ahead and give Net Link Plus a not so subtle plug so:

If you have found this page and are not really interested in Starting you own ISP Take a look At Net Link Plus for a reliable affordable Internet Service you can depend on.

I wish all of you much success,

Sincerely,

Calvin Herl

General Manager Start an ISP

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