On this Thanksgiving I find that I have so much to be thankful for:
You(!), my blog reader: For finding your way here and reading this blog. My hope is that you find what you seek and enjoy what you read.
My Wife, Milen: For a huge amount of things (way too many to count), including her practical wisdom and her passion for arranging our travel (like Costa Rica!).
My business Partner, Rick Henkin: For asking me to be the EVP of IncreaseOnlineProfits.com and for his great business sense, ability to carry a dream to fruition, clear thinking and clear writing among many other things.
My co-instructor at UCLA Extension, Beverly Macy: For being one of the most amazing people I know, not to mention being a Strategic Planning wizard and having a dynamite and dynamic sense of Marketing in every realm (Global, Social Media, offline, online, Web 2.0...).
Our bunny rabbits: For showing us that a lot can communicated even without words and that sometimes it's great to simply jump for joy (called binking). When's the last time you jumped for joy?
All of my Friends (you know who you are!): For being so thoughtful and supportive.
The Internet: For giving us a platform we can all communicate better and more quickly on.
Let's hope it remains free.
The Long Tail of the Internet: For giving us an infinite and unlimited amount of niches and for giving every individual a community (no matter how small) they can belong to.
Social Media: For giving us ways communicate better and more real-time than ever before with: Blogs (like Attract More Visitors), Photo sharing sites like Flickr, Video sharing sites like YouTube, etc.
Wordpress and other Open Source Applications: For furnishing platforms for us to publish on, communicate with, and connect through.
Plugin Creators, Coders, and Programmers Everywhere: For empowering our platforms and giving us the tools to do what we do.
Wikis and Collaborative/Community Websites: For giving us places to contribute and come together in meaningful ways.
Bloggers and Podcasters: For sharing your wisdom and insights in real time and on-the-fly.
Creativity: Rising up from yoga and meditation, helping bring out great ideas and possibilities.
The Universe: From subatomic particles to Super Novas and everything in between - giving us a playground to be creative in.
That from where all Creativity emanates: Known by many names, worshipped in many forms, languages, and constructs: For allowing us to be...and be together.
Yes, we have much to be thankful for, so please pardon this partial list.
I'd also be thankful for your comments, if you'd care to share them:
What do you have to be thankful for?
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Asking these 7 Questions can leverage brand slogan marketing and keyword optimization to attract and satisfy visitors to your website, just as Costa Rica uses "Pura Vida" (Good Life) to attract and satisfy tourists to their country.
Blog Post re: Costa Rica's Brand Slogan
Satisfying visitors helps create customers and success for countries as well as websites. Just as satisfied tourists (customers) tend to re-visit countries, your website can flourish too.
Does your company have a tagline or motto and are you putting it everywhere and on everything?
Are you using the best/optimized keyword terms to attract visitors to your website, e.g., "good" vs. "great"?
Are you satisfying people's needs on your website?
Is your website and are your employees "talking the talk and walking the walk"?
Can your employees or customer service "make lemonade out of lemons", e.g., turning terrible roads into massages?
Does your site make what people want or need easy to find, e.g., "eco-tour" signs being everywhere, appealing to the youthful environmentally-conscious traveler demographic?
Is the spirit of your brand "lived" (portrayed) on every part of your website and by your personnel and consistently used in every/all places it makes sense to?
Part I: Pura Vida - Marketing the Experience of the "Good Life" in Costa Rica
How "Pura Vida" (Good Life), the national motto/tagline of Costa Rica, can help *you* attract more visitors to *your* website.
Two weeks ago I returned from a 7 day trip to Costa Rica where my Wife and I had a wonderful time. In fact, the feeling of Pura Vida (POO-rah VEE-dah), or "Pure Life" (or "Life is Great" ), is still with me.
Pura Vida - The Tagline/Motto for Costa Rica
Pura Vida is a national motto, or tagline, for Costa Rica. You see it everywhere on everything. Almost every hat, bag, coffee mug, and other tourist item seems to be subtly labeled somewhere with "Pura Vida". It's not always blatant. A cap may have a picture of a volcano on the front and "Pura Vida" on the side band.
