Front-End Book

Create Good Content

The best way to increase traffic to your website, is to offer good content or service. If people like what you are offering, they will come back to you and they will link to you. There is no single technique better than this one for generating traffic to your website. How many links do you think wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter or Firefox has? What they have all in common are great content, in different forms.

Search Engine Optimization

If the Search Engines cant find you, you dont exist. If you cant compete with wikipedia, facebook, twitter or firefox for good content, you have to use all the white-hat SEO-techniques you can find in order to optimize your website for search engines. This can be done both on-site and off-site.

Link Exchange

Contact people who run websites or blogs similiar to yours and offer them a link to their site in exchange for a link back to you. This is a good way to start building links organically to your website. When your website is getting more and more popular, more people will contact you with similar offers. Only link to sites that actually has something to do with what you are offering. In order to maximise the search engine optimization, make sure the links you get corresponds to the keywords you are targeting.

Affiliate programs

If you are selling something online. Start an affiliate program and track referrals and give some of your profit to the one who referred the customer to you. If your offer is ok, people will start talking about your affiliate program and start generating traffic to your site, hoping to convert a user and earn a dollar or two. I think more and more people will start using this as a way to drive traffic to their sites. As it is today affiliate programs are mostly used by big players.

Pay Per Click Search Advertising

There are a couple of big solutions today for PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising. The biggest name in the industry is of course Google Adwords. Yahoo and Microsoft also offers solutions for PPC-advertising. With PPC you either target a number of keywords and buy advertising space next to search result, or you buy advertising space on other sites that fits your targeted keywords and website content.

Banner Advertising

A lot of big blogs offers advertising possibilities for banners. Today the most commonly used format for banners on blogs are the square ones you often see above the fold on the right on blogs such as Problogger.net and alikes. The CPM for these type of banners differ a lot but I am sure you can find a good deal for such banner advertising if you look around the blogosphere. You can also post on webmaster forums such as forums.digitalpoint.com where you will find a big and alive community.

Social Networks

Use your contacts to drive traffic to your website. Use both your offline contacts and your online contacts. Typical examples on driving traffic to your site could be the following:

- Mail all your contacts (if they are part of the intended audience) about your website
- Create a Facebook Group that focus on your new website
- Sign up for MyBlogLog.com and promote your website as a commmunity
- Promote your website on MySpace
- Create a short (fun) movie and post it to YouTube.com
- Change your signature on all forums you are active on to include your new website
- Print a t-shirt with your websites url on and wear it to work and when shopping

Competitions and give-aways

Create a simple competition where you hand out a prize or two. The typical prize could be an ipod and a lifetime VIP-membership on your website. If you really want to build traffic, create a competition that acts as a link bait, making the contestants create natural links in forums and such. This is one of the most effective way to get links and traffic. But you have to have somewhere to announce the competition. I would suggest using competitions when you have started to gain an audience.

Link Baits

Link baits are powerful, but sometimes difficult to come up with. It is important to understand the concept. Link baits are content that gets people to link in numbers. A typical example could be someone naming their child Google, a woman throwing up on live TV, a funny letter, a mugshot or just something stupid. You get the picture? Link baits are important but also a question of timing and luck. Typical content that can be considered link baits is:

- Top 10 lists
- Articles with authority that helps people on a matter where there are a lot of interest
- A funny picture, story or movie
- Unique Content such as screenshots from new software or screencaps from upcoming movies
- Something cool or astounding

Link Building

Link building incorporates a lot of different techniques and approaches. This is long-time job and something that builds traffic long-term. But done right it is going to make a huge difference for your traffic. Link building can contain these approaches:

- Article submissions
- Directory submissions
- Social Network submissions
- Commenting on blogs
- Add link to footer in forums you are active in

Buy Traffic

There are a lot of different solutions available out there for buying traffic, from targeted traffic from adwords to people redirecting to your site from domains no longer in use. As you can see the quality of the traffic may differ a lot and you have to take this into account when thinking of buying traffic. But watch out, dont let good offers fool you, a lot of scams exists out there, if someone is selling 10000 unique visitors for $10 it is probably too good to be true.

In order to maximise the profits from the increased traffic, it is important that you know your front end architecture. Front-end architecture covers a vast range of topics within web development, seo and other areas.

Facebook bigger than MySpace, the evidence.

It is pretty obvious, both trends and what has happened. Today Facebook is bigger than MySpace. What will happen to MySpace, they are working on API:s like Facebook, but Facebook in combination with OpenSocial may be to much for the previous market leader in Social Networking.

Swedens biggest newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) has a piece on Facebook and integrity today. I believe that a lot of the people signing up to a Facebook account just ignores the EULA, I know that I did. But now the DN warns the swedes that Facebook owns everything you add to the application.

You may believe that it is free to join, but you pay with your personal integrity and future. 30 years from now when applying for a job, the recruiter may be able to read everything you have written.

