One of the questions I am most often asked is:

“How can I get more people to look at my site without spending money?”

The answer is pretty simple, but it usually isn’t what people want to hear. Folks, you have to put in effort…daily. That’s it. Really. It sounds simple enough, but for whatever reason, people don’t want to do it.

One of the keys to increasing site traffic is to update your site every day. Yes, EVERY DAY. At minimum, Monday – Friday. I don’t care if you are a shoe store or a stock broker. If you have a website critical to your business, you should be updating it every day.

What’s the pay off? More visitors, and many more return visitors. If you are lucky enough to have someone visit your site, the hope is that they like what they see. But what if they come back again next week? They are going to expect to see something new! If they come back, and it is the same thing they saw last time, they are never going to come back again. Period.

Eventually, the goal is to have your visitors checking back on a nearly daily basis, therefore, you need to have something new there.

Ok, how do you make your site new and fresh every day? The easiest thing to do is start a blog on your site. That word (blog) scares people who aren’t Internet savvy peeps. It’s ok, calm down. A blog for your purposes is just a means to an end. It’s an easy format to constantly keep your site up to date.

For example, let’s say you own a modestly popular steakhouse. Your neighborhood locals come regularly, but you would like to expand your dining reach to the surrounding area. Heck, why not…money is good! But how on earth can you keep a restaurant website updated daily? [Read more...]