So, you have a website. Now you are finding yourself in the position of wanting more visitors to your website. Okay, you share a common problem with tens of millions of other people.

Now, if you have done some research on the topic, you are probably aware that there are two primary ways to get more traffic to your site: organically (a.k.a. naturally) or via paid search.

In Internet marketing lingo, the study and practice of getting more traffic via organic search is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. Meanwhile, the practice of paying for your traffic is called search engine marketing, or SEM.

So, which should you choose? Here are a few benefits of each:

Benefits of going all-natural:
1. You do not need to pay for each action (ad impression or click) that gets someone to your site
2. The effects of a strong SEO campaign can last for a long time
3. Often, the off-site content (e.g., in blogs, etc.) created to drive traffic to your site creates a higher value for would-be visitors, potentially leading to a higher conversion rate once they reach your site
4. The content you create online (out on the Internet) with backlinks to your site might last for months or years, unlike with paid ads which go away the minute you stop the campaign

Benefits of paying for it:
1. Takes no time to build up its effect: you get instant traffic with paid ads
2. Due to the large amounts of traffic you can “turn on” all at once, you can use that reliable, steady stream of traffic to do testing (e.g., conversion or A|B split testing, whereby you see which types of messaging, images, pricing, etc. help drive more desirable user actions, such as purchases, on your site). This can help you draw conclusions about how to build a better, stickier, and more user-friendly website.
3. The cost of getting the traffic to your site can be measured very precisely in dollars and cents, such that it is very easy to calculate return on investment (ROI) of your campaign
4. You can experiment easily with different types of paid traffic and then quickly and accurately measure the effectiveness of each campaign

Which do I recommend? Well, of course, it depends upon your situation. If you need traffic – like – today(!), then I recommend at least starting with a paid traffic (SEM) campaign. But, on the other hand, building up a solid SEO campaign does take time, so the sooner you start, the better.

One final note: SEO and SEM are by no means mutually exclusive. Rather, you can (and probably should) implement both in tandem – and if you do good job, they will complement each other very well. For example, doing good SEO work on your website can actually result in your paying less for clicks with your SEM campaign due to your site having a higher “quality score.”

Yesterday at the local grocery store I noticed two Coin Star machines placed side-by-side. The machines were almost identical, save for the style and size of the font used in the title panel that displays the name “Coin Star.”

It is likely that the company’s product manager did this on purpose in order to see which machine attracts more users by experimenting with the two different types of signs. (Or, maybe one machine is just an older model!). Either way, this photo serves as a great real-world reference when explaining the Internet marketing technique called “split testing.”

Split Testing: A Proven Way to Increase Conversions

If you are like most website owners or webmasters, you want more traffic surging to your website on a daily basis so that you can make more money (or get more exposure to investors, etc.). But, have you given much thought as to what happens once the traffic gets there?

Identifying such desirable actions that your visitors take – often called “conversions” in Internet marketing lingo – is a key step to building a solid online strategy.

In fact, finding ways to increase your site’s “conversion rate” (i.e., # of people who take the desirable action / # of visitors) is a very worthwhile endeavor that should pay for itself many times over in terms of your time investment.

This is where split testing – sometimes called A|B split testing – comes in. This practice involves creating two similar landing pages (either on your existing site or hosted at two independent Web domains). The key is to make both pages identical in almost every way – save just one element (e.g., a certain image, a choice of wording, a price point, etc.).

Once you have set up your two pages this way, start driving traffic. Then, using your analytics package (I prefer Google Analytics), track which page brings you a better conversion rate. Once you have determined this, you simply start over again: make both pages identical (using the highest-converting page as the model), and then change yet another element – and so on. You can repeat this process forever. Provided that you have given each configuration enough time (or visits) such that you have gathered statistically significant data, split testing is a sure-fire way to improve your conversion rates.

Hint: be sure to only change one element at a time. That way, you can know for sure what it is that has contributed to the better conversion rate on one landing page versus the other.

In this world of Web 2.0 and social media, Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot to know – maybe too much. Frankly, it can all be a bit overwhelming. In fact, you may be tempted at times to avoid trying to keep up with all of the latest technological developments out in “Internet land” and just stick to what you know well. You know what? This can actually be sound advice.

If you are feeling like you are on information overload and find yourself doing anything BUT making the necessary efforts to promote yourself online, try shifting your attention to what you already have right under your nose: your good-old, standard, traditional, Web 1.0 website.

