How to Get Visitors to Read Your Article and Increase Your Web Site Traffic

Article writing should be a major part of your internet marketing strategy. In most cases, depending on the content, articles can greatly increase traffic to your web site. But there is a problem.

The internet was built for those of us who love to surf through the information rather than read volumes at a time. Since many people do prefer scanning, there is a pretty good chance your entire article will not be read. Visitors usually look for sentences or paragraphs that capture their attention, and then return to the search engines to continue surfing. If they happen to come across a poor or mediocre article, they will leave even sooner. You can bank on that.

So what does it take to get your visitors to read more than a few sentences and view your article as a quality resource? The answer is to provide a well written article with plenty of useful content. You can get more web site traffic by using the following tips.

1. Use Sub-headings

A good sub-heading can peak the curiosity of your visitors and get them to read more of your article. Do not try to be too cute. The sub-heading should be relative to your subject without overwhelming the content of article. The whole purpose of a sub heading is to lead the visitor to the next section of your article. Integrate your subheadings without allowing them to be distractions.

2. Use Bullets and/or Numbers

For whatever reason, people like lists. Most of us will take reading articles with bullets and numbers over those with long drawn out paragraphs. With so much information available today, attention spans are not what they used to be. People get bored very easily, so you must capture their attention fast and hold it. Formatting with bullets or numbers allow you to keep the pace and momentum of your article moving forward. Think in terms of the soundbytes you see on television; descriptive and catchy but very brief. Apply that to your article writing.

3. The Hook

Each paragraph of your article must hand off to the next one. Develop a main point for each paragraph without giving too much information away concerning the rest of the article. Think of each paragraph as steps that get your visitors to take action. The action in this case is you want them to continue reading your article and click on your web site link in the resource box. Give your readers just enough in each paragraph to get them to the end of your article.

4. Your Credibility

This by itself can determine your site traffic. If you are just starting out, the best credibility is to provide good content. The product or service you offer might be great but let us face facts: among millions of websites, people do not know you. Earning credibility does not happen overnight. It is going to require a steady flow of unique content before you stand out from the crowd so get started writing now.

Whether immediate or long term the point is get readers to go beyond just scanning your article. Utilize these tips while staying focused on providing informative content and watch your web traffic steadily increase.

Ways that Website Analytics Can Save Your Online Business

Website analytics is probably the last thing an online business owner wants to worry about. With 15 things to do every day before 10 am and another 50 to do before you can call it a day, sitting down in front of a bunch of web traffic stats seems like a waste of time. While I agree with the sentiment, it’s completely wrong. In fact, website analytics should be the first and last thing you review every day and I’ll give you three reasons why:

1. Web Analytics Help You Detect Fraud and Incompetence

Have you hired an SEO expert? PPC marketer? Social media guru? If you have people on staff or retain contractors to help you with your site, website analytics are your best friend.

Forget about the reports these experts create because all stats and data can be manipulated or ommitted. What you need is raw, reliable data to calculate the ROI of the services you are paying for.

Specifically, programs like Google Analytics can help you quickly isolate specific traffic streams and provide a host of useful data to calculate ROI, including:

Conversion Rate of Specific Traffic Channels
Conversion Rate for Specific Targeted Keywords
Average Time on Site for Specific Traffic Streams
Bounce Rate for Specific Traffic Streams

Of course, the conversion rate data for specific traffic streams (or Internet marketing experts) will help you calculate the ROI. But the average time on site will also help provide a rough gauge of overall traffic strength. If a specific traffic channel can’t keep visitors on site for more than 2 minutes, the traffic is either weak or you have significant issues on your landing pages.

2. Web Analytics Help Assess Site Health

To put that another way, web analytics essentially help show you where you need to invest your money most to boost online profits. Specifically, website traffic analytics will help you assess:

A. Traffic Strength
B. Sales Funnel Effectiveness
C. Shopping Cart Function and Conversion Rate
D. Website Conversion Rate and Rates for Specific Services/Products

For instance, high bounce rates and low average time on site typically indicate weak traffic or exceptionally poor landing pages. You can confirm which by looking at the data for specific traffic streams to see if there are significant variations in performance. If there are, then the issue is likely a weak traffic stream but if all channels are doing poorly, it’s more likely to be landing page.

The point is, the data tell you what’s wrong with your site so you can best channel your investment dollars to the most critical areas.

3. Web Analytics Eliminates Needless Split Testing

In most cases, optimization of landing pages and product descriptions is completed via split testing. That is, decide what sales tool you want to test (like a headline or CTA) and then create a new one to split test against. If your new sales tool performs better, conversions will increase and your hard work rewarded. However, this is rarely how it works.

You see, the thing people always forget about split testing is it’s sheer expense. To statistically verify even a lead gen site with a non-monetized CTA, you need at least 1,000 visitors or more to each version.

So if you think a landing page or product description might have problems with the headline, value proposition, and credibility tools, that’s at least 3 tests you need to run at 2,000 visitors per test. At even $1 a click, you can see how that would get very expensive, very quickly.

And the worst part: You have no idea if the headline, value prop, or credibility tools are even suppressing conversions. You are just split testing one sales tool versus a new one and hoping for the best, seriously.

But with web analytics, you can pinpoint the issues and eliminate the guesswork saving loads in unnecessary testing costs and content creation.

In conclusion, web analytics really are vital to your online success because they provide you with an accurate assessment of site health and your investments in traffic generating services. If you don’t know the true health of your site, then how can you possibly know what it needs to grow and be more profitable?