Karl enjoying Pura Vida @ Arenal Volcano
Needs Being Met = Satisfaction
One of our drivers told us "If you're working, life is good." In other words, if people in Costa Rica have steady work then they can do all right and have a good life. And isn't that fundamental for all of us? It's like Maslow's hierarchies - Having food, shelter, etc. (benefits of work) satisfied allows one to consider other possibilities in life.
What Keyword Research showed about Life (Good vs. Great)
Interestingly, when I was checking Google AdWords Keyword Tool for the title of this blog post, "good life" had an approximate average of 673,000 monthly searches. Not surprisingly, there were about 1 million searches in October - Clearly people were looking for "good life" when the financial industry crashed and the world stock markets went into a collective nosedives.
But perhaps more interestingly "great life" only had an average of 74,000 searches - monthly and in October. And "perfect life" was just searched for 22,200 times on average.
So people were just searching for "good life" and they weren't even daring to search for "great life" (let alone "perfect life"!). It's kind of sad when we're not even *hoping* for the best possible outcome versus some lesser flavor of it.
Pura Vida Exemplified: "Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk"
Clearly people should have been in Costa Rica last month! (where they could have actually been living "great life"). The people there "talk the talk and walk the walk" about Pura Vida. I never saw one upset person the whole week we were there.
Terrible Roads = Massages
The roads are challenging (terrible) to say the least...but no-one complains about them. In fact some tourists who rented vehicles seemed to take delight in the rough pot-hole laden snaking dirt roadways. The roads just are what they are. When our drivers arrived to pick us up they would say, "Are you ready for your massage?" since the twisting turning up-and-down motion of a trip on their roads felt like a massage. This is certainly making the best of the what some may feel was the worst of situations. Pura Vida!
Leveraging the Main Industry and Trends
We were told that Costa Rica's main industry is Tourism. Eco-tourism signs are everywhere, clearing tapping into world trends and the preferences of many youthful travelers.
Omnipresent Branding
Is Costa Rica promoting "Pura Vida"? I hope so, because everyone in the country appears to be living the spirit of it. In fact the small print at the bottom of PuraVida.com home page states that "PuraVida.com is a national brand dedicated to promoting the Costa Rican lifestyle to the world." And it's not hard to see how this is expressed when their brand slogan ("Pura Vida") is on almost every piece of tourist merchandise that mentions Costa Rica, and/or has a picture of a tree frog, toucan, or a volcano on it.
Brand Statement: PuraVida.com Website
But the omnipresent branding and merchandising in no way lessens the wonderful experience of Pura Vida in Costa Rica and in fact, it seems to enhance it.
Caveat/Disclaimer: By the way, I'm *not* an expert in Costa Rica and I'm *not* commenting as a social or political or historical expert on their country or life. I'm only commenting as a liver and enjoyer of life.
Part II: Attracting Visitors with the Principles of Pura Vida (Good Life)
Here are some things to keep in mind when Attracting Visitors to your website:
Does your company have a tagline or motto and are you putting it everywhere and on everything?
Website, Blog, Business Cards, Literature, Promotional materials, Brochures, etc.
By the way, if you need your company name or motto/tagline printed on literally anything, I can highly recommend Joe and Marcy Roschitsch at SCEP Inc.
Are you using the best/optimized keyword terms to attract visitors to your website, e.g., "good" vs. "great"?
Are you satisfying people's needs on your website?
Are they finding what they came for once they get to your site?
Is what they find at your site congruent (in keeping with) what they were promised in the process of getting there?
Will they feel good about your site and want to re-visit it again and again?
Is your website and are your employees "talking the talk and walking the walk" re: your:
Tagline/Motto?
Mission and Vision?
What your marketing and advertising promise leading up to their arrival?
What your website promises to deliver?
Can your employees or customer service "make lemonade out of lemons", e.g., turning terrible roads into massages?
And perhaps more importantly can this transformation be delivered happily and without complaints, e.g., a Pura Vida "Great Life" attitude?
Clearly Costa Rica has tapped into the whole "spa experience"-type feeling as a lifestyle and philosophy of life people would love to come and experience themselves...again and again.
