How to Get More Traffic? Help Needed!

[amberstar702]

Is anyone familiar with marketing to seniors? My website http://www.spicy-senior-singles.com is way up front on the search engines (Yahoo, Google, AOL) for keywords senior singles, senior dating, senior personals. Promotion is not a problem and my husband and I have never paid out any money to get top listing. The problem is lack of traffic. We only get 50 - 75 hits per day. If we get that in a top spot, what kind of traffic can our competitors get who are lower in the listings? Any suggestions as to how we can get more traffic?

[SteveWebb]

Amber,

Have you considered that your target market may not have a high acceptance level on the Internet.

I am not sure but I would research to see how much of your target market is online.

There must be some research somewhere, maybe otehr could help you on finding this out.

The other thing is to consider some offline promotion as well.

[autolink]

If you want to get more traffic I would suggust getting a better WebHoster. Not a Geocities site. To get more traffic I would also suggest Google adwords, or targeted hits. I could get you the targeted hits if you are interested. Either e-mail me or send me a private message and I will give you my phone number and we can contact each other that way. But I would really look into the web hosting.

[amberstar702]

Steve, you made some very good points. I will start digging for some research on how many seniors are actually online. Autolink, I have signed up with a paid hosting site as I have heard from others that a free host is not looked upon too kindly for businesses. Thanks for your help, guys!

[Markll]

I think the look of your site is way off.

Getting your target audience to your site isn't your bigget problem. Getting them to stay at your site is.

The "In your face" design will not be accepted well by a demographic that is better sold with a low key and elegant approach.

[Shadows_Papa]

We face a similar dilemma (sp).
We are not bad in the SE's (not number 1, but findable) yet we get only about 30 hits a day, according to our page counter, and rare are the orders for merchandise.
Not sure what the issue is. Either our target customers don't order online, or something. Site design? I've been told by some it looks great, however, I'm ALWAYS open to other opinions!
Sign me:
Desperate in Iowa........

[bbauer]

Getting traffic to the site is not really all that hard to do but it does take a lot of time if you are not in a position to spend big bucks.

Even a poorly designed site can get loads of traffic over time. I'm sure that some may not like my methods but they are indeed effective.

How about 40,000 visitors in 8 months from a brand new site and producing a good income from it? Does that sound interesting to anyone? Here is how I did it.

First of all you need your main website, of course. You also need a message board in lots of cases such as in the dating game for instance. And most importantly of all you need to be blogging about your theme. And once you are blogging about your theme and related topics you need to archive each days posts into a separate webpage and each of those archive pages needs to be properly optmized for best search engine placement and they should each be submitted to the engines but never submit your blog to the engines.

Your blog needs quality content and lots of links which all point to your blog and your content should vary over a wide range of topics that are at least pretty well related to your main theme. For instance, if you are into credit repair as I am or into the dating game you need to write about your theme. Maybe one day you will write about some new law that has been passed or how the law affects your theme or those interested in your theme.

All those archived pages will help you get into the search engines big time. When you get enough of them on the net it won't be all that long until they won't even be able to find your competition under more keywords than you will ever think about using. Lots of folks don't really understand how blogs work nor just how effective they can be in getting visitors to your other sites but they are extremely effective. The fact is that they are so effective that I am using 13 of them with different themes and all interlinked to each other. Each one also has it's own
separate website where the articles are stored. All of them are on freebie webhosters such as hypermart and several others. If one free website gets full of the articles I just go open up another one somewhere else. I've got quite a few different webpages that start with or have creditwrench in the name somewhere. And all of them are getting good rankings in the search engines.

There are an awful lot of different tips and tricks that I use to get traffic to my site. So many that it would take far more space then can be posted here or on any forum in any reasonable length of time. But most of them can be found by simply going to www.backflip.com and putting creditwrench in their search box. That will take you to my public backflip folder and links to more than 700 different resources I have found on the net. You should get your own backflip account too and start bookmarking your resources so you don't lose them in a computer crash.
And backflip is free too. You can have both private and public folders on backflip so you can share bookmarks with others and private ones that nobody finds for those you don't want to share.

