search engine traffic - mini sites

Drive traffic to your main site by building mini sites based on popular search terms.

by Phil Wiley

Ok...let's suppose you've put a great web site up. Everything's pretty much perfect. You've found the perfect affiliate programs to complement your site's contents. Or you've got your own top products up for sale. Your ezine is rocking and ready to go. You've set up a site that sells by almost religiously following the guidelines in Ken's Evoy's book Make Your Site Sell. You've got your e-commerce set up, all in place so that you can accept online payments.(if you can't yet accept credit cards check out Clickbank for a low-cost option).

bla, bla, bla, etc, etc, etc...

Just one problem.

Hardly anyone is visiting your site. And few visitors means few sales. Without a good, steady flow of traffic you are doomed to quick failure.

Advertising works of course - but only if you have the budget to do it properly, and keep putting a big percentage of your income back into it.

Free publicity helps...but it's getting harder and harder to get web sites written about in the paper based media.

Writing articles helps. But they'd better be good because every man, woman, and dog is constantly mailing the editors of ezines.

So what important thing have I left out?

Search engines.

They're still supremely important for getting people to your site. And most of them are also free. (though this is rapidly changing). Searh engines are excellent for driving TARGETED visitors to your site.

But something they can't do is drive UNTARGETED visitors to your site.

Untargeted visitors? What's the point? Why on earth would you want untargeted visitors?

Come on, LET'S THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX for a moment or two.

I'm going to go against the grain here.

I can think of at least two reason's why untargeted visitors are worth getting in big numbers:

1. Because it's difficult to stay at #1 in the search engines. You can be there one day and get knocked from your perch into semi-obscurity the next. It's a constant fight to keep your web business up there in a traffic grabbing position. Suppose you only go for targeted traffic, but your main page slips badly in the rankings and vanishes from the first few pages. What happens to your income then? It vanishes along with your page.

2. And two...because traffic is traffic. You're getting eyeballs onto your products. Web marketing is often just a matter of percentages. The more people you get to your web site the more sales you make, the more advertising space you can sell, the more profit you're likely to make.

Think about it - suppose you've got a site selling hand-made photo frames.

Would you rather have the 10 people who actually did a search for hand-made photo frames?

The 100 people who searched for photo frames?

The 1,000 people who search for photography?

Or would you opt for grabbing the eyeballs of the 1,000,000 people who were searching for nothing to do with photography.

I'd go for the million hits any day.

Personally, if I could get a 1,000,000 untargeted visitors to one of my mini traffic driving sites I'd grab hold of them with both arms and say thanks for coming...and hit them with an almighty promo for my business site.

They might not have been searching - at that moment - for whatever it is you sell on your main site

But the odds are that a percentage of them are interested in whatever it is your business sells.

So how do you come up with mini sites that will grab you huge traffic? Well first of all you find out what people are looking for. To do that use one of these tools:

The GoTo Search Inventory Tool is brilliant for researching keywords to use. Type in a keyword or search phrase and it shows you how many times that word was looked up on Goto last month. Of course, it only shows you searchs done on Goto, but they are very representative of search engines as a whole.

To give you an example, I used to concentrate my meta tags, for press release and free publicity articles, around the term Free Publicity, because that's what I thought people searched for. But I was way out. Free publicity was only searched for 36 times. Press releases got 2448 searches. Make sure YOU'RE not missing out on visitors by targeting the wrong keywords. Look them up, and if necessary change your pages to drive traffic from a more popular search term.

Use This Free Search Word Tool

Take a look at this great little piece of free software
Good Keywords. It will help you decide on the best keywords to use to draw targeted traffic to your site. I thought the Goto Search Inventory Tool was the bees knees. But Good Keywords uses the Goto tool and improves on it, allowing you to save your searches for future reference and a whole lot more.

Another option is to visit Analogx which lists the top 100 searched for keywords for the last 7 days. The list is automatically recalculated once per day, and I guess sex related words are filtered out because non are listed. Interestingly for those of us in the e-publishing
business the top word today is Information.

First comes a list of the Top 100 words, then below that is the more useful Top 100 phrases used.

Also take a look at Wordspot, which bills itself as an "advanced keyword detection service"

They wrote a page listing MP3 searches

http://www.wordspot.com/samplecustom.html

(hich serves as an example of what I'm talking about)

... and say:

" this page alone with NO promotion work at all was found by AltaVista and brings in hundreds of hits a day - even with a description saying that it's about WordSpot"

Wordspot will email you the Top 200 keyword searches of the week if you go to

http://www.wordspot.com/free-report.html

Ok... so you've found the most popular search words and phrases. Now what?

Build a mini site around that search term, maybe just
one or two pages - but make it useful and take care
with the headers and keywords in the main text to make
it search engine friendly. It can be as simple as some into
text with a list of links to other sites on the subject.

Then you've got two choices.

1. Place a banner ad to something you're selling, or to an affiliate program you're trying to make sales from.

or

2. An ad or recommendation for your main web site.

Whichever of these you do make sure you place it in a
prominent position on the page - after all the idea behind the mini site is to get eyeballs to whatever it is that makes you money.

Then one final step - use a url submission tool, like the
newish intelligent submitter Search Engine Commando

to get listed in the search engines and directories.

( By the way, you should really check Commando out.
The list of features is outstanding and it does an excellent job )