If you’re just not getting enough visitors from Google, here’s a few other ways to get more people to your site. Most of these methods are part of a good SEO strategy anyway, so you’ll find that by implementing them you will probably do better in Google as a natural progression.

1. Bookmark your most interesting, outrageous or funny content in Stumbleupon. You can get literally thousands of visitors from doing this, however not many will go further than the landing page.

2. Build up a profile on Digg. Make contacts and digg plenty of their articles before dropping in one or two of your own pages and asking your contacts to digg it.

3. As 2 above except do it on Sphinn. Sphinn works mostly for marketing related content so if you’re selling vacuum cleaners you might struggle to get content up there.

4. Blog comments. Unless you are in the most obscure niche there is, you’ll probably be able to find loads of blogs related to your site. Get active in the comments section, give valuable quality feedback on posts and include your web address in the appropriate location, not in the comment itself.

5. Twitter. Setup your account and get active. Make sure you put your web address in your profile and consider making a custom background with your web address on it. Use the search function or a third party app such as Tweetdeck to find people to follow and interact with who might be interested in the content of your site. Get your blog to automatically update your twitter account via Twitterfeed.

6. Contact other sites and swap links with them.

7. Forums – while you can’t go spamming forums with your sales message you can take part as a real member in forums and many of them allow a signature link which is displayed after every post.

8. Pay-per-click. It’s an expensive way to get visitors but it does work. If you want to avoid Google’s Adwords, give Yahoo Search Marketing a whirl.

9. Email signatures/Email Newsletters. Including your web address in every email you send to anyone will get you a few visitors. Running an email newsletter with software like Aweber or ConstantContact will get you lots of return visitors.

10. Give away content. Contact other website owners and offer to do a guest post on their blog or give them a page of content for their site in return for attribution and a link back to your own site.

There are plenty more ways to get visitors from sources other than Google but these are a few to get started with.

Today I received a parcel from an Amazon Marketplace seller. I had been looking forward to receiving it even though it took 10 days (hardly 1st class service as advertised). Upon opening it though I discovered quickly that not only was it late but they had not sent the item I had ordered. It was not only a different model but a completely different manufacturer and altogether different features.

They could have got away with calling it a mistake until I saw the accompanying letter that told me they had run out of stock of the item I had ordered so had taken the liberty of sending the one that arrived instead. They stated that this was a more expensive item with all these features so it must be better and they would absorb the cost difference. They stated this as if they were doing me a favour. Their suggestion was that the product they had supplied was much better than the one I ordered.

The problem with this practice is that they are assuming the customer has just ordered on a whim and that they know better than the customer. It’s cocky and arrogant. In my case, as with all products I buy I researched carefully to find just the product I wanted. I put time and effort into making sure I was selecting the right one. I read over a hundred reviews. I was pretty certain that I wanted the product that I ordered. In double-guessing me they are insulting my ability to choose wisely when buying. They are calling me stupid.

It wouldn’t have taken them more than a few minutes to send me an email to ask if I wanted the alternative. Certainly it would have taken less time than packaging the wrong item and posting it. I would have been able to get my item quickly elsewhere and would have been happy in the end. As it is I’m still waiting for a response from their customer service email address. My time has been wasted. Their time has been wasted. Their money in sending, refunding and processing is wasted, and the packaging materials are wasted. Oh, not to mention the negative feedback that is imminent and the resulting loss in future business to them from potential buyers who check out their seller rating.

For now I have decided not to name the seller here. With a bit of quick talking customer service they might get away with this, but the longer it takes to get a refund the higher the chances that the negative feedback will come with some really negative comments.

I guess the moral here is – don’t assume your customer is stupid, communicate with them and let them choose to be stupid if they so wish.

Update: This was resolved quickly and the seller did have good reason for acting the way they did. In the end though I went to Argos to get my product – something I usually try to avoid.

Seth Godin asks “When the newspapers are gone, what will you miss?”

Personally I’ll miss having something to stuff my wet running shoes with.

I spotted the ad above in autotrader this evening while fantasy shopping for a shiny new Audi Q7 on www.autotrader.co.uk. The ad for “Whacky Racer” seemed slightly fuzzy and out of place on the first page. Turns out it was a fake ad, leading to a full advertising page about drinking and driving.

All in all I’m impressed. This is an ad coming from a government agency that is customised entirely to this website and uses strong emotions and a fake format to get click-through’s. If they can be this inventive, surely we can all learn from that.

I just wondered if anyone finds that some blogs are so prolific that they don’t have time to keep reading the posts.

In my case it’s Lifehacker. It’s only been a couple of days since I whittled Google Reader down to zero unread posts, but already Lifehacker tops the rosta with 40 new articles for me to peruse. I say peruse because I rarely read much that they write, though there is the odd nugget of really useful information which is why I don’t unsubscribe completely. It’s relatively easy to browse quickly through their posts though as they use good descriptive titles, often naming the technology they are talking about. So if the title contains Mac or iPhone and can skip right past it.

2nd to Lifehacker is Search Engine Land – where Danny Sullivan blogs. Only 17 items there in the last 2 days. Most of it is speed scanned but there are some great nuggets in there that I don’t want to miss so have to take a little care with it.

In 3rd place is the blog I spend most time reading – Geekdad. It’s just great and I’m happy to waste hours of my life reading that stuff.

So what do you do with a prolific blog? Read everything? Mark everything as read even though it’s not? Or just delete it from your feed reader?

Image Credit

I saw this Adwords ad today and was really impressed by it. I’m not sure if the hotel owns a petrol station or if they have an agreement with one, but what a great way to entice visitors to come and stay with you. Offer discounted petrol when you stay in that hotel. It really made their advert stand out amongst all the others.

People use Amazon’s tools in different ways. I use wishlists as a place to put gift ideas, either that I would like, or that I would like to buy for my family at a later date.

Last week after I subscribed to Friendfeed I realised that people were sharing their wishlists through the Friendfeed service. Suspicions aroused I went to take a look at Amazon and found my wishlist was also public. It included gifts that I had chosen for my wife and kids birthday presents. Not stuff that you really want them to see.

It’s straightforward enough to go in and make your wishlist private, but perhaps it should be set private by default, or at the very least when you add something to your wishlist you should get a warning to alert you if it is being added to a publicly accessible page.

Not fully trusting Amazon at this point I ran a Google search for “my profile name +amazon” and found there was an About Me page sitting there too. It showed products that I had reviewed, some other details AND MY EMAIL ADDRESS! I do share my email address publicly anyway so it’s not a huge deal for me, but lots of people don’t want their personal email address left sitting on a public page for any old spambot to pickup.

Again, it’s easy enough to make this info disappear, but the point is that it should not be enabled by default. If customers have to spend time and effort to stop retailers from giving their info away they are not going to feel quite so comfortable using that retailer in the future.

I’ve just redirected my feed links to Feedburner, so if you currently subscribe to my normal feed, please change your link to point at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/adamchristie
Thanks

As a guy who’s occasionally taken photos of new bits of tech gear as I unpack them, I love this photoset of lego men unpacking an iphone.

Let me start this by saying that I run Windows XP x64 Professional on my main work PC. It’s not the best supported OS but not the least either. Last week I got accepted for BBC’s iplayer beta release. Works on my Mrs C’s laptop, but doesn’t on my main PC. Apparently I don’t have Windows XP installed! Annoying.
So in the search for some TV to watch in the corner of my screen I went to Channel 4 to get their 4OD player. No Dice. Application error.

Why is it so difficult for these guys to just provide streaming video so you can catch up when you’ve missed a show.
Can no-one just copy Youtube? All platforms, all browsers, no downloads, no hassle.