Does your site make what people want or need easy to find, e.g., "eco-tour" signs being everywhere, appealing to the youthful environmentally-conscious traveler demographic?
Are you leveraging your equivalent of this for your brand, motto/tagline, products, etc.?
Is the spirit of your brand "lived" (portrayed) on every part of your website and by your personnel and consistently used in every/all places it makes sense to, e.g., your equivalent of coffee mugs with the image of a volcano and the words "Pura Vida" inscribed on them?
For instance if Disneyland, "The Happiest Place on Earth"*, didn't fulfill their motto and the expectation of it, people wouldn't look forward to visiting and re-visiting their theme parks as much.
* The Happiest place...other than Costa Rica, that is.
In any case, I hope that you enjoyed my impressions from Costa Rica and how I think you can leverage some of these ideas to improve your website so you can leap frog (or tree frog) your competitors to success!
Does your website (or company) have its own version of Pura Vida? If so, what is it and how is it expressed on your site(s)?
I'd love to hear your comments - please let me know what *your* thoughts/experiences are on this...
Want the scoop on techniques for attracting visitors on the Internet? Well, I blogged about these in Part II of my last blog post on the "Best Twitter Tool and Trick for Short URLs" (see image on right).
But since the blog post was so long I think most people missed seeing the best part: The low-down on the actual Internet Marketing Techniques that were used in the post.
As you've probably figured out by now, sometimes I like to write example blog posts and then analyze them below the example post. If that wasn't clear before, it should be now.
Part II of Blog Post re: Attracting Visitors
In any case, if you missed seeing "Part II: Attracting Visitors and Internet Marketing Techniques" of the blog post, then you might want to check it out to see why these Internet Marketing techniques are good things to keep in mind for attracting visitors:
Twitter is a great way to attract potential visitors to your blog or website.
Intriguing/interesting Titles attract people to your blog posts, articles, or emails.
Delivering on what your Title promises is very important.
Uploading a video to YouTube has several advantages.
Use Examples.
Asking your readers to do something is a "Call to Action".
"Always be Testing".
Navigation/Usability: If a web page or blog post is long, make them easy to Navigate (e.g., the Table of Contents).
Hope this helps. By the way, for more info on Navigation/Usability you can see Rick Henkin's Create More Customers blog.
Questions or Comments on any of this? Just let me know...
There's a great trick for shortening web addresses (URLs) in your Twitter posts (and no, it's *not* TinyURL!).
But first, what is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blog where you post 140 character updates simply answering the question "What are you doing? These short one-way posts, known as tweets, are shown on your Twitter profile page. These updates can also be received on Facebook, your mobile phone, your blog, etc. For more info see the Twitter Wikipedia article.
Table of Contents
Since this is long post, please see the clickable Table of Contents* (below/right) --> * How was this Table of Contents created? See Bonus Trick #5 below.
Web addresses (URLs) are long. Clearly with only 140 characters for an update message in Twitter, the less characters (letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces) you use, the better.
Solution
Shortening the URL using free web services like SnipURL or TinyURL which take long URLs and make them shorter.
--> Note: This is also great for PowerPoint presentations as well as Email messages, where long URLs can break-up if they're longer than one line (e.g., a huge link to a Mapquest map - yikes!).
These are great solutions, but SnipURL's "snipped" URLs can be shortened even more.
With all of the people using TinyURL in Twitter (about 2.5 million uses as of when this was posted), it's too bad they don't know about SnipURL and the trick for making their URLs even shorter. And of the 90,000+ uses of SnipURL in Twitter, only half used the trick.
Both short URLs have far less characters then the original URL.
This savings would be even greater if you started with a longer web address.
Note that the domain names are 7 characters for both of the URLs (excluding the ".com"):
snipurl (7 characters)
tinyurl (7 characters)
The number of characters after the ".com/" can vary, but there are usually 4 to 6 characters.
From what I've seen, SnipURL's algorithm seems to create less characters at the end than TinyURL.
- Definitely a case of "less is more". This might be because TinyURL has been used more than SnipURL.