So, while you are sorting out all of this new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff and trying to figure out what direction you or your company should take, try the following 7 ways to make your site work harder for you in a down economy:

1. Update your images/photos to something a bit more current. This is a quick and easy way to give your site a makeover while spending next to nothing. (iStockPhoto is a great place to start).
2. Write in your blog. Don’t have an on-site blog? Do the next best thing and start a FREE off-site blog. Just go to Blogger and set one up. Then, in your blog posts, insert relevant links to content on your website.
3. Read all of the content on your site out loud. This is a great trick to find out if it reads smoothly or if it needs a bit of tweaking. Be brutally honest with yourself.
4. Find some great content out on the Internet (for news stories on almost any topic, I like, for example, AllTop.com). Create a simple Resources section on your Home Page (or elsewhere on your site) and post links to the content you found for the benefit of your visitors.
5. Install Google Analytics, one of the best darn FREE software products available today. It helps you figure out site visitor behavior, traffic sources, and lots of other good stuff. Bottom line: this software helps you figure out what’s working and what’s not. And, it takes just minutes to install: you just put a short bit of tracking code that they provide onto every page of your site that you want to track.
6. Request backlinks from other sites: find sites that cover similar topics/industry niches to your own site. Then, e-mail their webmasters and ask them to link to your site. This is a great way to build backlinks. (If you are serious about SEO*, use this fee-based service (Linkvana) that allows you to create your own backlinks on other, high PageRank sites).
7. Refresh your content frequently: be sure to update/refresh your site’s content every 1-2 weeks at the minimum. Search engines love fresh content!

* Another hot SEO tip: you can get FREE SEO advice from yours truly, including a FREE “spot analysis” of your site, by visiting: Custom-SEO-Audit.com.

Here is a short comparison of the advantages of spending your free time blogging vs. using Twitter (or “tweeting”):

Advantages to blogging:

1. You can post the content to your own website (if the blog is hosted there), helping to create more keyword-dense, optimized content for your site
2. Off-site blog content can be embedded with valuable backlinks leading back to your website
3. Leaves a more permanent, easily-accessible record of your writings
4. Easy for readers to pick up a “connecting thread” or theme among your various postings
5. Easy to have your writings indexed by other services like Digg or Technorati

Advantages to tweeting:

1. Your entire posting will likely get read, since it is limited to 140 characters
2. Followers immediately get access to your tweets on their own screens as soon as it is made
3. You are more likely to create more value-per-word, given the short posting size
4. You get to enter into a multi-person, continual “conversation” with others, which feels more alive and evolving than do one-way blog postings
5. You get access to other people’s “best stuff” for the reasons stated in #3 above

Both are excellent options, and a good SEO and/or community-building strategy could well include both. Happy posting!

Advantages to tweeting:

Here are some tips on what makes a great blog. These thoughts are in my own words but borrow directly from a very informative (and entertaining!) recent talk given by Sonia Simone of Copyblogger:

1. Keep it personal and entertaining: people want to know how your content relates to them, and they don’t mind being entertained in the process.

2. The days of respecting “authority for authority’s sake” are gone. Nowadays, people want a “cool friend” who is both cool and an authority on a given topic. People will listen to their cool friend before they will listen to what is written in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

3. Give people a “cookie” every time you submit new content. In other words, given them something they can use right away without trying to sell them anything. This will make people love reading your stuff because they know that they will always walk away with something they can use right away to make their lives or their businesses better.

4. Looking for content ideas? Check out AllTop, the self-proclaimed “online magazine rack” of popular topics.

I have just returned from spending four straight days absorbing tons of useful information while attending Yanik Silver’s Underground 5 online marketing seminar in Washington, DC. Rather than do anything like a blow-by-blow of the conference (which would take not one but several blog posts), I thought I would share with you one of my key take-aways, which involves dividing up the ways to successfully make money online into three distinct categories. (This possibly-perverse need of mine to categorize disparate and complex realities into a set of mutually-exclusive, collectively-exhaustive dimensions in order to get a clearer understanding of those realities is a vestige from my days as a doctoral student in psychology.)