Another extremely important resource is to be found at SCREENBLAZE (http://www.shrinkmylink.com/rvs)
and will drive major amounts of traffic to your site.

I started with screenblaze just a month ago and as of
today I have well over 5,000 visitors that have found my webpages because of screenblaze.

Screenblaze has about 20 or so different categories that you can choose to advertise in but only about half of them actually carry much traffic. I'm now using 7 computers doing screenblaze full time, each one in a different category. I'll be adding another one today and more in the future. I plan on running at least 12 computers doing nothing but running screenblaze in the near future. You don't need anything fancy to run screenblaze. I just bought one yesterday for $15 and added a keyboard and a mouse to the package for another $3.50 bringing the total cost of the computer to $18.50!!! Sure its an old 133 MHZ machine but the speed isn't important. It only has a 1 gig hard drive on it and no cd rom or floppy drive.
Once the machine is up and running I don't need any way to put more programs on it. If I do I will just plug a cd or floppy into it, load the program and take the drive off again to use on some other machine when needed. Those old machines you can get for peanuts will get you lots of traffic and may easily pay for themselves and more in a single day. And it isn't even possible to not be able to get more than enough of those old computers working for you to get all the traffic you can use. After all, even on one 56k dial up line you can crowd at least 253 computers into the system. (LOL)

I'm using DSL, a 4 port router and an old 20 port hub I bought a few years back for $20 and that is way more than I will probably ever need. I could add 4 more hubs to the system and 19 computers per hub if I
wanted to. (LOL)

So can you even if you do have to build an extra room
onto your house to hold them all. (LOL)

My system is so important to me that I run them on a huge UPS that was originally designed for a hospital backup power source and that is backed up with a fairly large military surplus diesel generator. We get a lot of tornadoes and storms here in Oklahoma and we lose power every once in a while due to spring time storms. I don't. A few years back a tornado took out huge sections of the city and we were without power for 5 days while the lines were being rebuilt. My part of town was out of power for 5 days. I wasn't
out of power for even one split second. I not only ran my computers but 4 air conditioners full time and my whole house on backup power until the power came back on.

But whether you run only one computer on screenblaze or a few dozen, it will bring you major amounts of traffic. And if you watch your monitor(s) at all you will notice that there are big banks, insurance companies and of course porn sites, insurance companies, mlm marketers and many more now running screenblaze. It is getting to be big time stuff indeed. So go to Screenblaze (http://www.shrinkmylink.com/rvs) and start cranking in the visitors to your sites.

[Elite Skills]

Your page size is too big.

1 26944 IMG senior1.gif
1 20666 HTML
1 17564 IMG seniorlogo.gif
1 14909 IMG luvcover.jpg
1 14679 IMG ob24703b.gif
1 12911 IMG sea.jpg
1 11883 IMG expediaicons/468x60_swimsuits_tab.gif
1 10116 IMG jogging.jpg
1 6100 IMG roses.jpg
1 2022 IMG glogo.gif
1 949 IMG poweredby.gif
10 850 IMG arrow.gif

139593K Total! Takes 30 seconds to load on a 56k.

I see your stats are flying. Just be patient. If you really really want to get going try paying the yahoo fee, list your site on msn, lycos, infoseek, ask.com, overture, etc.

(MOD edit: please remember that this is a "family" rated forum)

[minstrel]

My website... is way up front on the search engines... for keywords senior singles, senior dating, senior personals... We only get 50 - 75 hits per day.
I think the question posed by SteveWebb as to how many of your target market is actually on-line is a good one, but he may also be overestimating the age of your market and underestimating their technical skills. There are clearly a lot of seniors out there who know how to use computers and who are very familiar with what the internet has to offer and I suspect that many members here would be surprised at how many websites there are that are specifically designed for seniors and retired people.

