Your business may depend on your website. Are you getting enough visits?

The success of any online business (and to a degree, storefront businesses) often comes down to the success of its website. Your business’s website serves as the core element of public outreach. It is how people find out about you, learn about you, and eventually become convinced to buy from you. If you hear of a company and want to find out what it does, or are looking for any company that can fulfill a need, the Internet is going to be the first place you turn to, followed by social media accounts. But even a company’s social media accounts have the ultimate purpose of driving traffic website. Because it's this simple: the more traffic you get, the more successful you will be.

Use any of these seven tried-and-true methods to start increasing website traffic immediately:

1. Employ free search tools.

• Take advantage of Google and other Internet search engines by optimizing your website to reflect keyword search results.

• Adding new content to the website on a regular basis makes the website appear more prevalently on search engines, and so does being active on Google +.

• Use social media search bars (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram in particular, as hashtags make searching easier) to promote your page and website--the more you post, the greater chance of attracting attention you have.

2. Use other people’s traffic to increase your own.

• One of the best targeted traffic-increasing methods is by guest writing on another business blog that complements, but doesn’t compete with, your own business blog. Be sure to incorporate a link to your website!

3. Pay to receive traffic.

• Advertise your website using Google AdSense.

• Pay for an a post promotion or ad on social media. Spending just a few dollars on a single campaign could generate over a thousand views.

4. Network on social media.

• Simply participate in discussions and engage with users of social media to generate traffic.

• Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn have been proven to be particularly effective at generating traffic for you.

• Discover what people are searching for, and supply them with related, unique content.

• Reach out to other website owners for mutually beneficial promotional agreements.

5. Network face-to-face.  

• Depending on the nature of your business and your industry, some professionals may choose to have direct contact. Meetup.com is a great resource for arranging such contact.

• You might meet with other website owners, instead of just reaching out online, to discuss in greater depth mutual arrangements to promote each other’s websites.

• Discover and attend nearby business seminars or conventions.

6. Promote your website offline.

• There are tons of ways to increase website traffic and brand-name recognition off the Internet. For example, you might:

  • Hang up and hand out flyers.

  • Sell cheap T-shirts.

  • Put up stickers around town.

  • Take advantage of public speaking opportunities. Visit joesabah.com to see if you can get on a radio show to briefly promote your website and business.

7. Try to guarantee personal and professional referrals.

• Word-of-mouth remains a highly effective promotional tool.

• People that get recommendations from people they know, like their friends, or respect, like a celebrity, are more likely to take that specific advice.

• Even referrals from people that someone doesn’t know, like people on the Internet, are highly effective at generating traffic.

The US has been making a transition into a postindustrial society for some time now, in which creative service-based goods (as opposed to material goods) are the driving force of the economy. As waves of technological innovation continue to flood the marketplace each year, industries have had to turn to a new brand of financial expert for ideas. This expert, known as the “postmodern CFO,” must be capable of overseeing the transitional effects of post-industrialization.

The new skills postmodern CFOs have, or in other words, the ones CFOs must soon expect, include:

1. The ability to create business models that reflect market trends. This requires business and marketing expertise, and incorporates analytical skills.

2. The ability to attend to core financial responsibilities while also recognizing and reacting to customer/client feedback, as well as social trends.

3. With the influence that politics and media now have on modern economics, CFOs must have the ability to foresee the influence of external trends on business and finance.

The Internet is full of thousands of examples of people that have made more money than they ever could imagine, all through affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is promoting someone else’s business, product, services, etc., and is almost entirely a digital craft. Marketing is done through a variety of methods like placing targeted ads and building email lists. Websites want traffic and are willing to pay you substantial commissions for successfully attracted business.

If you have no marketing experience (or really, no experience at anything business-related), fret not! People are often surprised by how simple affiliate marketing is to pick up and get started. Since the work you do to market is all done online, affiliate marketing allows you to become your own boss, work when you want, and depending on how much initiative and resolve you have, earn upwards to a six-figure salary or more. That is full-time pay for what often feels like relatively easier work, and indeed, one can even automate the process of affiliate marketing and be making money whenever, wherever.

So where do you sign up? This article contains the first two steps you need to get started, including the basics, the tools, and guaranteed success tips.

     1. Understand your role as an affiliate marketer.

Remember that your primary goal as an affiliate marketer is to gain money by promoting another person’s product, service, and/or website. This can be done a variety of ways, such as pay per click, but the most common payment method is a sale commission.

Sales commissions can be exceptionally high, and depending on the price of the product you are promoting (and of course, how successful you are at promoting) that means big bucks for you. You earnings are guaranteed through the use of hoplinks--when a particular person clicks a special link provided to you by a company for a certain product, and ends up making a sale, then you get paid.

Online programs such as Clickbank University provide useful instruction with additional clarity on these aspects of affiliate marketing, as well as useful tips on developing a marketing strategy.

     2. Find an affiliate product to market.

You should find a product that you are personally interested in and will be motivated to promote. The product should also coordinate with whatever marketing strategy you are employing. For example, if you have a blog dedicated to golfing, then you should probably be promoting golf equipment.