For the example above the characters following the domain names are bolded below:
With SnipURL, you can shorten the URL even more, by using any of SnipURL's shorter domain names: snurl.com or snipr.com. For the example above, any of these URLs will lead to the same web address:
--> So by using "snurl" and "snipr" you can save a few characters.
How to Use the Trick
Simply "Snip" the long URL to get the shortened SnipURL, e.g:
http://snipurl.com/3n4l1
- How: By cutting and pasting the long URL into the box on SnipURL.com's home page.
Now you're probably thinking, "Can I make the URLs even shorter by deleting the leading "http://" characters too?"
- Answer: Yes, but then the URL won't be clickable in Twitter (Yikes!).
- See the deleting the "http://" test in Twitter.
If the description of the Trick above doesn't make any sense, just view the Video below...
You might be thinking, "This is completely ridiculous - You're only saving a few characters at most with this stupid trick."
Answer: Yes, but with only 140 characters allowed for a post, the prime Twitter real estate (space available) is very valuable and you need to save every character you can...especially if you are trying to squeeze several URLs into a post as in the next example:
Now you're probably wondering, "Why would you want to post such a cryptic message? Are you a spy or something?" (Answer: "No!").
Well, here's the situation: I had just posted a comment to the blog page of one of my favorite podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee. Unfortunately MoC's software/settings for Comments had stripped the helpful links from the comment I'd made.
As a workaround to this dilemma I posted the tweet above so someone searching on the keywords might find the links. (Ok, I cheated and used my first name in the search to limit the number of search results...but you get the idea, right?).
What did I do with the extra characters saved with the SnipURL Trick?
- Inserted the phrase: "How-to" to describe the link
(which actually gives the solution many people might be searching for).
Bonus Trick #2:
- How do you get SnipURL's (Snip!) into your Browser Links or Bookmarks toolbar?
Go to SnipURL and "simply" drag the Snip! button to your Links or Bookmarks toolbar.
While this usually works fine for Firefox, in many cases it doesn't work for Internet Explorer.
--> Trick for IE: Right-click on the Snip! button, choose "Add to Favorites", then click the down-arrow next to Create, scroll down to the Links folder, and click Add. Easy, right?
Bonus Trick #3: - How do you get your Twitter posts to be displayed in the right column of your blog?
And while you're there, be sure to subscribe to their "Snips" e-Newsletter, which sends you an email of interesting snippings every week - definitely a guilty pleasure(!), but you can get a read on hot trends and popular culture too.
What do you think?
Do you have a better way to do this? If so, please leave a Comment below...
If you like this post, then:
Subscribe to the Feed (see the orange "subscribe in a reader" feed icon at top-right of page.
Let your favorite Social Media/Networking site know (see "Share & Enjoy" icons for Digg, etc. below).
Tell A Friend (see "Share This Post" and/or TellAFriend button/link at bottom of post).
PART II: Attracting Visitors and Internet Marketing Techniques
What does the blog post above have to do with Attracting More Visitors to your website or blog?
- How can these Internet Marketing techniques help promote your site?
Twitter is a great way to attract potential visitors to your blog or website.
Intriguing/interesting Titles attract people to your blog posts, articles, or emails.
Using carefully selected keywords is very effective and critical to the success of your Titles.
Delivering on what your Title promises is very important.
Just in case someone wanted something other than what they found here, bonus tricks were included.
Did you find what you were looking for?
If yes, then more value was provided.
If not, hopefully you found something that was helpful (a trick, resource, or link).
Since "Twitter Tools" is a very popular search and "Twitter Tools" is also a Wordpress plugin, content was provided for those searchers finding this post as well:
Bonus Trick #2 and other info "Twitter Tools" searcher might find interesting/helpful.
The video can be searched/found on YouTube or search engines.
Linking a YouTube video back to your blog or website both in the video description and within the video can be very powerful.
Of course with any Social Media community, try to be sensitive to what they consider to be blatant marketing (bad) vs. subtle markerting (may be ok, depending on the community).
Any video has the potential to become viral and be passed around exponentially.
