11. 12.
Website traffic is a very crucial aspect of any website. Anyone who has an online business will know the importance of a consistent flow of visitors to their website. Without traffic, your website will not be seen by anyone and will not result in any sales.
When it comes to free traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is the main strategy to tackle. You want to get your site ranked on the first page of the search results for terms that you are targeting. Having a good ranking for a select few highly searched terms can bring you loads of free traffic but technically, the traffic is not free. You have to put a lot of effort into link building, optimizing your site, etc. This takes time and as the saying goes, time is money.
For this article, we will focus instead on paid sources of traffic. This is the fastest way you can generate a lot of traffic to test your sales page for conversions. The most effective paid traffic is that generated through pay-per-click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. These three platforms get the lion’s share of PPC traffic so you should focus on them. Master them and you will be on your way to creating streams of traffic on demand.
It is important, however, to be constantly testing new sources of paid website traffic. Social media advertising is another option to advertise your business. MySpace and Facebook have recently launched their own self-service advertising platform. With the ability to target a certain demographic that corresponds to your business, you may see some high conversion numbers. There are a large number of social media and social networking sites that you can test.
Media buying through banner networks is another option. Most of these companies have easy-to-use platforms where you can easily upload your banner to create an ad campaign. Then you can specify your ad budget and also target the categories of sites you want your ad to appear on. Alternatively, you can also approach individual site owners to advertise on their sites. Think of sites that your prospective customers tend to visit, such as forums or blogs.
As you branch out to other traffic sources, be sure to keep track of the results of your tests. After a period of testing, gather all the data and analyze them to make a decision whether the website traffic is profitable. If it is not, drop it and move on to the next traffic source. Do not stick with a source that costs you a lot of money, yet makes a slow improvement on your website traffic.
Another thing you can do is to set aside a portion of your profits for the purpose of testing. This is akin to reinvesting your profits to grow your business. Having a disciplined approach to continuously increase the traffic to your site will reap massive benefits in the long run.
10. 12.
You set up your website, added your RSS feed and started a monthly submission routine. Now what is the next thing to do?
Well, let’s compare this to an off-line business. What you have done is set up your business “store” and put the open sign in the window. Now its time to start bringing in some potential customers. If you opened your store in a busy mall then you could naturally expect to receive traffic from mall foot traffic. But wait, what if you opened your store on a quiet back street? You may have a great product and great parking but no one will find you. This is the situation you are in with your website, no one knows where your website is and therefore there is no website traffic and no conversions.
An important concept to keep in mind about website traffic generation is to go where the traffic is and where you can redirect the traffic to you. Let’s look at some ways an offline business would generate traffic that we could apply to our online business.
Offline, business owners will network, join the local chamber of commerce, and other networking organizations to get the word out about them and their business. You will find them with small kiosks in malls and display booths at trade shows and community events.
Now how would we apply this concept online? Online this would be comparable to:
(1) Joining social networking sites. Creating profiles and adding your website url on social networking sites gets you in front of the traffic these sites generate.
(2) Building your own satellite sites. These are high PR (page ranked)sites such as Hub Pages or Squidoo that allows you to add your own content to their site. Creating these satellite sites are much like the kiosks at the mall, all directing traffic back to your website through the content and the links you have placed on your profile and satellite sites.
As an online business owner, you will need to create profiles at high pr social networking sites and create satellite pages directing traffic to your website. Sounds, good so far, but creating, maintaining and updating these off page traffic generation sources, while beneficial to your business can be labor intensive without the right tools.
Use the free tools listed below to redirect website traffic from high page ranked sites to your site.
Google Gmail:
Create a Google Gmail account. It is fast and easy to set up. Keep it separate from your regular email. You will need it to confirm emails from the social networking sites and to “dump” the occasional or regular emails they send you.
Firefox Browser:
Next download the Firefox browser. It’s free. It does not interfere with internet explorer. And best of all, it has many add-ons that you will find useful. You will need its multiple tab feature to jump back and forth between opened tabs to make your online business more efficient.
Go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Roboform:
Roboform is a password manager. The trial version is free. You will need this to save you logins and passwords to all the social networking sites you create.
Go to: http://www.roboform.com
HelloTXT:
HelloTXT is a micro-blogging and social networking status updating site. Join the site. There is 28 different sites to sign up with inside. Join each one and make sure to confirm the link inside each email you will receive from each site. Add each site to your HelloTXT profile. Now you will be able to update all your social networking profiles from one interface. Fast and easy. Over time you will build up your website presence and receive traffic, both, from the links inside your profiles and also from the search engines because of the page rank juice of the links leading to your website.
Go to http://www.hellotxt.com
Follow the process above. Do not put this off, schedule it. This kind of traffic is time consuming to set up but very easy to maintain with the tools above and following this traffic generation process will prepare you for the next step. It takes patience and persistence.
In the next article we will be discussing how to multiply the power of the website traffic you will generate by using bookmarking and pinging. Apply what you’ve learned here and expect to receive more traffic and buying customers soon. This will improve the effectiveness of your online business.