The other thing that occurred to me, though, is your choice of keywords - specifically, the fact that all your example keyphrases contain the word "senior". Would older people looking for dating or relationships enter that word? My suspicion is no - I remember when my father retired several years ago (this was a couple of years after my mom died) he initially moved into a "seniors" apartment building - he broke the lease about two months later saying, "I hate it here - there's too many OLD people". I think a common human characteristic is that we often feel younger than our chronological ages and even looking in the mirror seniors often don't see an "old" person - as a teen, I remember my mom telling me that it surprised her to look in the mirror because she saw a 39-40 year old woman (at that time) but inside she still visualized herself as about 25-30 or so.

So I'm trying to imagine myself at age, say 65 - I'm alone and looking for companionship, a date, maybe a relationship - will I do a search for "old women"? I know that's an exaggeration but think along those lines. I think I'd be more likely to look up "dating services" or something similar and then see if I can specify age ranges in the site search. And even there, my guess is that most men and women would enter a range of perhaps -10 to +5 years of their own age.

All of this to say (did I mention my kids think I'm pedantic?) I would think about trying to optimize for different keyphrases - if you rank high and only get 50 hits a month, I would first suspect that you are ranking high for the wrong phrases... think about other ones you might use, or go to competitors sites and look at what keyphrases they are highlighting.

[bbauer]

I've just been looking over the comments of Minstrel, SteveWebb and others about your website.

I think you need to be paying close attention to what the other commentators are saying because they are right on the money.

At age 72 I guess I qualify as being in the "Senior Citizen" category. (LOL)

And I just happen to be looking for someone who is somewhere near my age range. Almost anything female and between the ages of 55 and 72 will work for starters. The comment about how senior citizens search strikes me as being just about right on the money. They are going to look for age ranges and probably would not use "senior" in any of their searches.

Matter of fact I ran a dating club several years ago known as Latin Mate. It wasn't on the internet at all but I had a lot of success with it in a very short time and I would get tons of "old" men well into their 70s and 80s looking for Mexican girls ranging in age from 12 to maybe as much as 16 years old. (LOL).

They were so serious they were even willing to buy courses from me that would teach them to write love letters in Spanish. And some of them got real good at it. I wrote the courses myself. It was never hard to find the "LOLITAS" back then because there was a Spanish language magazine being put out every two weeks that listed hundreds of Hispanic women of all ages looking for love and romance. Back then, "LOLITAS" had a far different meaning than it does on the internet porn circuit today. Back then they were all good decent people and would have been horrified at what goes on today. That hispanic language magazine was known as RUTAS DE PASSION or roots of passion. But it went out of publication years ago and I've never heard of anything like it since.

I wouldn't mind doing a dating site myself but I probably don't have the time to devote to it now. I've got far too many of my own websites and now I'm going to set up webhosting services starting tomorrow. I'll be using them for my own purposes and not trying to sell any unless somebody was to ask me to host their site and I probably would not do so even if asked untill I have had more experience doing my own. But I just bought a bunch of new equipment and will start setting it up and installing the software for it tomorrow. So I'll be pretty busy doing that for a while.

Anyway, pay close attention to what the others are telling you because I think they are pretty well right on the money.

Happy New Year to all.

[susannice]

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[Peter (IMC)]

Is anyone familiar with marketing to seniors? My website Spicy Senior Singles - senior singles dating, senior personals (http://www.spicy-senior-singles.com) is way up front on the search engines (Yahoo, Google, AOL) for keywords senior singles, senior dating, senior personals. Promotion is not a problem and my husband and I have never paid out any money to get top listing. The problem is lack of traffic. We only get 50 - 75 hits per day. If we get that in a top spot, what kind of traffic can our competitors get who are lower in the listings? Any suggestions as to how we can get more traffic?

50 to 75 visitors per day, is that bad? How many senior singles that are still in a spicy mood are there anyway?

Maybe you should consider researching your target audience. I'm not a senior, but I can imagine that seniors are a bit more creative than just searching for those keywords you mentioned. What do they really search for?