8 Ways to Increase Website Traffic

With a global pandemic upon us all, it is even more essential for businesses to implement digital-first initiatives. There have been some great highlights during these difficult times, like restaurants and grocery businesses have led the way for online orders and distanced fulfilment. 

Yes, that means it is more important now than ever to have an online website that can allow you to receive, make and deliver your products or services to your customers.

A website is essentially space for your business on the Internet allowing visitors to learn more about your business and solutions which you can offer to them.

Having a website solves one-half of the puzzle of a digital-first initiative. The other more important half is focusing on obtaining a higher conversion rate.

Let's take a step back here. A higher conversion rate just means new visitors who are looking for your product or service which would be more likely to find your website first and for them to purchase what you have on offer.

You've likely heard that growing a website takes time. Requires consistent sharing of great content for months and months on end. And usually, it takes around 2 years of disciplined committed work for your website to get big.

It's slow. Not very thrilling.

This article isn't about to be boring. It'll cover some great ways to help your website gain spikes in traffic as and when you carry out any of the following suggestions. Read on.

Here's 8 ways you can increase your website traffic:

1. Make use of your email list

There are so many content marketing strategies available today, and it can be confusing. However, email marketing is the simplest, most cost-effective, and effective way to advertise your website.

As it is generally inexpensive email is more likely to drive a favourable ROI while being versatile. Create campaigns which encourage your email subscribers to share your content with their friends and family.

2. Build a presence on social media

Social media is the future. Don't take this lightly, as many businesses are already monetising from their social profiles. Social media worldwide is increasing at a rapid rate, and there hasn't been any sign of a slowdown yet.

Think outside the box. Don't just rely on Facebook. There are plenty of other alternatives such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

Do more than just create a profile. Make sure you spend time to curate valuable and useful information or content that encourage engagement as these actions will make it much easier for you to generate new sales opportunities.

3. Start blogging

Make sure you create a blog and treat this as a priority because it doesn't matter what type of business you are in, blogging is one of the best ways to increase your website's traffic and generate new sales opportunities.

When you blog, you're taking steps to improve your SEO. As you continue to consistently add new content to your page, your SEO factor is improved. Yes, the success of this is directly related to the frequency of your posts. Stronger results came from more frequent blog posts.

4. Use influencer marketing to establish digital credibility

A website is only as credible as other people say it is. A fast way to hack this is to leverage your relationships with influencers. There are 2 ways to this (1) established celebrities (2) micro-influencers. 

5. Improve your backend infrastructure for more streamlined search engine optimisation

One of the key elements to discoverability on any search engine is website speed. Make sure you are with a reliable hosting partner to ensure your website loads fast, and is optimised for key target regions. You can find more information about this here.

6. Leverage long-tail SEO

You might have heard a big emphasis on including key search phrases in your SEO strategy. Who doesn't want to rank for terms like "web hosting" and "Kuala Lumpur's Best Web Hosting Company". Although those terms are lucrative they are also very difficult to rank for. Because of a large competitive base tussling for those keywords.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are much less competitive and could drive the majority of website traffic to your website.

7. Writing a high-quality guest post

One of the hottest and easiest ways to give your traffic a significant bump is to write a guest article for an already popular blog.

Here's how you can do this:

1. Establish and build a relationship with the blog's owner. 
2. Contact them via Twitter, and comment on their postings.
3. Leave high-quality comments on their website.
4. Get introduced by another guest writer.
5. Meet them face-to-face.

Here are some great tips for your guest post:

1. Use simple words
2. Write advanced how-to blog posts
3. Links
4. Create conversations
5. Prove you are the authority
6. Create powerful headlines

8. Create a giveaway worth wanting

There are many free giveaways, but very few take the time to craft a great giveaway that people actually want. Remember people are not signing up to your list because they like you, they're signing up because they believe you can help them with their problem. 

Conclusion

We get really excited just talking about all of these tactics because these are tactics that anybody can use, and some of the tactics that we also use. If you have any other findings that work for you do share them in the comments below.

