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If You Own a
Web Site -
You Need Traffic
By Enrique De
Argaez, MBA, P.E., webmaster
One of the most common
needs of online business owners is traffic. Without traffic, your
web site barely exists, and is unlikely to make any profit
whatsoever. With traffic, you stand a much greater chance of
success - but not just any traffic.
Newbies on the web
frequently make the mistake of just wanting traffic, and join any
and every program offering just that - "thousands of hits to your
web site", with the vast majority of them completely worthless.
When their web sites fail to make any money, many of them give up
on the web as a money-making myth.
For those that do
persist, and try to learn from their experience, they realize
it's not just any traffic they need - it's targeted traffic. That
means web site visitors who actually want to visit (rather than
those who are 'forced' to visit via some traffic exchange
program), and so are actually interested in what you have to
offer.
This type of traffic is
far more profitable to you - your visitors are far more likely to
purchase from you, simply because you have what they
want.
But how can you attract
targeted traffic? Here are ten tips:
1. Start An
Affiliate Program
This works by giving
those who promote your products a commission if they make a sale.
Over time you can build up an army of people who are busy
promoting your web sites for you.
For many emarketers,
affiliates account for a large portion of all their sales, and to
do that, by definition they don't have to pay to get a lot of
traffic going their way.
You can begin to see
why big marketers all have an affiliate program in the marketing
mix to grow traffic and sales levels.
For beginners who are
selling digital products such as ebooks or software, the easiest
and cheapest way to start your own affiliate program is
through ClickBank. That's how many started and still use them
today.
2. Add Content to
Your Web Site
Providing quality
content on your web site is an excellent way to permanently
increase traffic to your web site.
Search engines
like Google, MSN, Yahoo appear to favor web sites with a clear
navigation structure that provide quality content within a
certain genre - that means not adding anything you can think of
to your web site, but to focus on a particular niche, and provide
content broadly in line with that.
You don't even have to
create it all yourself. For example, look in article directories
on the web for free reprint articles you can use. Chose the
article subjects related to your web site topic. Here is a list
of several such sites:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/
http://www.seo-writer.net/reprint/articles.html
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
3. Create Content
Just as you are looking
for content you can quickly add to your web site, so are
thousands of other publishers. By creating content yourself, you
can not only put it up on your own web site, but also provide it
to others for their use with a small resource box at the end of
the article with a link to your web site.
In so doing, you can
have literally hundreds of web sites all linking to yours. This
provides a consistent stream of targeted traffic from readers of
the article who want to follow through to your web site, and also
from search engines like Google, where your ranking will broadly
increase in line with the number of web sites linking to
you.
Hundreds of ezine
publishers are also on the look out for quality content that they
can publish, on a wide range of topics - if a publisher with a
large mailing list chooses to publish your article, this can lead
to a surge in both traffic and sales on your web site when their
ezine is published. Many ezines are published online too,
providing another permanent link and source of high quality
traffic to your web site.
There are various
courses and ebooks available online that can teach you how to
effectively distribute your articles and get them published.
Anyway, the process is fairly simple, here is all you need to
know:
Proofread and check your article, then it's time to start
sending your article to those publishers who are dying for your
fresh, new content! So how do you find them, and get your article
to them? There are several ways.
First, publish your
work to free content mailing lists where publishers subscribe for
the sole reason of receiving content. Go to Google
Groups and Yahoo
Groups where
there are a lot of groups to which you can post to (check the
subscribe addresses and please read their posting rules prior to
posting).
There are many other
free content lists and websites out there. Search around and you
should find more to post your articles too, including ones
dedicated to specific topics which may be more relevant for your
article.
Once you've posted your
article to the free content mailing lists, you need to start
contacting individual publishers. Start making a list of
newsletters and other publications which will accept your
articles by contacting each one. It will require a little work,
but many even provide an address for article
submissions.
Ask each if they will
accept article submissions from you, what address to send them
to, and be sure to allow them to remove themselves from your list
if they ever want to. Build up a list of publishers over time and
send your articles to them each time you write a new
one.
Write articles on a
consistent basis, monthly works best for most people, keep the
quality of your writing up, and you should have no problem
obtaining substantial free traffic from your work.
4. Publish An
Ezine
One of the most
effective ways to build a loyal base of repeat visitors for your
web site is your own mailing list, whether it's an ezine that
publishes regularly, or a mailing list who you occasionally mail
to.