Use Examples
People like examples as they show "how to".
People love Stories...and Examples can tell a story and make cold data/info personal.
Asking your readers to do something is a "Call to Action". (e.g., Tell A Friend)
Sometimes all you have to do is ask and people will respond favorably.
"Always be Testing"
The Twitter Test "deleting the "http://" test" (above) is a tiny testing example in homage to what Bryan Eisenberg says: "Always be Testing" (in his book titled: Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer):
Navigation/Usability: If a web page or blog post is long, make them easy to Navigate (e.g., the Table of Contents)
If the post was broken up into several posts, then it would appear in reverse order and lose its scanability, effectiveness, and flow. Instead of doing this give your readers an easy way to navigate (links, Table of Contents, etc.).
If you liked this post you might also enjoy receiving our 77 Great Tips of Internet Marketing to help you Attract More Visitors and Create More Customers(SM).
Welcome to the Attract More Visitors blog. The mission of this blog is to help you attract more visitors to your web site, blog, or podcast.
How?
By using evil internet marketing techniques, vacuuming unwilling and unsuspecting innocent bystanders onto your site and holding them hostage until they buy from you?
No!
How really?
By using proven e-Marketing, Social Media/Networking, and traditional marketing techniques.
Of course any discussion about attracting visitors and increasing traffic wouldn't be complete without some SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and SMO (Social Media Optimization).
Anyone who has a site that isn't performing to the level they'd like.
Maybe you have a business-card website that you set up years ago and have never done anything with since.
Or maybe your business has the obligatory stagnant website that no-one ever updated.
Or perhaps your business has a phenomenal web site, but not as many people come to it as you would like, so your chances of convincing them to buy from you are problematic at best.
Why does the Title of this post say "...or Else!"
That's just a fun and humorous way of titling the post. Life is too dull and serious anyway. The process of attracting people to your web site should be interesting - to you...and them. Nothing says that you can't have a good time during this process. Part of this blog will be using humor, satire, irony, and roasting (there's nothing like "roasted web site"...ummmm!...until you've seen it) to make some points. So stay tuned and see if you can "spot the irony".
While the focus of this blog is to Attract More Visitors, the focus of our sister blog is to Create More Customers. Together these blogs and our upcoming web site are an integrated whole which will help your business achieve the success you desire. Well that is, if you take the techniques we show you and apply them.
Nike has a great slogan: "Just Do It". And you should do it too. We'll show you how - all you need to do...is, well, do it. By applying these techniques consistently you'll find success, which means that more visitors will find your site and choose to do business with you...over and over.
Sound like a plan?
Ok, let's get to it then...
Oh, and by the way, our IncreaseOnlineProfits.com web site will have a lot more techniques (with "how-to" descriptions, videos, etc.) available when it's up and going. If you'd like to keep updated on when these will be available, just subscribe to our eNewsletter and grab our free 77* Point Internet Marketing Checklist while you're at it. See the upper right corner of this page for the opt-in box to subscribe.
* 77 Points as of this post date. With the imminent roll-out of changes to Google's algorithms these points may also change somewhat, but if you continue adding true value and transparent usability of your site for your visitors then you should still be on the right track.
One last thing:
You might wonder why we're making the distinction between "attracting visitors" and "creating customers".
First you have to get the people in the door, or in our case, in the "virtual door" of your web site. Then you can consider how to "convert" them to a customer or buyer of your products, services, ideas, etc.
If there's no "there there", visitors will leap (bounce) out of your site and you won't have a chance to sell to them.
The "creating customers" side of the equation involves everything that would give the visitor an enjoyable and informative time on your site, such that everything they're exposed to eases and smoothes their way to finding what they need (visually pleasing, intuitively organized, with great accessibility and usability) so they can make an informed decision and finally make their purchase(s) seamlessly and without a hitch.
As my partner, Rick Henkin says, "Your competitors are only a click away." Getting your visitors to stay long enough to buy is critical to this process. Is every aspect of your site designed to lead visitors to this favorable conclusion? That's why the "create customers" part is crucial. For more on this see the Create More Customers blog.
