If your company has a website, it most likely needs traffic. Unless of course you are the ceo of a major corporation with lots of brand recognition. If you are then you are most likely not going to care about this post unless you are optimizing your traffic.

Free services and tools are a great way of generating traffic. Let’s say for example that you have an interior design company. Offering your visitors a free flash tool online that allows them to decorate their room virtually before they buy or sign up for your service will help you make the sale.

The extra money spent on free tools that require zero or little management from you can help you generate twice as many sales or more!

Traffic generation is more than social networking and blogging. By offering a free tool you are bound to get a flood of inbound links from grateful webmasters who stumbled upon your website. And if you are wise, you will have a graphic and a statement requesting that visitors link to your tool on your website using a code that you provide.

It is unfortunate when businesses must send accounts to collections. That usually means that the customer has either no regard for financial responsibility, or they are simply broke. If it were the latter then they should not have obtained your product or service in the first place, or if their financial issues happened recently then they should have made an effort to tell you about it immediately so you can work something out with them.

When collections become necessary then you must partner with a collection agency that has a decent track record. We do not mean a track record of collecting. That should be a given. We are talking about responsible collection that follows ethical standards. Not companies that harass people on weekends, or multiple times a day. Hiring such a company can earn you a bad rep as well.

Collections should be a matter of last resort. After you have had a chance to send multiple email and phone requests, as well as a certified letter or two. This shows that your company has a great deal of patience and care about your customer’s situation. You do not want to ruin someone’s credit more than they want you to. You simply want to be compensated for what they hired you to do.

Sometimes it is good to offer incentives. Yes, offer incentives for them paying their late bill. You can sometimes turn a bad situation into a continued revenue stream by offering the delinquent customer some concessions.

Well, let us celebrate…. sort of. This is out 100th post! I got a theory about Google and blogs that hit the 100th post milestone. But that’s another story.

Unfortunately, this day is upsetting. I was trying to help someone out who was in a bad situation. She was behind on her rent and other bills severely. I gave her $500 in cash and I paid her landlord $250 on her behalf. There was a benefit on my part though. I was buying a police car from her that she had gotten for free. I was giving her $1,300 for it. And that $750 was supposed to be applied to it.

Well, all of her furniture and personal belongings are in our possession, which is at the place she was renting before she moved out. We took over the place and told her she can keep her stuff here until she can afford to come get it. She has taken advantage of us by giving us 3 different dates within 3 weeks for pickup, then she took the police car one last time to get to where she needed to go. Now she is telling us that she is NOT bringing the car back here. So I am out $750!

The good thing here is that we have her possessions. We are handing them over to the landlord for collateral for the $1,000 she owes him. And we changed the locks!

We try not to lose faith in people, and we try and help where we can. The problem is that we always get hit by someone taking advantage of us.

Do you remember back in May when we offered to let authors post tutorials on various development, marketing, and I.T. related subjects?

That offer is re-open. We have a good amount of traffic, and it is increasing daily. If you are an expert in your field then drop by our contact page and let us know you are interested. Go back to the original post and make sure you can accommodate our requirements for posting tutorials and articles.

Ecommerce is a tough business. There are alot of fly-by-night web design and seo companies out there who take money and run. They show little or no results and usually offer no customer service so that the customer is the one that suffers in the end.

The good companies who have lasting power must fight against each other, as well as the scammers in order to make a decent profit and put food on the table.

In the end, the fact that you show excellent work and have word of mouth marketing is what decides your fate. But if you do not want to make that your only way of making a living then you have to learn how to expand your business to a larger market.

Your realistic goal should be of partnering with various advertisers, and powerful companies with like-interests to come up with a major marketing campaign. A joint campaign should benefit both companies by fattening the pocketbook in the end, and making a household name for themselves with consumers.

Keep in mind when marketing that you have to think major and you have to have a gimick. An example of a gimick is the new Subway campaign that has a sandwich for every day of the week. I actually decided to write this post last oven roasted chicken breast, but I had some design work to finish. But back to my point… Every major company that is a household name has a gimick. I called Geico only because I thought the way the Gecko batted his eyes was funny. I stopped subscribing to Verizon Wireless and switched to T-Mobile because the “can you hear me now?” ad annoyed me. As you can see, some gimicks are simply annoying even though they hold a household name. My advice is to stick to funny.

Web Design Taxi is inviting solicitation by major companies to create a cooperative marketing campaign as we speak. Remember our post in May about having a company theme? Think Donald Trump. He lives for the brand that his name carries. He bases his reputation on it and we respect that. We believe in that way of branding and we mention Web Design Taxi every chance we get.

When in doubt, put your thinking cap on and sit at the drawing board. The business that thinks together makes expansion easier.

Below is some of our statistics information since installing this blog and posting both steadily and intermittant since May 2008. This is being posted to show you that even the slightest marketing efforts can have excellent gains. We have not included our traffic sources though.

Keep in mind that these are september of 08 and it has only been half a month. So the actual September stats will be much higher.

We are jump-starting the free web templates by posting the Zig Future Wordpress Theme. Currently this is a PSD and font only theme. We will try to code it as soon as possible, but it may take some time as we have priority projects.

If you enjoy our designs please link to us, even though you are not required to

I felt the need to share some of my ideas for generating traffic. Mostly they are universally proven, but there are a good number of webmasters who turn to black hat seo because it “sounds” easier. The problem is that they end up pushing for results with black hat for years before deciding that it is best to work on proven ethical internet marketing methods.

1. Keep your comments open - Do NOT make visitors sign up for an account to comment on your blog post. You will be surprised how many regular reads avoid commenting because they do not want to be bothered with signing up. I keep my comments open so anyone can post, but I make them approval only to avoid spam.
2. Comment on other blogs - You can easily find a few blogs that are in an industry you take interest in. Find them and comment. Join in the discussion and have fun. You will get traffic from signing your name with a URL. Just don’t go and spam your url into your comment. You will probably be blocked or marked as spam.
3. Create a forum - A community is a good place for people to come back to. Setup a forum with Simple Machines of PHPBB and make it specialized to your specific industry. Then find others like it and join them. Put your url in your signature so others can follow your link and join your forum.
4. Write articles - You can write articles and post them on free article publishing websites. These websites allow other webmasters to use the articles as long as they keep your author credit in them. This is basically the idea that other webmasters are marketing for you by posting your name and url on their website.
5. Press releases - A press release should be written about your company whenever you have something newsworthy. For example, you partner up with a major hosting company and your company becomes the referral for web design services. You can post your press releases on free press release websites. You can also benefit from the paid services as well. We like www.eworldwire.com for the paid services.
6. Newsletter - Setup a newsletter system so that visitors can optin to receive company updates. Allow them the ability to unsubscribe when they want to so it is compliant with CAN-SPAM laws. Send out newsletters on the regular. Maybe every week, or every month depending on the news you are providing. Make sure you highlight different areas of your website that need a traffic increase. You can also get advertisers for those newsletters and make some money that way.
7. Submit to directories - You will find alot of free web directories out there that do not require a reciprocal link. Submit your website to them in the appropriate category. Do not oversubmit because it will be considered spamming. Submit-and-forget.
8. Take part in auctions - I am talking about the local private schools who do auctions to generate money. Do you offer a product or service that you can donate? Your business will be promoted in print materials and possibly their website.

These are just a few tips that can generate a huge amount of traffic. Keep plugging away and you will be fighting off server bandwidth fees in no time.