One of the best ways to impress your clients on your websites is making it custom for them. Obviously, this is not always that easy since you never know who will show up knocking on your domain’s door.

I found a great resource that you can use in countless ways to help give your website a personal touch and a local feel, no matter what niche your in! ZipCodeGuy.com provides zip code databases that you can buy and use in limitless ways. Want your clients to be able to find your business from their location? Want to list demographic information for a clients area? Or just want to run a comparison type of website…the ideas are truly only limited to your ideas and skills.

In order to help your website increase conversion or even just increase your traffic you want to always be sure to offer these type of interactive features that will have them coming back when they need a certain type of information, or even just want to play around with your cool tools!

I highly recommend you check out these databases for your website and see what you can come up with to improve your website conversions. I’d love to hear what you come up with, and I’ll be sure to let you know what I begin doing with my databases that may help your websites too!

We are starting to add a new concept here at CNY Webmasters, we are allowing some select guest bloggers to give us some new ideas and tips. I think this will help increase our way of thinking about internet businesses and give us some new ideas and tricks to play with. So here is our first guest Ian Del Carmen is an online business professional running his main site at http://www.ianDelCarmen.com. His other sites include http://TheOnlineBusinessProfessional.com, http://MobileEbooks.net, http://InfoProductLaboratory.com, and many more…

Many people will tell you that to get your web site noticed you need to ‘optimize’ your site for the search engines. You are then led up a path where you have to keep changing your web site as the search engines change their ways of listing things. As fast as you ‘optimize’ your site, Google and the others have moved the goalposts, meaning you have to keep optimizing over and over again.

Now consider some facts. Most people in the world are not users of the Internet. Let’s repeat that. The vast majority of people who you want to reach don’t use the Internet. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your web site, they simply will never find it.

Here’s another fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make most of their sales ‘offline’. They sell their books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars, workshops and conferences. Indeed, for many ‘Internet marketers’ these ‘offline’ sales represent the bulk of their income.

So what do these facts tell us? They show us that ‘offline’ promotion is more important than online promotion. You may be able to optimize your web site to get high rankings in a search engine. But that doesn’t mean you’ll reach the vast majority of people who could buy your product or use your information.

This was confirmed recently by one study that showed most people go to an Internet address (URL) after having read it in a newspaper or magazine, been given it by a friend or colleague, or having heard it being mentioned by someone speaking at a meeting or on TV. In other words, it seems that significant numbers of people who get to your web site will do so having heard the URL somewhere outside the Internet.

You can get many people visiting your web site, even if you are not ranked highly by the search engines. You can do this in two main ways:

1. Write articles for use in regular publications - newspapers, magazines and so on. Always include your URL in the article and you’ll get millions of people to notice your web site address.

2. Speak at every opportunity. Make presentations to business clubs, chambers of commerce, local societies - you name it, you should speak at it. Every time you speak, announce or your web site address.

Although these are the two principal ways of gaining offline publicity for your web site, don’t neglect your business stationery, posters, car stickers and so on. The more your web site address is visible outside the web, the more visitors you will get regardless of how kind the search engines are to you.

Pay-per-click or ppc advertising can be costly and grossly ineffective. When going ppc you need to really watch costs, conversion and ad effectiveness. While we are new to the ppc arena we do know that mistakes can and will cost you.

First off always go with Google Adwords and Yahoo!, MSN is ineffective and you will get very little traffic from them. By far Google has been our best performing ppc platform, obviously with 60-70% search market share.

Choose your keywords carefully, general terms do not and will not convert. We run an annuity website, but using the term “annuity” is too broad, costly and competitive of a keyword to be effective. In other words, you will spend a lot of money for low to no results. But, the keyword annuity comparison, while competitive, is a better fit with lower competition and low cost per click.

Google offers a keyword tool to help you pick the keywords best for your website. Pay close attention to advertiser competition for the keywords, more competition means higher costs for you. We concentrate on lower cost keywords that fit our sites best. This method keeps our costs lower and conversions higher. We also offset our costs with Google Adsense so those who do not buy will hopefully click off our site and we can recoup a portion or more of our cost per click.

Ad variations are also important. Create several, and we mean several, different ads with your focus keywords in the ad. If the ad contains the keyword that you are bidding for then you may get a higher quality rating which can mean lower cost per click expense for you. Ad quality is extremely useful for ppc advertising and pay close attention to it.

Cost control is extremely important when using ppc advertising. Since you have greater expense exposure than traditional banner advertising, which is generally fixed costs, you have to watch costs. We refuse to pay more than $.50 a click, therefore we set out maximum bid for $.50 and daily budget at 20-$30 a day. From there we watch conversions and which ads generate more clicks.

Do not assume you will get business from ppc, it’s like a website, just because you have it that doesn’t mean that it will work or generate money for you. Log in to your Adwords account at least daily to check your stats, make adjustments and hopefully you will have conversions.

Cheap keywords and enticing ads will create sales for you. One last thing, never bid the same amount for content advertising as you would for search engine advertising. With click fraud and mfa sites abundant, you will find that content ads are next to worthless, IMHO.

If you are doing ppc arbitrage be very careful and keep your bids low and content keywords high to maximize returns. A 10-20% rate of return on arbitrage is EXTREMELY good.