Any website is only effective if people are finding it and reading it. Therefore, the main aim is to attract traffic to your site, and organic traffic i.e. people who have specifically searched for what you offer, is the best kind of traffic. To keep that traffic coming, or returning, you need to provide the reason for them to do so. Here are some elements you need to pay attention to:
* Make it useful
Think of your target audience. What are they looking for? What do they want?
Many people, especially those looking for ways to make money online, are looking for useful and trustworthy information. They will research money-making opportunities. Your website can describe your own personal experience and help them make the decision to join.
Also, your PSAs will look to you for additional support and guidance. While the SFI site does contain all the information they need, they may find it a little overwhelming. Your website can break it down into bite-size chunks, can explain it without the 'jargon', you can even make videos to show your team exactly how to do specific activities.
You can include more subjects than available from the SFI website, e.g. tutorials on how to set up their own website or social media page, good places to find leads/paid ads etc. These will not only help your team, but will also attract other people looking for this information, even if they are not looking specifically for SFI, but they may see your SFI banner and be curious, so will join.
Remember also, SFI is a global opportunity. You already know that there may be language issues with your PSAs, the same is true for prospective affiliates. Install a Translate facility on your website.
* Make it attractive
Make it easy-to-read and well-designed. Ensure you are using a 'responsive' theme which will display well on any device.
Think carefully about placement and style of your ads and banners. Personally, I cannot tolerate those websites that have lots of flashing banners and I will move away from those sites immediately without reading them.
Pay attention to spelling, grammar, punctuation, paragraphs and layout.
* Encourage engagement
Offer visitors a way to stay engaged with your site, and a reason they will want to return.
Offer the ability to subscribe to your site and receive updates when new posts are added.
Offer a 'freebie' if they sign up to your list. This could be something like a free report, or an easy-start guide. This doesn't have to be something aimed at getting them to sign up with SFI, it can be anything a reader might be interested in (somehow generally related to online business or entrepreneurship, there's no point in offering '10 tips for raising chickens'). The main thing is that you now have their email address and you can send out autoresponder and scheduled emails in the future which gently encourage them with 'drip marketing'.
When you write articles, invite readers to make comments.
You can even install a 'membership' plugin and make some areas of the site accessible only to registered members. Some also have a forum feature included. This will give you an opportunity to send member newsletters to invite members back to your site.
* Use effective SEO
Effective SEO increases your search-engine rankings. Don't worry if you don't understand it. There are lots of free plugins, especially in wordpress, that you can install and they guide you through the process of improving your SEO.
In my own website, before I learned this and installed a SEO plugin, I was getting only a few visitors per day, mainly through my own publicising, but after I began using SEO, this improved drastically. Within a month I had my first 100-hit day and some of my articles even made first page of Google, which is what you want to aim for.
* Persistence
Give it time. Update and add articles regularly, and keep going. I began a personal interest blog about 2 years ago, not about SFI. Since starting SFI, I have been too busy to update my personal blog regularly. When I left it, about a year ago, I was getting a few hundred visitors a month. I had reason to log into the admin area recently, and was very pleasantly surprised to find it is receiving around 5,000 visitors a month now. I didn't set it up to monetise or promote any business, but I also found out about 6 months ago, that I had earned some affiliate commissions from an event I promoted on it - it was a decent amount, about $60 from one single event. I didn't even know this activity was going on, and I can only imagine how many more visitors and how much more income I would be getting if I had continued to update and publicise it regularly.
* Engage with social media
You can link up your website with your social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. so that whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be posted on your social media pages. You can also write several posts at a time, but so you don't bombard people with lots of posts at once, you can schedule them to post at specified times, e.g. you could write 7 short posts in one day, but schedule them to publish one each day, so if people miss your posts one day, they might see them the next day.
Social media pages, particularly popular ones, are becoming highly-ranked by search engines.
Ensure that your website has a feature for visitors to connect with you on the social media of their choice.
* Include an 'About Me' page
Increase reader trust and confidence by showing that you are a real person that they can personally connect with.
Now put all of this in the context of an SFI website, more activity on your site means higher search engine rankings and more visitors to your site which, by the laws of probability, means more SFI signups.
I hope this has given you some ideas.
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