Get the Quickest Traffic to Your Website
If you’re a business owner with a website, you know that you need to get traffic to your website.
Website traffic is defined as real people actually visiting your website. You might spend thousands of dollars setting up the prettiest, easy-to-navigate site you can imagine, but with no visitors, you will not make money with that website. It would be similar to building a Macy’s -fully stocked and staffed- in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield.
There are many ways to get traffic. If you need traffic fast, there are two basic methods you can use.
The first basic fast-traffic method is to borrow the traffic. This may or may not work for your industry, but try and get creative and adapt it to your business because it can be very effective. What is done is to convince another website owner with a list of prospects and customers that would be interested in your product or service, and encourage them to recommend your products or services. In most cases, you will have to give them an affiliate or referral commission in order to encourage the referral.
This particular method is effective for two reasons I’ll mention. Firstly, the website owner has already gathered the list of people who are interested in your specific topic, saving you the expense and time of identifying them. Secondly, in so doing you are “borrowing” on the goodwill of the referrer. Consider in your own experience. If you need to make a buying decision, do you place more weight in traditional, self-serving advertising or upon the impartial recommendations of friends and advisers? Most people choose the latter.
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 of advertising is attractive for numerous reasons. Chief of these is the ability to match the words people are searching for with your particular ad. Another great benefit is you can track many aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns.
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.
We have only covered two methods of generating traffic to your site. In future articles, we will cover many more.
Filed under: Copywriting