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Why should SMEs choose to host externally?

Technology over the years have influenced and shaped the business world. There is a large amount of users and especially small business owners that have turned to the Internet to help them to deliver some type of service or function as it is evident that the Internet can help to perform a lot of operating business activities. There has been a rise on the need for external hosting. Why? The attraction of outsourcing business activities and directly saving costs is among one of the big factors in influencing this change.

The reality is that external hosting is customizable to fit almost any budget and project - as shown through these hosting packages on offer. When working with an external hosting provider it is important to know which features you really need and how they will help your small business grow. Once these goals are aligned, the options which are on offer become very attractive to any business.

For business managers the relation in choosing outsourcing as a business strategy should be reasoned with alignment of business goals and objectives, available resources, push factor; whether there is an internal need to pursue hosting or pull factor; due to attractive external propositions and proactive environmental scanning to determine what best fits your current needs.

What you should look for when outsourcing your hosting needs:

1. a dedicated 24/7 phone & email support deployed to help you with your day-to-day IT needs. This comes with no additional human capital requirements on top of the service fee charged.
2. Unmetered data transfers; no hidden terms that would severely limit your business potential and not reflect on your investment and prove to be expensive poorly reflecting on your return on invested capital.
3. Allows you to try without fear of commitment, on offer should be a 30-day money back guarantee with no questions asked to accommodate the notion that not all services provided, although designed with good intention, fits everyone.
4. One other important distinction that you should look for is the ability for your outsource hosting provider to be able to accommodate your infrastructure extension requirements. A big misconception is that an externally hosted environment once deployed becomes an island that is independent/isolated from your businesses future expansion requirements. 

As more and more small businesses are seeing the benefits of moving towards outsourcing their complex IT needs. Your business will be able to enjoy both the cost benefits and ability to adapt to an ever changing business environment that is highly influenced by a hyper-competitive IT integrated ecosystem.

photo by © Brennan

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What is Colocation?

Colocation is the practice of housing your servers and devices in a professional datacenter in order to access the benefits of greater bandwidth, lower latency, specialist services and systems, constant security advanced infrastructure, economies of scale, and a bunch of other benefits.

As the demands of the world increase, technologies grow to become more extensive and sophisticated. Constructing or adding to a proprietary, private datacenter becomes a commercially difficult (unless, perhaps, for the larger corporations that have plenty of dough to splash)

Greater resilience to disaster, malicious attacks, greater savings in costs, increases time flexibility as a convenience of service that is immediately on hand. A logical argument for colocation as a positive strategy for many businesses.

What are Colocation Services?

Colocation services are offered by datacenters equipped and configured to allow secure client access to private servers. Colocation services include:

1. Leasing server cabinets and cages
2. Connecting to an ISP's network and physical infrastructure
3. Monitoring server status.

Each cabinet and cage is securely locked and inaccessible to other colocation clients. 

Colocation services let clients take advantage of datacenter infrastructure, while maintaining control over their servers. The benefits colocation customers enjoy are:

1. Environmental control (temperature, humidity, and filtration)
2. Fire suppression systems
3. Redundant power sources, and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) backup
4. Large capacity quality bandwidth
5. Around-the-clock physical security
6. Monitoring and technical services (storage, backups, firewall, and DDoS attack mitigation)

Using colocation services is an effective way for your business to achieve continuity, scalability and minimal network latency, while maintaining healthy costs, and at the same time having complete control over the physical server, operating system, and applications.

EVERWORKS is Malaysia's leading Datacenter Hosting Service Provider and Datacenter Hosting Solution. EVERWORKS houses over 200 Dedicated and Colocation Servers in World-Class Datacenters across Malaysia. EVERWORKS provides you with all the benefits of colocation hosting along with a flexible 'priority switch' to any EVERWORKS servers to maximize the best network blueprint at no extra costs (contact EVERWORKS for more detailed information).

Find out more or start colocation hosting with EVERWORKS.

