Direct traffic.

I was scanning through our company’s website stats the other day and noticed quite a few visits came from direct traffic.

This typically means either these visitors typed in our web address in their web browser’s address bar or they have our site bookmarked.

At first glance this may appear to be useless information regarding your website and how people find you, but realize this: This is what you want to see!

Yahoo! doesn’t want to see people are finding their website through your website, neither does Google. What they want is every time someone thinks “I need to search for this on the Web,” they need to go to our site.

No referrers, no links, no tweets.

What is it then they strive for (and the reason why I like seeing direct traffic in my stats)?

Brand recognition!

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, a SEO consultant and online entrepreneur.

Blogging long ago stopped being just the way to share news and / or personal thoughts. Today it has become a common fashion already to create a blog supporting your main website. Several reasons for that include:

• you can update it regularly with useful relevant information (and thus improve your chances to rank well in Google);
• you can get closer to your customers or readers (by starting a real communication with them);
• you can build business relationships with influential bloggers in your niche (by linking to them and referencing their posts).

Let’s look how these aims are achieved by reviewing just a few examples:

FreeShipping.org

FreeShipping.org, a valuable resource that helps shoppers save money by showing them what stores offer free shipping and provides the necessary coupon codes to get it, has a coupon codes blog where exclusive and time-limited offers are posted regularly. The blog also reviews other similar resources that might be useful for their readers. The blog is thus meant for several aims:

Who are you selling lemonade to?

Is simply building a community of bloggers enough to make you a nice profit from blogging?

The last few posts I wrote dealt with some concerns I have and misconceptions out there about what it takes to generate income being a web entrepreneur. Those posts were:

1. Building A Business Through Social Media Vs. The Old-Timer’s Way To Business Success - A post expressing my concerns that with the idea of social media marketing entrepreneurs might become lazy.
2. The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing and Does It Teach Us Bad Habits As Entrepreneurs? - It takes more than sitting at home everyday in your PJs authoring a blog to become highly successful.
3. The Unplugged Entrepreneur - Taking yourself offline and building your business.

To be successful in generating profits in business, you need to create something that solves a BIG PROBLEM for your potential customers (which might be your blog readers). Let’s look at an analogy.

Imagine if you were the first company to own a printing press. What value could you bring to your customers? Courtesy of Wikipedia

Sean D’Souza wrote an article on Copyblogger entitled Why Urgency Succeeds Like Nothing Else In A Bad Economy.

While I agree with Sean that creating a sense of urgency is definitely a key factor in boosting sales during a slow economy, we also shouldn’t forget the power of adding company value to the list.

In marketing, you should always keep these 3 things in mind that your customer wants to know:

• So What?
• Why Now?
• Why Your Company?

Of course we should never forget the P’s of marketing and you should try your best to answer the above questions in your P’s.

The so what? factor isn’t necessarily a key to beating your competition, but rather simply shows potential customers the need of your product or service. “So What?” “Who Cares?” “Why Do I Need This?”

So you got a blog and want to start earning enough money to support your Starbucks fix each week through the use of affiliate marketing and ads.

But if you’re like me, you don’t want to slap any ol’ product on your site and send your visitors to who knows where.

Yes, I’ve been working on ways to monetize this blog and I’d like to share with you some thoughts I have on this topic because to be quite honest, most of my options out there for affiliate marketing violates many rules I go by when creating a brilliant website.

Although I’ve only been blogging for about 9 months or so, I’ve had my share of time in designing websites and providing business advice to entrepreneurs. Anyone who knows anything about marketing knows you need to focus your product on something your target audience wants or will listen to, otherwise it will be ignored.

Image by Hysterical Bertha

A while back I went through the Publisher’s Clearing House process online to register to win a million dollars.

Yes it’s a long shot and no I don’t normally sign up for these kinds of contests, I guess I was bored and figured, why not?

A little while into it I began to notice how I was skipping through all the advertisement pages offering magazine subscriptions. They were there, I saw them, but I didn’t look at them. All I wanted to do was get to the end of the registration process and cross my fingers for a million.

Being that so many people register to win the million, I’d be willing to bet a large number of registrants to the contest really don’t care about ordering magazines. Like me, they keep clicking until the page says, “Enter Your Name Here.”

Once I noticed how I was skipping through to the end, I started analyzing the blind marketing system these magazine companies are doing.

1. Cost of leads = your marketing costs / the number of leads
2. Gross margin = revenue - cost of goods
3. Rate of return = profits / investment

Ok, so I cheated, they’re not sentences. But they are good to know.

Questions? Post’em in the comment section.

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