I have created the following three dimensional map to illustrate my thinking. The background for this is as follows: after watching speaker after speaker at the conference, almost each one with his or her own rags-to-riches story, a key insight hit me, which was namely: everybody has their own angle, their own story, their own technique. In other words, after watching 15 or so speakers, I saw 15 completing unique approaches to making money on the Internet, with very little knowledge overlap amongst them. But, what struck me was that the various ways that they are each making money online can be distilled into a few simple dimensions or categories of skills:

1. the ability to create unique content, products or services (e.g., create an eBook, start your own fee-based membership community, sell a product, provide a service, etc.)
2. the ability to build a community (e.g., build a large list of opt-in e-mail subscribers, build a large following on Twitter, build a large community on Facebook, etc.)
3. the ability to achieve mastery over technical or operational elements of how the Internet works (e.g., become an expert at Google Adwords, SEO, buying and selling domain names, etc.).

Also significant (and this is a big one): no one person who is making big, big money on the Internet seems to be a high-achiever in more than two of these areas. Nobody! In fact, the vast majority of the speakers are getting rich (to the tune of $100K/month, $2MM-$20MM/year, etc.) by merely mastering one of these areas – and maybe dabbling a bit in one or two of the others.

Okay, so here’s my map:

A parting thought: an additional, essential element that anyone who wants to make money on the Internet needs to consider is this: you need to be able to monetize what you do. In other words, you could achieve mastery in any of the three areas shown above, but if you are not able to create and execute a vision for turning that mastery into revenue opportunities, your hard-won skills may be exceedingly interesting and fun, but they will ultimately fail to make you any money.

Black Hat techniques in SEO are those used to try to trick search engines into giving the target website a favorable ranking.  Common techniques include, for example: creating hundreds or thousands of worthless backlinks to one’s site, “stuffing” the site with the same keyword a ridiculous number of times, or duplicating one’s entire site and posting it on multiple domains (Web addresses/URLs) in the hopes of garnering more traffic.

Should you engage in Black Hat techniques? No! These techniques are not really unethical, per se, since they don’t hurt anyone – at least not directly. However, the argument can be made that they hurt the social and economic value of the Internet – since engaging in Black Hat techniques could potentially degrade the quality of the search results for users of search sites like Google or MSN.

The most important reasons to not engage in Black Hat techniques are that, by engaging in them you risk:

1. degrading user experience for visitors to your website

2. being flagged by top search engines, who can (if they catch you) ban your site from ever achieving strong search rankings

Bottom line: good SEO consists of featuring excellent (and fresh!) content, delivering a top-notch user experience, and generating lots of quality backlinks to your site. If you do these things and do them well, you can avoid engaging in Black Hat techniques. You will sleep better at night knowing your site is not going to be banned from Yahoo! or Google. And, your site will rank well for your target keywords – which will make you and everyone in your organization very happy campers.

Seth Godin, one of my marketing heroes, wrote a book called “The Dip” which offers some wonderful insights into the question of when to quit and when to stick with any given endeavor. One of his premises is that you should immediately quit something and move on unless you have the chance to become the “best in the world” at that thing.

Of course, this is a heavy statement for most people at first take, since only a select few of we humans are truly the best in the world at any given thing. But, Godin goes on to elaborate: his definition of the “world” does not really mean the entire planet – or industry in which you compete, as the case may be. For him, the “world” means the sphere of influence in which we have chosen to operate. So, if you sell cheeseburgers in Milwaukee and they are pretty darn good burgers relative to those of your competitors, you may well be in the running to have the best cheeseburgers in the world.

With his assertion, Godin brings to light a powerful concept which you can turn into a reality for yourself with through good SEO. In the world of the Internet, you are at the top of your game – the “best in the world” – when you can get people to find your website through achieving top search rankings. If you come up at the top of Yahoo! or Google for a keyword that is relevant to your industry, product or service, you are in fact  “the best in the world.” Congratulations!

We are told in “The Dip” to stick it out through the hard times when it seems that we will never become “best in the world” – provided that we have set realistic goals for ourselves. In SEO-speak, this thinking translates to the following: choose keywords for which to optimize your site for which you have a reasonable chance of actually reaching a number one (or at least page one) ranking. If you have chosen well, then don’t quit until you win.

However, if you never took the time to do the proper analysis as to which keywords to choose to optimize your website and are now frustrated at your lack of SEO progress after much labor and many hours spent, you likely chose poorly. In that case, you should quit now – right now. Then, start over by: doing the work (the analysis), choosing the right keywords, and continue driving hard until you appear on the first page. That’s how to be “the best in the world.”