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 So you got your website up and
running. You hired an excellent web designer to
craft a perfect home page and satellite pages that
will really draw in the visitors and inspire them to
buy. You have a beautiful catalog of products with
detailed descriptions. You have a section dedicated
to the services you provide with praises from past
customers. And you have the best online shopping
cart service out there so that you customers can buy
from you with no hassles and next day shipping.
That's great! Now where are your customers?
Driving traffic to your website is a much discussed
and much misunderstood venture. There are a million
theories out there that claim to drive tons of new
visitors to your site daily. There are services that
say they will increase your traffic by an enormous
percentage if you will only pay them their small fee
over a period of fifty years. There are so-called
experts who will place your pages on all the best
search engines on the net. They claim that with this
kind of blanket exposure, your traffic numbers will
explode within days.
But the only sure-fire way to draw productive
traffic to your website is through targeted
marketing. The important word to notice here is
"productive." You can draw hundreds of
thousands of visitors to your site every year by
hosting a giveaway of some kind. Services that
search the internet for freebies will have people
clicking a link to your site like crazy. But these
people are not there to buy anything from you ...
quite the opposite. They are empty clicks. There is
nothing productive about this kind of traffic.
People looking for free stuff will rarely make you
any kind of money. And that's what you're after,
right?
So target your marketing to the people who really
want to buy what you have to offer. How? Start by
trying these basic steps...
* Hire an experienced
copywriter. The copy that is on your site
makes a world of difference in the sales you garner
from the internet. Most important to targeted
marketing are the keywords found in your title and
the metatags in the website's code. An experienced
copywriter will know how to determine the most
effective keywords and place them strategically in
your site's copy. If you cannot afford a copywriter,
do some research and talk to your web designer about
inserting metatags.
 * You can enroll in pay per
click search engines. Obviously, google.com
is one of these, but most of the most popular
keywords are already taken. If you can think of some
original phrases that people use to search for your
products or services, you can post your ad next to
the text that comes up when people search for that
phrase. Every time someone clicks on your ad to go
to your site, you pay google.com a nominal fee.
* Submit articles to free
ezine sites. This is especially helpful if
you are a service provider. You can write, or hire
someone to write, an article for you about your area
of expertise. Give some free tips, offer your
experience, and be accessible in the text. Then at
the bottom of the article, you get a link to your
website advertising your services. Every time
someone publishes your article in their ezine or
newsletter, they must use your web address at the
bottom.
These are just a few of the many ways to ensure you
get "productive" traffic. Empty clicks are
just that ... empty... and your wallet will stay
that way, too!
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