I’m not a journalist yet, but I study journalism and I’m sharing my knowledge with anyone who’s interested in the hope that it will be useful and at least a part of the learned things will be put in action. I really hope that in the next few years the number of the blogs will increase, I enjoy the fact that anyone can share his opinion and knowledge. I’m just dissatisfied with the way many do this sharing.

Just for the matter of the example, if you will follow these posts, You’ll understand that a well chosen title how can increase the effectiveness of your content, a well designed content how can be in the benefit of your user, a well-chosen font type how can keep your visitor reading and returning, and a good knowledge about the applicable “Journalistic Ethics and Standards” how can avoid you some headaches.

As I said, I’m not a journalist yet. I really hope when I graduate the journalism college, better said IF I graduate this college, I will be able to provide my users the content they will really find interesting, or at least they will recognize sooner if they should read a post or not. Because this is part of the ethics, too: the user shouldn’t read a whole article to learn if it’s useful for him or not; he should know from the first 2-3 sentences.

I will try to post these, let’s say lessons every Sunday, and I will cover the following things:

• Genres and use of the genres
• Standards and Ethics
• Typography – Designing a good layout
• Communication
• Media sociology
• Media psychology

Why will the posts be in your benefit? Simply because if you’re more professional, the users will be more likely to revisit your blog or website, your content will be more appealing and interesting, the visitors will find your posts useful.

I recommend following these posts to anyone who runs a blog, you can only win by using the tactics described in each post.

I’d also like to recommend subscribing to the RSS feed set up for these posts as this way you will get the posts directly in your favorite reader. To subscribe, please follow this link to Feedburner where you can choose your reader.

Please, tune in, you can only win.

This is not hard at all, all you have to do is to think.
You may ask, think about what? About what your competitor does and will do. Look at their websites, browse it and look at every aspect of it. Look at its visitors, who are they what are they searching for when they arrive on your competitor’s website?

It’s simpler than you think, there are tools you can use to look behind the scenes. For example Alexa. It is a very basic chart you see on their website but for beginners it will do the job. If you are on to beat your competitor, you want to know how do you and the competitor do. To begin, place your competitor’s domain name in the first box, then yours in the second input field. You will get a nice chart you can monitor many things like Alexa Rank, Reach, etc. As I said, this is a basic tool, but for monitoring is OK.
Another cool tool is Compete. Their slogan rocks: Track your rivals. Then eat their lunch. , if you click the link it will take you to Compete. This tool requires sign-up (both free and paid), but what you get is awesome.
All you have to know is to learn your competitor’s details, remember this and you’ll be better than him/her.

To effectively rank better than your competitor, you can do another thing: use the same keyword as he/her does then add your own too. Adding your own can be a bit difficult, here’s where you can use a bit of help. KeyCompete.com generates keywords for your website (or advertising campaign), then you can place these keywords in your keyword list. What will you achieve? Think about it:
Your competitor has the “car” keyword, so when somebody searches for “car”, his result will be amongst the search results. You have “car, truck, auto” keywords, so when somebody searches for car, truck or auto, you will be amongst the search results. If your website ranks better than your competitor’s, you rock, and you receive the visit, not him/her.

In marketing a very basic need is to learn you visitors, Compete.com helps you to learn ‘em. The next step is to beat your competitor. Online, this means, get your site rank better and for more thangs than your competitor’s. KeyCompete.com helps you with the keywords.

If you have ads on your site, you will earn more. If you don’t have, much likely you will earn only reputation. That’s a “cool to have” thing on the net, so why not have?

Back to the initial question, driving visitors to your website can be achieved generally talked only two ways: the easy way and the hard way.

Drive visitors to your website: The Simple Way

This is very simple, but it costs. Basically it’s advertising on very high traffic websites, they are NOT paid links because those are forbidden from SEOs point of view and from the search engine’s too. You can only ruin your life with paid links, so don’t buy paid links.
I said high traffic websites, what do you think, which are the places which get the more hits? I tell you: the search result pages. Google, Ask!, Yahoo!, Live, each get millions of hits daily, so these are the best places where your link should appear.
Each of the above search engines have their own place where you can purchase sponsored links, as they call these links.
In Google’s case there is Google Adwords where after you place some cash in your account, you can place your own ads on either the content network or the search results page. Both are a matter of view clicks and can have incredibly cool results considering the number of visitors gotten from the advertisement. By the way in 2009 we will be able to create TV ads from Adwords, which will be published on NBC channels. How will they manage that I have no idea, but it can be very interesting.
In Ask! case, you sign up, add funds to your account then specify the details of your ads. You can sign up with Ask Sponsored Listings here.
In the other search engine’s case basically the process is the same: sign up, add funds, create your ad then wait.
Any search engine will do the job, but I still recommend Google because its coverage and its number of visitors.
How will it affect your pocket? You can set it how much do you want to pay. I managed once to get on AdWords 1000 clicks for only $10 (USD) which is quite cool. Again, you set how much do you want to spend.

Drive visitors to your website: The Hard Way

This was covered already in many of my articles, but I tell it again anyway: quality content means a lot of visitors.
It’s very hard to post content which will attract many visitors, so the best method is to post a lot. You will be able to post something which will attract wide audience, just don’t give up. Maybe your first post will attract hundreds of visitors, maybe only the 100th, but sooner or later you will post something which will be interesting for the others. Again, just don’t give up! And this is why it’s hard: you need a lot of patience, enormous amounts, and imagination too. Why? after a few hundred posts you will face a strange feeling, you will feel there is nothing you can write about. If this is the case, just go to Digg and browse its content. The possibility of finding something you think about you can do it better is very high. So just use digg for source of inspiration.

Upcoming post will be other methods of how to bring more visitors to your website, so get back soon