Case In Point: Designing A Site That Demands High Traffic

by Karon Thackston ?2002 http://www.ktamarketing.com nnMarnie Pehrson may not be well known for driving traffic to Web sites, but she should be! Her ability to get literally hundreds of thousands of page views a month is simple astounding! (NOTE: I said “page views,?not “hits.?BIG difference!) I had to ask her to reveal her secrets so that we all could learn how to create a Web site that simply demands high traffic.nnKARON: Hi Marnie. I really appreciate you taking the time to give us your insights on traffic building. You seem to have the Midas touch in this area : )nnMARNIE: Oh sure, Karon. Anything for a friend.nnKARON: I know from our email conversations that most of your Web sites get anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 page views a month. How do you do it? Search engines? Ezine ads? What?nnMARNIE: Well, those things do help, but normally the site itself drives the visitors to return over and over. It also encourages viral marketing with lots of referrals.nnKARON: So tell me about your two biggest sites (in terms of traffic). Those would be http://www.ideamarketers.com and http://www.shelovesgod.com, right?nnMARNIE: Right. Both of these sites give the visitor a chance to shine - to contribute and be in the spotlight. They both accept article contributions, they both allow profiles of visitors, and they both have a place for me to give extra attention to visitors (the masthead).nnKARON: So, because visitors are in the spotlight on these two sights, they recommend them to others, return repeatedly, and link back to you. Excellent!nnMARNIE: Yes, I’ve built in automatic ways for visitors to forward pages to friends which brings even more traffic. Basically, rather than having the focus on selling, I put it on the visitor. They are the primary focus with the products/services I sell taking a back seat (so to speak).nnKARON: But you still make sales, right? nnMARNIE: Oh yes! The sites wouldn’t have been able to stay online since 1998 and 2000 if they weren’t making money : )nnKARON: Good point! What else can you tell us about your “magic formula??nMARNIE: Well, both sites have *LOTS* of pages people can visit. As you know, more pages = more doors for visitors to enter = more listings in search engines = more traffic!nnKARON: Keep going?I’m all ears.nnMARNIE: The masthead I told you about earlier helps drive traffic from my heavy-hitter sites to my newer sites. Among other things, it features articles and tips from site contributors. Then, in my newsletters, I encourage people to go to the site to read further. In other words, everything's not there in the email, they have to go to the site to get some of the content.n nKARON: Well, you just have all kinds of tricks up your sleeve, don’t you? Anything else?nnMARNIE: Yes, actually : ) IdeaMarketers is also a "newsworthy" site that is used as a resource for many people. It tends to get a lot of mentions in articles simply because of its nature. And because of the quality of the site, IdeaMarketers has been recommended in a lot of high-traffic ezines.nnKARON: So the combination of all these elements creates a Web site that people WANT to visit time and again, right? Marketing sites such as these is left more to the visitors than to your efforts, huh?nnMARNIE: In a way. The visitors most certainly are the reason for my success. As I said before, search engines are not to be ignored, and I’m a firm believer in ezine advertising, but when you build a site designed around visitor interaction, traffic usually comes without a struggle.nnKARON: Thanks so much, Marnie. This gives us some serious issues to think about.nnMARNIE: My pleasure!nnThe two sites of Marnie’s we mentioned in this interview are her article promotion site http://www.ideamarketers.com, and her women’s spiritual growth site http://www.shelovesgod.com. Visit them today to see Marnie’s traffic pulling designs in action.