Referenced from PEER 1

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Report: 69% of Plan Passenger Use Smartphone or Tablet During Flights

APEX (The Airline Passenger Experience Association) and CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) has recently join conducted an interesting survey on American airline passenger, and they found out that 69% of them will use their personal electronic devices such smartphone or tablet – during flights.

Doug Johnson, VP of technology policy at CEA, said: "Airline passengers have come to rely on their smartphones, tablets and e-Readers as essential travel companions. Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of passengers that are using electronic devices while traveling will help the FAA make informed decisions." Four in ten passengers (40%) would like to use their devices during all phases of flight, including take-off and landing. With 28%, smartphones are the most commonly used devices during flights, followed by laptops on 25%, tablets on 23%, MP3 players on 23% and e-readers on 13%. 

Meanwhile, we also found out another interest figure on their survey, that 59% of passengers will always turn their devices completely off when requested, 21% of passenger will switch their devices to 'Flight Mode' or 'Plane Mode', while 5% of them will just turn their devices completely off the entire journey. 

As we know this report is being conducted to understand the attitudes and behaviors of American passengers, but I think many Asia or even Malaysian passengers will have the similar attitudes like what stated in this report. Meanwhile, the steady growth of budget airlines (or no-frills airline) in Asia market such as AirAsia.com, has changed the attitudes and behaviors of Asia passengers during their flights. Most of the passenger will actually their own devices such smartphone or tablet – during flights.

After reviewed on this report, we at EVERWORKS.com are strongly believe that mobile content business will be a next biggest business in Asia market. Hence, hosting of mobile content will definitely play an very important role in making sure all these mobile contents are delivering to mobile devices with good and stable connection. EVERWORKS.com’s Colocation facility gives you more than just state-of-the art security and fail-safe provisions – we give you the direct connection to one of the Asia’s largest, next-generation fiber-optic networks. 

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European & US companies love Cloud Computing! But why Malaysian prefer on Hybrid Colocation?

Recently, I have came across a interesting study report that conducted by Manchester Business School (MBS) and Rackspace Hosting, and their research topic is about the impact of cloud computing on today's businesses. In summary of the report, on average, moving to the cloud computing saves a company around RM1,275,000 (or £255,000) every year or RM106,250 (or £21,250) every month.

Dr Brian Nicholson of the MBS said "The survey - which involved questioning 1,300 firms across the UK and the US - showed the benefits of cloud computing are being felt by many organisations, as 83% of firms that have adapted to this way of working have saved money by doing so. Meanwhile, 40% of companies in the UK indicated that the use of the cloud had helped their organisation to grow, with 56% using the money they are saving through this strategy to invest in other areas of their business."

Let's talk about this report for a minute, from my point of view, this reports is still conducted in US and UK, and of course it's more applicable for their countries. From the amount of what Cloud Computing can save for the companies have to tally with the amount of IT budget that average a European and US companies spent every year. Image if Cloud Computing can save RM1.2mil  or 50% of the company's IT budget, mean the company's default IT budget is RM2.4mil. 

In Malaysia, although not many of SME (Small & Medium Enterprise) company will allocate a million dollars as their IT budget annually, but the awareness of Cloud Computing has always come into their future plan to improve their current IT infrastructure, or plan to cut down their maintenance cost. Currently, many of SME companies are slowly moving their front-end or less important servers (such as web servers, file servers, email servers, and etc.) to cloud servers, while still maintain most of their critical servers (like database servers) with colocation hosting model. Usually, we will define such hosting model as Hybrid Colocation model. 

SO, why Hybrid Colocation hosting is still more popular in Malaysia? Or why IT managers here are more preferable to Hybrid Colocation hosting? From our interview with some existing clients, we noticed many of the IT person-in charge are still worry to migrate of the existing data or software, but willing to consider in converting its front-end server like web and email server into cloud computing. Many businesses have elements in their traditional environments that they are unable to move to a virtualised or cloud environment. So Hybrid Co-location solutions is always their first move into the cloud computing, that putting both allow  virtual and physical hardware together.

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