For those of you who use social communities and networks as a medium to link up to other people to create awareness of your website, the best place is most probably Facebook.com. The beauty of this website when it comes to social communities is the use of ‘groups’. With a few simple steps, you can create your own group, and start inviting friends to join the group. This group will give you a common ground to keep in touch with all your members/friends/fans. With a group, you have the ability to send all your members a message, advertise certain things, and a collection of other goodies. I have created a group for a couple of my websites, of which some of them are sitting on 200 members already - this is a far higher success rate than I have had with any other social networking medium.

On another note, I have two very useful websites for everyone to take a look at:

Freelance Talk
Facebook Toolbar

I am sorry my postings have decreased so much recently, I have a number of things I need to prioritize before I can get back into posting several items a day, but I will be back with many interesting topics for everyone!

I was just over at Live Alchemy reading a very interesting post about effective adverts. I contacted Andrew to ask whether it would be alright for me to post his article here, and just a few minutes later, I received confirmation. Thank-you Andrew.

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Here are two ads that we have been running on Google Adwords. Guess which one receives more clicks:

The .COM advert has been viewed 125 times, and nobody has clicked on it. The .CO.ZA advert has been viewed 73 times, and 4 people have clicked on it. The only difference is in the URL at the bottom - one displays YuppieChef.com, and one displays YuppieChef.co.za (both addresses go to the same place).

200 people is not a huge test-group, but if the trend continues it raises an interesting question about what our branding and marketing strategy should be. Until now we have been pushing the .com version of YuppieChef because we feel it looks more professional and allows us to expand internationally in time. However, for now our market is entirely South African, and this little test seems to suggest that South Africans would rather visit a .co.za website if they are looking for stuff to buy. Perhaps they have been disappointed too many times after looking at a lovely international website and then finding that delivery to South Africa is not available or too expensive.

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I found this article extremely interesting, and it actually added to something I was thinking about the other day. With this huge web interesting in South Africa at the moment, there is definitely an increase in supporting local websites. I must admit, I would have clicked on the .co.za advert above as well. I commented on Andrews blog saying that I would assume it has to do with one of two things:

1. Readers feel that visiting a local website is more ‘reachable’, in other words, if there was something to purchase or the need to contact the person authoring the advert arrival website, it would be far easier than an international comparison.
2. Bandwidth reasons, we all know the costs involved with South African bandwidth, and if an account has been soft capped, local websites are still an option.

I will do a follow up with Live Alchemy, to find out whether they have more information in a couple weeks, and report back here with the results. Thanks again Andrew, for letting me post your article.

About two months ago, I sat down with a piece of paper, and drew three sqaures on the piece of paper. The piece of paper was entitled “traffic studies and human involvement”. My aim was to come up with three ideas, whether they were unique or recycled ideas, so that I could study website traffic, but more importantly, I wanted to try an get into the mind of the average human who surfs around the Internet ‘aimlessly’. The sites were coded, designed and online a few days later, and my studies started immediately. I now have a A3 piece of paper with various observations jotted down all over it. After sitting with the messy A3 page, I took an A4 page and proceeded to summarize my findings. I am not going to give a complete break down on everything I have observed yet, as I am still compiling a few items, but I want to share one topic specifically, which relates to website traffic, focusing mainly on blogs and human involvement..

I have noticed that blogs usually start with a slight boom, as an author releases a site to the public, the authors interest is large, and a great deal of time is spent spreading the word, emailing friends, submitting to search engines, and any other ’spam’ methods he/she requires (I don’t take kindly to people who spam, but you got to do what you got to do, I guess *shrug*). Anyway, this initial burst of traffic results in hundreds (hopefully) of unique hits to your website, and this fuels more interest in the blogger. The next step is to keep up the writing and content movement, but what often happens is that the spreading of the website dies somewhat, and the unique hits start to decrease, but the number of revisiting readers increases slightly. Over another period of time, let’s say around two to three weeks, traffic seems alright, but starts to decrease slightly, in both cases: unique visits and revisits. At this point, a blogger would usually try pushing again, but if this does not result in success, many people would give up, and the interest in the blog could easily fall away. This point is crucial for any blogger, people visit a website, and if they are interested in the material on the website, hopefully they will return again, but in most cases they will only return again if they see a link to your website, this would trigger the memory (MyBlogLog’s images play a great role in this recognition structure) and they would pop on over again. If this returning visitor now sees that many other people are interested in the site, the chances are that they would become a regular reader on the website, sign up for your newsletter or even subscribe to your RSS feed.. (more…)

With the on going increase of social networks geared at bloggers - posting times are getting more and more important in order to get some extra hits every day. There are many websites evolving, where you can list your blog, and other bloggers can browse directories to find various blogs based on topics. Furthermore, with aggregation becoming so popular, there are a number of websites, which now sydicate content from blogs onto one place. A great example of this is Amatomu. This site, as an example, sydicates content from all the websites, which are listed in their directory, and displays them on the main page - it is like a news warehouse for the bloggosphere I suppose.

Once an author has written and published an article, the topic and a snippet of the article appear on the syndicating website. This is a lovely way to get some extra visits to you website. That said, and off topic, it is a good idea to make sure your topic is attractive, and the first paragraph of the post, related to the topic, and interesting.

Moving along, I mentioned time being important in the first paragraph, and this was exactly what I wanted to talk about. Through personal experience, and experimentation, I have noticed some trends, which work fairly well with regards to getting extra traffic to your website. If you would like to increase your traffic somewhat, a good move is to publish an article at a not so common time, for example, late at night. Now, this will list your topic on the aggregating website, and because the time is unpopular, it will remain at the top of the new articles list for quite a while. This obviously has an adverse effect, in that at these times, there are probably not many people surfing the Internet, but those who are, are probably bored, not interested in writing their own articles, and therefore looking for something to keep them occupied. Another good time, I have noticed, is posting an article before a holiday or weekend - a large number of people who use the Internet, are using it from work, which means that during a weekend, they are not online. This means that if you post a new article just before the weekend or holiday, it will once again remain at the top of the list. When you publish an article at these times, there is another advantage - Let’s say that we publish an article at 1am on a Monday morning, not many people will be publishing articles at this time of the night, and therefore when people arrive at work, they will see your article topic at the top of the list and hopefully click through to your website.

Selecting times is a tricky topic, and one which I am still fairly new on. I have a couple tests, I am running, and I will elabourate more, once my tests are complete, and are hopefully successful.

The Web Entrepreneur, would love to hear your thoughts on this matter!