Ivygirl Media & Design

Building a website is easy. Building a successful e-business is another thing altogether. How to make the most of your web presence? Here’s five easy tips to maximize your site.

Give Good Service
There is nothing more annoying than a site that doesn’t offer adequate customer service. FAQ’s and contact information are just two ways that you can offer assistance to your customers. Users with a question don’t likely want to wait until your regular business hours to give you a call and they’ll likely surf somewhere else to find the answers they seek. Your objective is to make the business process as painless as possible. That means a quick checkout, easy navigation and yes, good customer service. Make sure your site includes answers to all the questions an uninformed user might ask. You’ll be surprised at what a little service can do for your sales.

One of the things I try to do every day is check my stats and see where my traffic is coming from. This helps me in a number of ways: first, I can see where my visitors start, where they leave and what they look at in between. The more popular pages give me an idea of what my users might be looking for and thus, I can target those topics more prominently in my blog. In addition, it shows me what search terms were used to find me, providing another insight into the needs of my readers.

But perhaps the coolest thing about StatCounter is that it shows me where my visitors are coming from, i.e., who’s linking to me. And that my lovelies, is priceless.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I’ve recently noticed a considerable amount of traffic from a new source – StumbleUpon.com. And you know me… I’m always up for a new source of traffic.

Stumble Upon is just what it sounds like – a social bookmarking site where you can show others what you’ve “stumbled upon”. Post links to anything, from interesting pics to interesting links and share your favorites with the Metaverse. You can categorize your blog into topics to make it more usable and most importantly, you can do all this for free.

So, how did I make it to Stumble Upon? It seems lyndon101 enjoyed my post on linkbaiting so he added my site to his blog. Want to see if your site is listed? Look it up using their website review tool. That’s free too and if you’re looking for a way to connect with the multitudes of users out there, Stumble Upon is definitely a good place to start.

According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the top 100 blog posts for 2006 came from a relatively short list of blogs. Mother.LiveJournal.Com, Crooks and Liars, Sifry’s Alerts and Michelle Malkin dominated the list with the top spot going to Mother.LiveJournal.com for the “petition against changes in the livejournal interface“. This one post was linked to 801 times in 786 other blogs (make that 802

What does this mean for hopeful bloggers?

While the Internet continues to be an equal opportunity employer, there is some evidence to suggest that the blogosphere is just as “clique-y” as anything else. Simply throwing your blog out there doesn’t necessarily mean it will get noticed and if you really expect it to generate some traffic, it wouldn’t hurt to get a few mentions from an already-popular blogger.

Will public blogging directories even the playing field? Its really too soon to tell but sites like Digg, Technorati and Digital Journal definitely offer some hopeful possibilities for new bloggers just starting out.