The European Union, through its Agency for Network Security (ENISA), also informs the citizens of the European Union on Social Networks, Security and Personal Integrity in a press-release named How Safe is ‘Social Networking’?.

There you can read

Thousands of young people are revealing the most intimate details of their personal lives for everyone to see

I think it is interesting and important that these issues arise. People tends to like the open atmosphere as long as everything runs smoothly, but as soon as it gets used the wrong way, it will be a little more complicated.

I promised to deliver the stats on Facebook Flyers. I bought 5000 page impressions for $10 and my estimate was that 1-2% would click on the Flyer.

I got 25 clicks, thats a CTR on 0,5%, a little higher than what I got on AdWords Content Network, but much lower than Adwords shown in search result for the same ad-type. Avg CPC on Google Adwords is $0.50 and $0.40 on Facebook Flyers.

No deeper analysis, but it seems that Facebook Flyers is a good complement to Google Adwords and that the estimated cost more or less is the same (or a little bit lower in this example). I am, however, a bit disappointed, I dont know why, but maybe I have been bitten by the Facebook-bug and start to think that everything they touch turns to gold.

According to TechCrunch MySpace will launch MySpace Platform next week. The release of the Facebook Platform in may this year is probably one of the reason for the extreme success Facebook is enjoying right now. As TechCrunch points out, there will be even more competition in this area in the coming future:

Suddenly Facebook, with nearly 5,500 third party applications, has significant competition around their platform - Within a month both MySpace and Google (see our post here) will probably have launched their own services. Platform competition is great for developers, but it also means they need to create and maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on. Someone is hopefully working on a startup that will streamline that process for people. Whoever does it first, and best, can have a winner on their hands.

Ad Yahoo! to this and 2-10 today known and not known social networks with open API:s for social applications. Developers do not want to create x number of variations of their application. As I see it there are three possible ways this will evolve:

• All the big ones will sit down and decide on a standard API in order to not miss any good application within their Platform.
• An external player will create and manage a standardized API that will offer cross-platform-support
• Different platforms will expose different API:s and see this as a “feature” and “offer” to the application developers.

The first point is the W3C-way, really slow, difficult to achieve and probably totally useless and will slow down the fast growing social application development taking place right now. The second solution is a dreamy black-box-solution that will make programmers and architects wet their pants when they think they have solved the problem. The problem is that the problem is too big to solve and the black-box will be a big huge code-bucket of spaghetti. The third way is the natural way, we have seen the browser wars go there, and all poker- and casino-networks today work like this, making it hard to create platform-independent software.

So the analysis is that Social Networking and Open API:s will make development of web-based applications even more complex and harder to maintain. Thats the sad truth but we will probably see a lot of cool and interesting applications.

But, if someone creates this magic black box solution to this, they will be one step closer to the secrets of alchemy.

I bought some adspace today on Facebook Flyers, I believe this will be huge! But I have to wait two days before I make some analysis of the results, but it is much easier to target your audience than with Google Adwords. I will post before saturday with conversion rates/CTR and so on. The pricing starts very low, so it is easy to just try out, I think I have just found a new way to drive traffic!

I believe Facebook will become the no 1 social network before the end of 2007, but there are some things I still miss and I hope they will sort out. If they sort them out, they will please me, grow in signup numbers and earn more cash.

Revenue Sharing on the Facebook Network

One feature that I think will make the number of sign ups and use of Applications explode is the possibility to share revenues within the network. Take the the iLike application for example: The author/programmer of the application is an affiliate for iTunes and makes a small profit each time a Facebook user buys a song from another Facebook user iLike-list. If a User B buys a media item from a list provided by User A, User A should earn a small amount of the profit the application author gets.

Possible solutions on revenue sharing on Facebook

1. Facebook Applications with affiliation and/or subaffiliation between developer and users
2. Get part of ad-earnings from Facebook when visitor to user content clicks an ad if ad presentation is based on content context.
3. Let a user get a smaller amount for adding new active users to their network and earn even more if his/her active users add even more active users.

I believe that this will happen somewhere, users give the social networks a lot of information that the companies can use in order to earn a lot of money, sooner or later the companies must start to share in order to get new customers and good content.

Facebook recently (re)launched Facebook Platform, realizing what drives this kind of services is unknown, and by exposing apis to its users enabling the platform they are offering to grow in an uncontrolled and positive manner. I think Facebook will achieve this quickly. I have just started to become a Facebook-user but I quickly started enjoying the Application Part of Facebook. I think that Facebook will kill MySpace in the long run. In this post I would like to present a typical “5 Must Have” of Facebook Applications

1. Video

   Lets you upload your videos to your profile.

2. iLike

   Put your favorite music on your profile so your friends can listen and buy, it would be great if they let each user share profit for each sell on itunes.

3. Facebook Exporter for iPhoto

   Export images from iPhoto to your Facebook profile, must have for mac people

4. MyFlickr

   For people who have a lot of images on their flick account and like to share it on their profile

5. Amazin Wishlist

   Show your friends your wishlist at Amazon