By publishing quality
information in your emails, you increase your credibility, build
trust with your subscribers, and encourage repeated visits to
your web site.
5. Better Organic
Search Engine Listings
Since natural traffic
accounts for roughly 70% percent of all the search engine clicks,
this is a mayor source of traffic and you should look for ways to
increase your web site position in natural search engine
listings. These are the famous SERP or "search engine results
page". The page that users see after typing their search query
into a search engine.
If done correctly, all
the above techniques can increase your natural page ranking in
the search engines. If this is the case, congratulations, you
will get better results. However, when you are not in the first
SERPs, content might not be sufficient to improve your web site
traffic.
Online marketers have
become very dependent on search engines, almost obsessed. If your
position is far from the top, use pay-per-click engines, try SEO,
or concentrate in other traffic generating strategies. Search has
become big business, an entirely new industry. See the next
tip.
6. Pay Per Click
Engines
When you use
pay-per-click engines, you are effectively paying to have a high
ranking position for certain keywords, on certain search engines.
If you choose your keywords carefully, the traffic is highly
targeted - the trick is to ensure you are not paying more per
click than each visitor is worth.
To do this effectively
requires some careful tracking of the visitors that arrive at
your site from your keyword placements, but done correctly, the
end result is net profit for you.
The main pay-per-click
engines are Google Adwords and Overture - with Google, your ads
are displayed within minutes; with Overture, it can take a few
hours to a few days to have your ads approved and
displayed.
7. Create
Blogs
Blogs are highly
effective in building links of relevant web pages. Blogs can
increase the link popularity and relevancy, therefore increasing
natural rankings. Blogs can be useful for marketing and research
purposes, and to drive traffic to specific landing pages on your
web site. To get go benefits, the experts recommend developing 10
blogs, this is called a Blogset, with unique content updated
three times a week with at least 250 words per entry that are
keyword specific to the target keyword.
Doing this will represent after one month, 120 optimized web
pages of individual posts with links directed to your target
pages (10 blogs times three posts times four weeks). The cost is
only your time.
8. Issue Press Releases
The use of Press
Relaseases (PR) is another traffic generating strategy with very
good benefits, if done correctly. Use a resource like PRweb to
create press releases that are optimized for the search engines.
With appropiate SEO copywriting, a PR can drive more quality
traffic to your web site than a whole month of paid searches on
the search engines. An average press release on PRweb can attain
over 70,000 reads in a very short period of time.
Press Releases are closely related to Creative Public Relations.
Creative Public Relations example: GoldenPalace.com did a great
job last year when it bought the Virgin Mary grilled cheese
sandwich for $28,000. Did they really buy it? Yes. Did they buy
it for $28,000. Yes. Did it cost them $28,000? No. How’d
they do it? Here’s how their PR genius works: My guess is
that they made the sandwich themselves. Yummy. They made a big
announcement about it. Created a fictitious name as the owner of
the sandwich, then put it on eBay. GoldenPalace wins the auction,
pays themselves the $28,000, and only pays eBay the fees for
selling it. Pretty amazing PR.
9. Buy Targeted
Traffic
When you use
pay-per-click engines, you are effectively paying to have a high
ranking position for certain keywords, on certain search engines.
You can buy traffic directly from several portals, 1,000
visitors, 5,000 visitors, 10,000 visitors. This is anothe
alternative. However, you have to check for the quality of the
traffic you are getting for your money.
10. Other Ways to Generate Traffic
Participate in trade
shows, conferences, and specialized seminaries. You can find
offline traffic generating strategies useful. Advertise offline
your web site. This is a good alternative to pay-per-click
engines.
Of course there are other sources of targeted, ads in magazines
and newspapers, for example.
I recommend that you use a combination of all of the above
methods to attract targeted traffic to your web site - of course,
that's not the end of the road in terms of web site
profitability. You then need to ensure that a proportion of this
targeted traffic converts into paying customers. Once you've
mastered this too, you are well on your way to online
success.
About the Author:
Enrique De Argaez is the webmaster of the "Internet World Stats" website. Since
2000 he has been tabulating Internet Usage Statistics, and
publishing the statistics for over 233 countries and regions of
the world for free use by the academia, the global business
community and the general public. Visit his main web sites
at: Internet World
Stats and All About Market
Research.
Online Profits at the Speed of
Light
