Do you have a website? If so, you absolutely need traffic.
You may be asking: what do you mean by "traffic". I'm glad you asked. Website traffic refers to people checking out your site. Consider the possibility of laying out the investment to build a website, and thousands of dollars later, you have nice-looking site that no one knows about and thereby not earning you money. You may as well put a McDonald's smack-dab in the middle of Death Valley.
Many methods exist for traffic generation. For getting traffic quickly, check out these two options.
First, you can borrow traffic. Most businesses can use some form of this method, and I encourage you to creatively adapt it to your specific situation. In essence, you simply get another website owner to agree to recommend your product or service to their "list" of interested individuals. This usually involves offering a referral fee or commission to get them to agree to this.
This procedure gets results for these two reasons. First, the other website owner has already invested the time and money required to collect the names and contact information of interested individuals, sparing you from doing the same. Second, this method allows you to get "credit" for the credibility of the other website owner. Think about your own experience. Do you normally seek out self-serving, traditional advertisements, or do you rely more upon the advice of friends and trusted acquaintances when making a buying decision? The answer is obvious.
Borrowing traffic usually will not cost you out of pocket cash, although normally you should be prepared to pay out of your proceeds.
Next, consider paid advertising. Your options for paid advertising are many, and at the top of your list should be pay-per-click advertising. Google and their Adwords program is where you should begin, and before long, take a look at Yahoo and MSN. The largest benefit to pay-per-click advertising is it allows you to restrict who sees your ads; in this case, only those people who type specific words into the search engine will see the ad.
This method, if performed properly, works for a number of reasons. Among the top reasons it works is you are causing your ads to be displayed based upon specific words used by searchers. Another reason it can be effective is that is trackable. Google, for example, has built-in analytics tools and you can use them free of charge. After a period of time, you will be able to tell which keywords generated the most "clicks"; i.e. visits to your website based upon your ad. With Google's conversion tracking tool (also free) you can also determine which keywords lead to a buying decision.
Unlike the "borrowing traffic" method, you will have a cash outlay whether you make sales or not. On the plus side, Google will likely not charge your credit card until the end of the month, so you may actually have generated more than enough in sales to pay your Adwords bill when it is time to pay. When you first start, most people keep close tabs on their Adwords account, to make sure they are not spending more than they had planned.
These are only two methods of getting traffic to your website. Future articles will reveal many more methods.
About the Author:
If you are trying to get more traffic to your web site, see Darrel Hawes' site for tips in getting more traffic, plus generating more leads.
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