Peter Vatistas

I use a great application called WebCEO to track and manage various parts of my SEO/SEM efforts. As much as I would like to get into how awesome their software and support is I would rather talk about the people behind WebCEO.

A couple days before Christmas I received an envelope from Kherson, Ukraine. I wasn’t sure why I had received a letter from the Ukraine considering I don’t know anyone from there, I thought it was some sort of mistake or just a marketing piece. I opened the envelope and pulled out a very rich and shiny holiday card with a little WebCEO logo at the bottom. I figured it was just a holiday promotion printed in the masses - I was wrong.

I opened the card and found a long, had written letter addressed to me - wishing me a safe and happy holiday season. The letter was well written and by the looks of it not rushed at all. In addition the letter never once mentioned anything about business, their products, money, or a holiday deal - just a letter hoping and wishing I have a wonderful holiday.  WOW.

Now this is what I call great marketing, you see they didn’t have to mention what they are about or what they are selling - not even a holiday coupon or discount - just a hand written personal letter directed to me. It made me feel great! I was very impressed with what I saw and very happy to be a customer of theirs. More importantly (for them) it made me think about WebCEO and their products.

In my opinion this is the kind of thing that separates companies apart; even though there aren’t many comparable applications to WebCEO available today I would stick with WebCEO regardless. Something like this shows me (the customer) that I am important to them and they care about me and my business (which they do).
Take note of this guys, a great marketing campaign with little cost and a bigger impact than you could imagine. Thank you WebCEO - Happy Holidays!

If your stuck trying to think of new ways to generate more traffic (especially recurring traffic) to your website you may want to look into some form of point or reward system. People by nature are competitive and have a drive to win, adding this environment to your site may prove beneficial.

Already there are hundreds of sites on the net that utilize this and many base the majority of their revenues off of it. I am not interested in the systems out their that actually payout to their member base, like a revshare affiliate program, I like the programs that allow you to turn in your points for custom features, better exposure, stickers & t-shirts, and more.

There are several ways to accomplish this, the following is my favorite and the only one I am going to talk about :

- Using an internal affiliate program to provide your members with a unique URL. The more people that click on a members unique URL, the more points they earn. When those clicked unique URL’s turn into conversions, even more points are earned. Look at this very popular gaming site called Outwar, they follow this model almost to a “T” and make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing so.

This method, if not monitored closely and built around a solid TOS, can hurt you as it may be considered SPAM by sites (forums, blogs, etc) receiving these posted URLs. Just be smart about it. That being said, this method can grow your traffic like crazy; let’s say for example that you have 10 members - everyday each member can recruit 10 more people from their unique URL’s and everyday half of them sign up and continue to recruit more members. I’ll let you do the math here but after 30 days your member base is considerably larger and growing! Obviously this is a picture perfect scenario but I hope you see what I am trying to get at here.

If you have a monthly membership fee, and award can be a free month membership or even a more exclusive membership only earned by playing the game. The list goes on and on with things you can provide your members that play along.

Now for you, the webmaster or marketing guy, this will really build your traffic and exposure for your ad campaigns. Hopefully there is something to your site aside from this point system that keeps the members around and is complimented by the point & reward system.

I am currently developing a system like this using an open source ad management application and an open source affiliate program. I will also be using an open source shopping cart for the points to be cashed in at. The reason why I am tying the ad management application into the mix is to provide members with the ability to earn revshare off of ad zones placed on their personal pages (i.e. forum posts, blogs, articles, etc).

The more you give to your members/readers/surfers, the more they will want to give to you - just play fair. Don’t ask form 1,000 sign ups for a t-shirt - you’ll be stuck with 1,000 t-shirts!