|
In This Issue:
Random Free Hosting Site
We'd like to congratulate Carriage
House Inn for being the winner
last month and
Ab Butler
for being this month's free hosting site. At the beginning of each month we
will call up our own site's homepage. Whomever's site is the featured
site when the page loads will get free hosting of one domain for one
month. It's just our way of saying thank you.
Free Availability Calendar
We ran across this very
nice availability calendar and thought a number of our clients would
be interested in adding it to their accommodations site.
RentCalendar is a free Web based vacation rental availability
calendar. It is designed to help innkeepers easily display the
availability of their accommodation properties on the Web.
If you are interested in
adding this capability to your site, just set up an account and
contact us and we'll handle all the geek stuff for getting the your
site linked to the calendar.
Web Page Updates
In addition to web page content, the ranking of web pages is
influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. Google measures
content changes to determine how fresh or how stale a web page is.
Google tries to distinguish between real and superfluous content
changes.
This doesn't mean that it is always advisable to regularly change
the content of your web pages. Google says that stale results might be
desirable for information that doesn't need updating while fresh
content is good for results that require it.
For example, seasonal results might go up and down in the result
pages based on the time of the year.
Google possibly records the following web page changes:
-
the frequency of changes
-
the amount of changes (substantial or shallow changes)
-
the change in keyword density
-
the number of new web pages that link to a web page
-
the changes in anchor texts (the text that is used to link to a
web page)
-
the number of links to low trust web sites (for example too many
affiliate links on one web page)
Promoting Your Site
Just because your Web site
is there, doesn't mean you're going to get any visitors. You must let
the Search Engines and the Net at large know you are open for
business. Other than the occasional redo of your site, marketing and
promotion is going to occupy most of your time. Believe me, it is
never-ending work.
The only way your Web site will grow and provide a self-sustaining
income is to get traffic to it. The theory is that if your visitors
are targeted, some of them will purchase your products. Consider these
resources to get visitors to come to your site:
a) Do your best to get indexed by all the major Search Engines and
directories. Many of your buying customers are provided by them.
b) Explore all the other ways of promoting your Web site. There are
business cards, word of mouth, Google AdWords, ad networks, linking to
relevant Web sites, etc, etc. We would advise staying away from FFA
(Free for All) advertising.
c) Never pay good money
for a print ad and forget to make a reference to your Web site. Print
ads are just too expensive to not capitalize of promoting your Web
site.
d) Schedule your time and do each promotion activity on a weekly
basis. You must sleep, eat, think, dream, and live to promote your Web
site. Cary your business cards with you and pass them around. Develop
contacts and relationships and nurture them, join any online or
offline groups elated to your Web site.
If you are realistic and keep at it, you'll see results. It won't
happen overnight, it’s more like a steady trickle that will grow. From
everything I've read it appears most Web sites take about 9 months to
a year to start producing an income. The one constant will be your
dedication and commitment to make it happen. Keep plucking at it and
the Internet horn of plenty will deliver.
New Clients
|
About
Us
