When promoting any product or service every hit to your website counts.

So assuming your site converts a percentage of visitors to sales, the more traffic, the more sales you make!

I have read a number of articles lately on how to write good ad or sales copy and optimising websites.

What I have not seen is how to get consistent numbers of hits to your site. Well may be, that is not quite true as you are constantly blasted with email about driving traffic to your site. But most of these options require you to get your bank card out. You know the rest !

I was checking the stats to my web sites and noticed 2 new referrers to my site. It occurred to me the importance of getting consistent visitors or hits to your site.

One site referring traffic was the Ryze Network where I have been posting in the "Promote It" network and receiving a slow but steady number of site visitors. The Ryze network is a place where you receive your own free web page where you are able to add a photo and information about your personal and business interests.

I'm also a member of the "ItsYourCoach" and the Entrepreneurs Opportunities, Ryze Networks and there are hundreds of others to join.

To learn more here is my personal Ryze page. http://www.ryze.com/go/VoIP

You are able to contact other members and join any number of networks which focus on a whole range of topics. Then you are able to go that one step further and upgrade to full membership where you can edit the html on your page along with other options.

One of my personal websites is receiving hits most days from Ryze and I am most likely receiving to affiliate sites that I'm promoting through Ryze too.

While I was looking at the posts in a forum I found a new Search Engine - Directory. It is offering Free membership until it officially opens. You are able to add your site to their directory - search listings http://www.4az.com If you list your site it is displayed, highlighted at the top of revaluate search's.

At present they are offering free membership listings but when they open, any new members will enter an affiliated program.

Another slow but steady number of hits come from Opportunity.com This only works if you get new members to join. You are able to send email to targeted prospects every week - 100% Free to join and real easy to set-up. You even receive a free email alias and an ID.

http://www.opportunity.com/r/VoIP_NZ

I have used an opportunity.com redirect link or Sub-Domain for my ezine. You are provided 10 sub-domains - redirect links. Having your link in an email ending in an Affiliated link has a good chance of getting your email filtered (dumped) by many ISP's. So using an Opportunity.com sub-domain for my ezine looks like this.

http://www.the-index-ezine.opportunity.com

If you are getting visitors to your site, Thumbshots Ranking is a way to compare search engine ranking between Google, Yahoo and a few others. Your ranking determines the amount of traffic you will likely receive from search engines.

One thing I noticed was that Google would only list one link where as Yahoo would list all links to the site or page you typed into the two text boxes. I have a couple of sites at the top of the ranking and for my Internet-Income-Index.com site Google listed one link and Yahoo listed 100. So you can see that each search engine uses different methods of ranking and listing your site.

http://www.thumbshots.org have a poll on search engines preferences. Google has 76% and second is Yahoo with only 8%. That is a big difference.

The Idea behind http://thumbshots.net is to provide a thumb nail image of your site when it is listed in search results. Thumbshots (ThumbNails) are screenshots of web pages to help you locate web sites quickly and easily. Thumbshots display exactly what you would get before visiting a link. Millions of people trust and rely on thumbshots to take control of their surfing.

This is similar to Alexa.com where you are able to ask Alexa to visit your site and take a thumb nail image of your home page to display beside your site if it comes up in the top 3 results in a search.

Ask Alexa to take a Thumb Nail of your site.

http://thumbnails.alexa.com/update_thumbnail

I am sure getting side tracked from getting hits to your site but this is all good info to keep. This is how easy it is to get side tracked when researching one topic, But it still relates to promoting your site.

So now to explain more about Thumbshot.com, .org and .net They have a large directory with results from Dmoz.org and other sources. There are a number of search engines placing Thumbnails of web pages beside search results already.

ThumbNail.com are going one step further in that they are creating a directory like Dmoz with ThumbNails and are supplying other Directories and search engines with listings.

My prediction is that in the very near future as more people change to Broadband and WiFi many search engines will provide a ThumbNail beside their search results. Who will be first Google, Yahoo or MSN ?

But in the next year or so you may have to manually submit your site to Alexa.com or add either the Thumbshot.com image or test link at http://www.thumbshots.org/attribution.pxf to your site before they will display your Web page thumbnail next to your listing. As most home or index pages appear in search engines add their link there and on any page that comes up in searches.

NOTE: But Some of my website pages are coming up with a ThumbNail some aren't. Now work this one out. Some pages are coming up with a ThumbNail view of the "Home Page" but then there is no ThumbNail displayed beside the home page when I do a search in the directory at thumbshot.net ??

My Internet-Income-Index.com site shows the ThumbNail without me adding the image or link to my site so they must also be indexing some sites and taking the screen shots.

NOTE also that Sites that look cool in real size may not look so hot as a Thumbnail.

PETER GREEN.

Editor of ~ The INDEX ~ ezine.

Editor@Internet-income-index.com

http://www.Internet-Income-Index.com

Your Free Weekly Internet Marketing News, Ideas, Resources and Sources Ezine.