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Want More Sales? Concentrate On Return Traffic With The Google Toolbar

If you look at Brick & Mortar retail businesses, you’ll notice a very common theme: keep the visitors coming back. If the corner grocery store didn’t have it’s loyal customers, it wouldn’t still be there - the large chain grocery stores would come in and take it over with their branding and big advertising budgets.

But online, webmasters tend to concentrate on one-time visitors - SE traffic, article traffic, etc, while completely forgetting about return visitors. What does this mean? You have to work that much harder to establish your site as a credible source, because you have to go through the meet & greet process with every single visitor.

Why not take some time away from link building and SEO and concentrate on keeping visitors coming back - so you can profit from them again and again? Run promotions, contests, update your blog regularly with new, fresh, interesting content, ANYTHING you can think of to keep them coming back.

In fact, the new Google Toolbar is a VERY valuable way to build credibility with new visitors and easily turn them into repeat customers. Associating your site with Google gives you massive credibility, and the ease of having your site’s RSS feed right there in their browser every time they open it is also a HUGE benefit - when you post something new to your blog, they’ll be alerted, and WHAM - free traffic.

But how do you get the privilege of having your site on the new Google Toolbar? Easy - your visitor simply clicks a link, and within a matter of seconds, your custom button is there. Now, there is some work to be done in the background, but it’s well worth the effort. If you don’t want to go through the pain of creating your own button code, there are products on the market like the Goobar - WPGoobar.com - for Wordpress blogs. There aren’t any other automated scripts available for other blog types or websites that I know of yet.

The custom button API (Application Programming Interface - what you need to add your site to the Google Toolbar) can be found at Google: http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/apis/howto_guide.html and although the process of creating your own button can be tough, especially if you’re not tech-savvy, I assure you, it will be well worth it.

The first step is to create a .xml file that will become the base for your button. There are a few key items that MUST be in the document, so lets start with a basic template:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? > < xmlns="http://toolbar.google.com/custombuttons/">

<>

<>http://www.Google.com< /site >

< /button > < /custombuttons >

Now, you don’t want your readers returning to Google, so change the URL between the <> tags to your URL.

Next, you’ll want to add a title and a description for your site, so your visitors remember that the button is yours.

...

<>http://www.Google.com< /site >

<>The Big G< /title >

<>Google Is a Search Engine... and More!< /description > ...

Have a search feature on your site? (Note: your search must be your own search, it can’t be your Google AdSense for Search page, that’s against Google’s TOS) Add it like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q={query}

The {query} part automatically adds the text in the search box to the URL. Next, how about adding a RSS feed? Yep, that’s easy too – simply add:

< interval="3600">http://feeds.feedburner.com/AdventuresInInternetMarketing< /feed >

And replace the URL I added (one of my feeds) with your own feed URL. Want to add your own custom icon? Yep, they made that easy, too. First, create your own 16x16 .gif icon. Then, it needs to be converted into base64 character representation. Google recommends this site - http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp - to get the job done. Then, add this to your .xml file

< mode="base64" type="image/x-icon">Paste Your base64 Code Here

Note that you will need to paste the base64 representation of your icon over where I typed "Paste Your base64 Code Here" Then, save the .xml file and upload it to your server. After you have that ready, add a link to your site to this URL:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=Your_XML_File_URL_Here

For Example - visiting http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.adventuresinim.com/customgoobar.php will allow you to add my blog directly to your Google Toolbar.

The only drawback, albeit small, that I can see to this is that Google hasn’t released a Firefox version of their v4 Toolbar. But, with the amazing features of v4 Beta, I’m confident they’ll release it soon.