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 You have a great website now where
are the customers? If you can't get them through the
search engines then maybe you will have to pay for them.
A great website without customers is like a mega mall in
the middle of a desert with no road leading to it. In
order to sell you need customers, but how do you get the
traffic to your website?
There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website,
lets examine the paid methods of getting traffic.
1. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Nothing new to anyone on the net. Every major search
engine offers it in one form or the other. A great way to
drive traffic to your site. But only if you know how to
use it.
You must select keywords that will drive traffic to your
site but will not cause your CPC bill to skyrocket without
converting prospects into sales. Your description must
also complement your keyword so that it reinforces your
products and services.
The persons who click have interest in your goods but are
still prospects. What goods are they interested in
however. If my food site should use a keyword phrase
"oral pleasure" relating to food and tastiness,
I might be surprised to get a lot of clicks but no sales.
Why, you might ask? Most likely the persons clicking on my
link got there while searching for adult links for oral
pleasure.
Funny you might think, but everyday, advertisers
haphazardly choose keywords that have no bearing on their
site. They now start to receive customers but have no
conversions as these were not targeted visitors. By now
the CPC bill is high and sales are still low to
non-existent.
So for my food site, a better choice of keyword would be
"jerk seasoning", and if I wanted to narrow my
target market more with specific searches, I would use
"Jamaican jerk seasoning". This would be sure to
send me only targeted customers searching for my products.
My conversion rate will be higher out of this batch of
qualified prospects.
2. Text Ads
Advertisers can sponsor text ads for varying periods on
different search engines. These text ads run from as
little as $12 per 3 month period and give good exposure to
a wide market, but is again dependent on keyword and
description choices.
3.Buy Traffic
There are sites that are wholly designated to selling web
traffic. The rates vary but traffic can be bought from as
little as $2.99 per thousand visitor. The type of traffic
is dependent on where the traffic is from. Traffic is
generated from expired domains and redirected traffic.
Traffic can also be classified into geographic regions and
by shopping preferences. The more targeted choices are
more costly but give a better quality visitor.
If your business is in the USA selling golf shoes, a US
visitor who is a golfer is going to be a more qualified
visitor than one who lives in Bahrain and does not know
what golf is.
Some traffic sites send visitors based on auto generated
views. This might boost the stats on your site but will
not generate sales. You need to ensure that real people
are viewing your site and not automated software. If you
are going to pay for traffic then you need to get real
traffic.
Some websites will tell you they are sending visitors,
when they mean hits. 1000 hits is not the same as 1000
visitors. Every time a visitor comes to your site they
generate hits. Every image that opens generates a hit. So
you can see the difference between the promise of 1000
hits vs 1000 visitors. 100 visitors just might, depending
on your landing page, generate a 1000 hits.
4. Links
Joining paid link exchanges is a great way to get incoming
links to your site. This method until recently was a good
enough method, but Google's recent change to its view on
paid Link Exchanges means that less value is placed on
incoming links.
It is still a fairly valuable tool as the other members
with whom you link, the traffic from their sites now have
a link to you. The drawback is when your link is so far
down the page that customers to that site will never have
easy access.
5. Search Engines
Not by any means last or the least effective method. The
major search engines will drive most of your traffic tot
your site. Google delivers at least 60% of a sites search
engine traffic, and so websites must be optimized and
tweaked to achieve higher ranking in the engines. Higher
ranking translates to appearing in the first few results.
the higher up you rank and place the more your traffic
from the search engine. With this method, optimization and
submission of the site is paramount. A good SEO can tweak
your site to make it search engine friendly including
optimizing your meta tags such as Keywords, description
and title, or by subscribing to good SEO newsletter, you
can do it yourself.
Coming... Part II : Free Website Traffic Building will
deal with the free ways you can drive traffic to your site
without spending a dime.
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