The whole purpose of establishing a web site is to make people aware of the products or services that you are offering. Many amateurs simply put up a web page and hope that people will surf to it. It doesn't work this way. People with this mindset have long given up due to frustration.

When I first started advertising a web page, I became increasingly frustrated because I was only getting 6-7 visitors a day. In the following article I will outline to you how I turned my website around to generate 150,000+ visitors a year, and how I keep this number growing rapidly. I hope to have 1 million visitors for the year 1999.

Giving People What They Want

Firstly, you must give a reason for people to come to your website. I purchased the reprint rights to over 250+ money making reports and put them online for people to see for free. I figured that if I gave them something for free they would come and also see the products and services I had to offer. My main goal was to generate traffic. The reports at http://www.freecoolcash.com/reports have helped me do that.

But now I needed to tell people about these free reports. The first place I went was the newsgroups. By posting some messages about Cool Cash Free Reports, it generated some visitors. Not a whole lot, but some. However, I still wanted more people to come to my site, so I started a free classifieds section. I started advertising Cool Cash Free Classifieds; and consequently hit counter rose dramatically. Why? People always want something for free, and free classifieds are popular on the internet.

I soon realized that if I wanted to make an impact on the net I would have to create a more professional image. I quickly purchased an automatic free classifieds system to do all the work for me and established a domain name. In October 1997, Cool Cash was officially born at http://www.freecoolcash.com .

Establishing a domain name was probably the best thing I did as it established my identity. We my new host I now I had the power of cgi-scripts, unlimited email autoresponders and unlimited email addresses to play with. I quickly added free postcards to the site as another traffic generating tool at http://www.freecoolcash.com/postcards . And soon after that I established Cool Cash Supermall at http://www.freecoolcash.com/supermall where people could set up their own free online shop, advertising their products or services. People jumped at this opportunity because they could take advantage of my traffic. The key was that these were all traffic generating tools.

Promotion - What didn't work.

Search Engines - I had a heck of a time just trying to get listed in the top 100 of the major search engines. I enjoyed glory days at top of Infoseek for the key words "free classifieds". But these search engines are always changing the way that they index pages. I was #1 one day and not even in the top 100 the next. Bottom line, I gave up on the major search engines if I could not get listed in the top 10. Seriously, do you actually look past the first 20-30 entries? I don't.

Banner Exchanges - I added banner exchange programs to my site in the hope that this would raise my hit counter. Do they work? Not really. Most of these sites offer you one banner impression for every two banners that you show. My click thru's were only 3%, which means that I would have to show 200 banner impressions on my site to generate 3 visitors to my site. Not a fair deal so I gave up on banner exchanges.

Free-for-all-Link Pages - I submitted my website to 500+ free for-all-link pages. Do they work. Not really. Most people only go to these pages to add their own link and do not really look at the other sites. Submitting to 500+ FFA pages did not make an huge impact on my hit counter.

Newsgroups - I used to regularly post messages letting people know about the services offered at Cool Cash. Although it generated more traffic then the above methods, it did not generate the amount that I wanted for the effort I had put in.

I am not saying the the above methods might not work for you, I am just writing my experiences with them.

Promotion- What did work.

Linking - There is a saying, "Linking is thinking, for it is the lifeblood of all businesses". When I set up my free classified website I contacted other webmasters who also ran free classified sites and established reciprocal links. This was by far the best decision I had made at this point as my hit counter tripled.  Establishing links with similar web pages is one of the keys to major success.

Mailing List - I run two ezines. Cool Cash Ezine and Free Biz Ads Direct. This is probably the most powerful tool in attracting repeat business to your website. Every Sunday when Cool Cash Ezine goes out, my hit counter almost doubles for that day. You want to let people know about new changes to your site so that they will come back. Having your own in-house list is the most powerful web promotional tool.

What good is a visitor is he/she never comes back? Statistics say that a potential customer usually needs to see ads for your products or services seven times before they actually purchase it. If you get those customers back to your site more then seven times, you have a good chance of getting their business.

Forget the heavy graphics! What is the point in having a heavy graphic web page if it takes too long to load up? Most visitors do not wait around longer for 15 seconds for a page to finish loading, so you should have a page that loads up fast.

If you were to go to Cool Cash today, you will see tons of traffic generating tools at the web site. Cool Cash is now a premier Business Search Engine on the internet. We also offer free classifieds, free web pages, free reports, free stuff, tons of free resources, free news and many other traffic generating tools. The best part is that we did not pay an arm and a leg for these scripts and either should you. Most of these scripts were free!

You might be thinking that this will take a lot of work and a lot of time. Of course it will! Success does not come easy. It takes a lot of dedication and ambition. If you want to see results, you have to put the effort in.

Key points to remember:

* Give away something for free to attract the visitor
* retain the customer by offering a service that they can use
  many times (i.e. free postcards)
* make your web page quick to load up
* AND MOST IMPORTANT, establish an in-house mailing list (i.e.
  an ezine)

Follow these tips above and implement them. You are almost guaranteed to have a popular website without paying hundreds of dollars. I am living proof of it.