Increasing Website Traffic With Pictures

I've already spoken about how useful picture galleries are for increasing website traffic, but how could you use them?

If you can get pictures of your customers - a bar, holiday site, function, club etc - then you can easily take pictures and let your customers know that the pictures will be appearing on your website. Once the pictures appear there they see them and if they like them they tell their friends.

This is excellent marketing. You are keeping existing customers happy and returning to your website whilst they in turn are telling their friends about you. The friends then become customers and their pictures appear on the site.

It's free, easy and fun.

But how do you manage the pictures? The easiest way can be a gallery. Simple, straight forward and easy to manage. Link to it from your home page, maybe even put one or two recent pictures on the home page, and you have your traffic.

A better way can be a blog. Using a reputable blogging system you load text about what happened and also describe the pictures. A sort of diary for your business. The advantage of a blog over a gallery is that it is well organised even when you have lots of pictures and there is also the ability to add a load of text.

To get the best out of a blog, especially if not actually hosted on your site, make sure that you use the blog feed to put text from the 2 or 3 (at least) most recent entries onto the home page. This keeps the home pages updated and fresh, whilst making the pictures easy to find.

You should also always include an email link, whether it is a gallery or a blog. If someone see their picture then you want them to tell people. If there's an 'email a friend' feature, they can just enter the email, hit send and the friend is sent a link to the page.

Lastly, it's also a good idea to add your site name to the picture in some way. This means that if the customer prints out the picture then they also print out the site name. This is then shown to friends and family and a reminder to themselves.

Enjoy!