Synaxiom Media Group Inc.

The most important part of having a website is proper Online Marketing. This goes hand in hand with proper development of your website. These two elements work together in order to achieve online success and drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Key elements in order to achieve online success are as follows:

1. You need to have a good product. If you are offering a product that is identical to millions of other websites you will have great difficulty achieving success. Find a niche and make sure that you believe in your product and it is truly something people in general would want to use or buy.
2. Presentation; your products and services should be presented to your visitors clearly and concisely. Keep in mind that when a user arrives on your site they will browse your content and then make a decision on whether to buy or not. In a traditional storefront you will have the opportunity to offer a sales pitch and convince the potential client to purchase your products. However, on the web, your site itself is your sales pitch. Make sure it is clear, concise and accurate.
3. Implement as many of the proven methods in generating traffic to your website as possible.(we will discuss this further later on in this resource)

Traffic Exchange programs

Traffic exchange programs are generally a service for webmasters who can create a network of back links to generate web traffic. This is achieved by placing links on other sites allowing the web traffic on one site to be diverted towards another. This is a strategy that can be successful, however it requires constant monitoring and quality maintenance.

Generally speaking, a Traffic Exchange program will result in a lot of traffic; however it may not be quality traffic. It’s better to have 100 quality hits with a conversion ratio of 5% into sales than 1000 garbage hits with a low 0.1 conversion ratio. Hits on your page are NOT generally a good indication of how successful the site is in actually generating sales.

I have certainly experienced the negative side of this marketing strategy. We subscribed to an online directory charging Pay Per Click for placing our link on their site. We received hits and within a few days we owed them over $100 US. However NONE of those hits even translated into an inquiry let alone a sale. Therefore our experience with that specific website was rather poor.

There are many companies out there offering web traffic to be directed to your site, blindly sending hits to your site, and most of the time the visitors arriving on your site were brought there against their will. This will actually have a negative impact on your site’s success instead of the positive you are hoping to achieve. Cheating is extremely common in these programs and the old saying, buyer beware, truly applies here. If you are going to implement any type of paid link exchange or PPC (Pay Per Click programs, meaning that you have to pay a set amount of money per surfer sent by the referring website) campaign, make sure that the companies you are dealing with are reputable and will abide by ethical means of generating traffic.

Another type of traffic generating program is to implement an affiliate program. Also known as a partnership program where a commission percentage is paid to the referring website. When implemented properly this method of creating traffic may be successful in increasing quality traffic to your site. However there is also a high risk of reseller fraud that occurs in this marketing strategy.

Common frauds in Affiliate Programs and how to safeguard yourself

One of the common Affiliate Program scams is as follows:

1. You receive an new affiliate who joins your program
2. After a month or so you have received many sales and you pay your affiliate his/her commission
3. A little while later the charge backs begin to happen
4. You wonder what is happening so you investigate
5. You realize that your affiliate has been charging on stolen credit cards
6. You can’t find your affiliate and you are left responsible for refunding the money and paying the extra fees related to this fraud

Even if you identify the fraud you have no guarantee that he is not back on your program using another URL, name and address, causing the same problem all over again.

Certain safeguards you may implement in order to protect yourself again such frauds are by keeping an eye out for the following:

1. These fraud artists tend to ‘purchase’ your large ticket items. Thieves don’t tend to steal cheap, small items.
2. Keep an eye on the IP, email and shipping addresses for those in the Far East and eastern European countries. Most fraud tends to come from there instead of from Central Europe and North America.
3. Affiliates requesting to join your program with invalid emails. Therefore always have an email confirmation system in place. Another good tip is to request an email address from an ISP or generally from a paid service. Therefore avoid requests from individuals using free web-based email address such as Hotmail or Yahoo.
4. Shipping address is not the same as the billing address. Many sites will NOT allow for the shipping address to be different from the billing address. This will ensure that the product will be delivered to the owner of the credit card.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is simply optimizing your website page by page so that when search engines run spiders to ‘crawl’ your site, the information is quickly understood and stored by the spider. Poor ‘presentation’ (does not mean the visual presentation) will cause the spider to get confused and will leave your site without indexing it properly.

Performing SEO tasks are an important source of high quality traffic to your site. SEO is not a program that you subscribe to however it is an extremely important part of your success online.