A website isn’t necessary to promote someone else’s product, although it admittedly makes it easier. You can promote as many products for as many companies as you want, but some companies will not allow you to be an affiliate unless you have a successful website. Also, you may be only be able to target certain product niches, and promoting even one product can be an extensive process, especially the first time around.

In any case, try to have an idea of what products or services you might be promoting before creating your website or starting a campaign, because naturally, your website and campaigns should reflect an interest in whatever the potential customers are interested in.  

If you are unsure of how to find affiliate programs or take advantage of available product promotions, simply Google it. Search for an exact product (if you know one) or topics that are industry-specific, and follow it with affiliate marketing. The aforementioned ClickBank.com is an excellent affiliate aggregator, as well as Commission Junction (cj.com). Affiliate aggregators are programs wherein marketplaces advertise available affiliate marketing jobs available. Programs such as these make it especially easy to be an affiliate marketer, with ease of payment options.

Getting started with affiliate marketing may seem intimidating, but remember, every successful journey begins with the first step. Just keep making steps forward and eventually, you will be smash success. Good luck out there!

A good business model and a good marketing plan go hand in hand. They compliment each other like peanut butter and jelly--they may be fine on their own, but they taste much better together. Well-developed social media marketing in particular is a staple of modern business success. Whether you are new or seasoned in the marketing game, remembering the following marketing rules will allow you to reach your company’s goals successfully:

1. Not even the best marketing can improve a bad product or service.

Although experts have confirmed the fact that successful marketing ultimately contributes the largest amount of success to a business, it is common sense that people won’t want your business if it isn’t quality. Apple Inc. has arguably the most elegant marketing campaign of most businesses, but one can see how the effect of their marketing strategy would lose its touch if they technology wasn’t genuinely good.

Drawing people to your business is only the first step--drawing them back is the second and equally important step, and it all depends on their experience. Keep in mind that word-of-mouth remains one the biggest factors in a business’s success. Also keep in mind that higher quality products/services provide the freedom to increase prices, and depending on the success of your marketing campaign, substantially more profits.

2. People can sense authenticity and respond positively to it.

Any company people can trust is going to fare far better than a company they feel like they can’t. Even companies that offer better prices will probably do worse than competitors who appear more authentic and therefore more trustworthy. Honesty is a huge component of trustworthiness. If the consumers smell a fish in the water, it is time to re-evaluate.

Marketing is an opportunity to let your company’s voice be heard, and that voice should be real. This may be easier for small businesses, as they tend to come across as more caring, but one must remember large corporations have hearts as well. After all, they too started off as small businesses, and companies have roots. Business size does not have to be an indicator of ethics. Regardless, emphasizing the fact that your business is run by real people who are in it for more than the money will always attract more people to your cause.

3. Keep open ears--remember to listen and respond to consumers.

Have you ever been to a store where the employees treated you dismissively, or struggled to communicate with salty customer service reps? Odds are you did your business elsewhere from then on. As a customer (or client), there is nothing worse than feeling unimportant and unvalued. The saying “the customer is always right” has a definite amount of truth behind it. Whether or not the customer is a quote-on-quote “ideal” customer is not necessarily relevant--every last customer is of value to your business. You may consider employing marketing strategies that seek to respond to common customer concerns and re-establish any lost faith. For example, if consumers are concerned about the potential dangers of your product, post something or create an ad that clarifies it is safe or emphasizes the importance of safe use.

Additionally, anticipating what the customer might want or like ahead of time and giving it to them is a win-win solution. Ask yourself what your consumers would be pleased by--a new innovative product, perhaps, or even something as simple as having direct communication with the communication. The communication can be quite light-hearted. Have some fun with it! Make people know that you care about them and want to develop positive relations.

4. Look beyond the data.

If your company is trying to target a certain audience, and all your social media posts and ads clearly reflect this incentive, it is going to come across as selective. Nobody likes reading droll posts that only someone in the industry would understand, or sitting through a commercial that has nothing to do with them. Although they can’t technically be described as marketing, those annoying commercial run by lawyers targeting the few amount of people who might be able to take part in a class-action lawsuit are a perfect example of exactly what not to do when marketing; indeed, if you could list everything wrong with those commercials (such as impersonality and boringness) and create something that was the complete opposite, you would be well on the road to success.

Companies that appear to only care about drawing in certain people--regardless or not of whether they actually do--are not favorable. Even if your company is selling cat food, you should try to find a way to make the marketing accessible and open to dog owners, should they choose to get a cat. Appealing to everyone may be impossible but something as simple as throwing in the line “for pet lovers everywhere” could make all the difference. Otherwise, they have no reason to pay attention and will forget about you completely, when instead they may recall you later on and bring in business. As the experts teach, just one really effective ad can stay in someone’s subconscious and bubble up again when the time comes.

5. Make media content widely accessible.

This is a fairly simple concept but quite possibly the most crucial of all. When people have a need that your company can fulfill, it should be easy for them to find you. This means having a prevalent website that is connected to a variety of social media accounts, which are likewise all linked together. By strengthening the connections between different platforms--whether it be Facebook, Google, Youtube, email, television, etc.--you increase brand-name recognition, and therefore, success.