A recent study of users using eye heat-tracking technology shows that people are not paying the same attention to banner ads that they used to. The ads that were displayed in the study did not receive a glance from viewers of web-pages. Interestingly enough the same study showed that people do not look at non-ad content in the same places that ads are generally found.
To me this proves two things one that people are getting more selective with their attention, and second that people have been trained where to find ad content on web pages. The study concludes that the most effective way to get people to notice advertising on the web is to make it look like content.
I will take bold step here and say: if you create the content people will come to your site.
Some great tools that you can use to generate traffic for your site are:
- Blogging - It has been said a billion times in the RE.net but blogging is one of the best ways to create content and to draw people towards your site.
- Link clouds - applying tagging element to files or media which is not normally search engine friendly such as video or audio.
- Embedded content such as a presentation using Slideshare (since I posted the Homesopentoday presentation on Slideshare I have seen almost a doubling of traffic to the Homesopentoday site immediately following the posting)
- Social networking - engage people in conversations about your brand or product this can help to generate “buzz” and word of mouth leads. Stumbleupon is a great a way to get some views of your site.
- Widgetize your site - there are a number of tools out there that will let you quickly generate a widget for your site or blog. Using Musestorm I created a widget, yahoo desktop widget, and a google gadget all in less than three minutes. If you don’t like Musestorm, widgetbox allows you to do the same thing and I see there are already a few in the RE.net offering widgets through widgetbox.
- Be available - offer people many ways to contact you. These can vary from email, to through the website chat and instant messaging. Since I have added the yahoo instant messenger link and email link to my sidebar I have gotten a number of inquiries from people and have had several interesting conversations, I have also seen a noticeable increase in readership.
What has worked for you to drive traffic to your site? Are you still using banner ads and Google Ads if so are they a good return on investment?
Click here to add a widget for this blog to your site.
Click here to download the Yahoo Widget for this blog for your desktop.
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Mark Flavin
Mark, this is a great post and I think it’s highly relevant to the discussion about MLS data syndication. Brokers and agents advertise listings; MLS aggregations are content. This is the first time I’ve seen the difference between the two in this way, do you think the distinction makes sense?
I think that until we recognize that MLS data is content and afford it the same protections that other content is given then we will continue to have issues in how the information is treated and who retains the ownership of it.
[…] has written an excellent post on the fact that ‘ads are out, content is in,’ identifying that increasingly people are […]
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