Traffic Conversion-Understand Your Purpose
Getting lots of traffic to your website is an awesome thing. However, if you are getting traffic but no conversions it is time to rethink your strategy. This was brought to mind from a post I read about getting 30,000 plus unique visitors in one month. This was a project simply to determine if getting that many visitors could be accomplished. Well success came his way but not with the results you might think.
He got all that traffic and made $100 from adsense. But that’s okay because in the process he learned exactly what he needs to do drive that kind of traffic. What if you got that many visitors? What would 30,000 plus unique visitors do for you? If you don’t know the answer then you need to figure it out.
You need to know what your purpose is for getting any traffic? Is your purpose to grow your list, bum marketing, viral marketing, etc., you get the picture. After you decide what your purpose is, then you should target your keywords to suit your needs.
For example, if you were looking to grow your list for a niche in “dog grooming” you would target keywords such as “free dog grooming tips“, but if you were looking to make some money right now, you would target keywords such as “buy dog grooming accessories“. Get the difference?
If you received 30,000 visitors for the keywords “free dog grooming tips” and you were expecting to make some money, you would very disappointed. Those visitors would have come to your site for free tips, albeit some of these may convert to sales, but the vast majority may not. On the other hand, if someone is searching for the word “buy” with ANY keyword then they already have their wallet open and credit card in hand.
Traffic Generation-How Does a Brand New Website Get It?
Traffic generation is always a hot topic of conversation in the internet marketing industry, especially amongst the people that have been marketing for a while. Usually they talk about advanced methods of which you, if you have a brand new website, can’t exactly capitalize on yet. Heck, your website hasn’t even been indexed nor have you gotten one visitor yet!
Traffic Strategies Have Evolved
Well for one thing, the tactics nowadays are dramatically different than what it was even just a few years ago. I remember when people would just stuff keywords on their websites in such a way that the content was unreadable. But search engines gave them lots of credit for it that resulted in massive traffic. These were those made for adsense sites. I guess people made a killing out of that. I never did…guess I just wasn’t crafty enough.
Today search engines have become very sophisticated. They are able to tell how well your website is by the content and backlinks for example. It takes a bit of know-how to effectively implement the best seo strategies for traffic generation.
Free Information Is Available
You can find a great majority of the information for free at places like SEOmoz, SEOBook and BlogSEO.
You can put on your learning cap and dive deep into these sites because you are going learn a lot! Take what you have learned and apply it to article marketing. Article marketing is the best way to start generating some traffic to your website without spending much if any money. Another tactic you can use is to comment on some of the top blogs in your niche. A lot of blogs let you put links back to your website.
But you better make sure your comments are “worthy and valuable” to the conversation at hand!
However, you are still going to be on a big long learning curve. I don’t say that to discourage you at all. But just for you to keep in mind that with anything that you don’t know much about that it will take time to learn. So don’t expect that once you implement a few of the strategies, somehow overnight that you will rank on page #1 of the SERP’s (search engine results pages).
More sites of interest:
| Massive Website Traffic: Succeeding By Taking It A Bit At A Time … – If you’ve been reading my articles you’ll be in no doubt that you need to take massive actions in order to get massive results in your website traffic campaign.
Blog Basics for Beginners: Backlinks – 3 Ways to Boost Your Web … – Also, make sure to use PingOMatic to let all the social networking sites know that you have new content. Conclusion There are a billion ways to boost web traffic. If you feel disappointed about the rate at which your blogs are growing … Tips on How to Choose a Good Domain Name for Your Website Or Business … – Before you rush out and choose your domain name or name your website, you might want to consider the following points. Naming your site after your domain may seem obvious to some of you, but … |
Online Marketing Strategies-Is It Really Cheaper Than Offline Marketing?
The costs of online marketing is sometimes blown out of proportion when you don’t fully understand the costs of the alternative methods of advertising.
One of the biggest concerns with all businesses is keeping expenses to a minimum and maximizing their rate of return. Brick and mortar businesses know that advertising can be one of the costliest expenses, but is critical to the success of a business.
Yet when compared with the cost of online marketing is often considerably cheaper.
Offline marketing usually consists of the traditional yellow page listings, flyer advertising or the use of mailer value-paks where your ad is buried in with a hundred others competing for the readers attention.
Using these methods indiscriminately nowadays is like throwing out a huge net to the public in hopes that maybe somebody is interested in what you’re selling.
You may get some people to come and browse around in your store, but they still might not purchase from you.
Online Marketing Laser Targets Your Audience
It doesn’t matter if you use PPC (pay per click), adwords, SEO (search engine optimization), or even a twist of all of them. The people that respond will be pre-qualified.
Why?
Because when you are using these types of marketing techniques you are getting traffic from visitors who are interested in what you are selling, and therefore more likely to buy from you.
Another advantage to using these internet marketing techniques is that you can closely monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns.
If something is working out great then you can keep pumping it up.
On the other hand if something is bombing out you can stop it almost instantaneously.
Try that with the traditional forms of advertising. You won’t know much about your campaign until towards the end so you can’t practice much if any damage control.
In no way am I knocking traditional forms of advertisement because they still work. But what I am saying is that you don’t have to throw all your eggs in one basket.
If you have a brick and mortar business, you should try to work out something that works both online and offline.
That’s right. Maximize your profits.
One last thing to remember. If you have a website, please understand that your website is your online billboard that is capable of making you money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.
Absolutely do not miss this golden opportunity to effectively promote your business.
More sites of interest:
| Should Marketers Shift Offline Budgets to Digital Marketing … – As all of us know, digital (online) marketing is more measurable than offline marketing.It therefore allows marketers to have a better track of their marketing spend and ROI. But as Dan said, it may not be applicable to all. …
Small Business Marketing Better Online or Offline? | Understanding … – Depending on your customer, small businesses may be better off utilizing online marketing or offline marketing sactics to reach their customer. Bruceclay.com – Integrate Your Online and Offline Marketing … – Basically, the topic revolves around how well online marketing is complemented by offline marketing. Robert Murray of iProspect explained the significance of online-offline marketing integration with this simple statistic collected in a … |
Traffic Generation-The Heartbeat Of Your Online Business
Traffic generation is one of the heartbeats of your online business, and should be at the top of your list of must do activities as an internet marketer.
If you don’t get traffic, you don’t get visitors who turn into subscribers, who turn into buyers. But this is one of the hardest things to do, because there is so much information that can send you in so many different directions. I hope that by the end of this post I will add some clarification on this topic for you.
But if you think about it, there are only a few possibilities of bringing a steady flow of long term traffic to your website. That is your goal isn’t it? Long term traffic?
Let’s see, there is article marketing, backlinks, organic search engine traffic and Pay Per Click. Article marketing is advertising by writing articles that are keyword rich, not keyword stuffed, about a subject and then submitting them to article directories for exposure.
Article marketing includes using both paid and free advertising. Backlinks are simply links on other sites pointing back to your site. The more of these you have, the higher your site will climb in the rankings.
For example, say you like something I wrote about on my blog. You then write about it on your blog or website and include a link back to my blog article. There you have it. That’s called a backlink.
You see backlinks all the time and probably just didn’t realize what they were called nor understand that they hold a significant value to the website owner.
Organic search engine traffic is just a fancy way to say that the results of any search that is found on the left side of your screen is the natural or organic results of your keyword search. Anything on the right of the screen is paid advertisements that are keyword phrase driven.
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Pay Per Click is pretty much what is says. You pay for advertising using a keyword phrase, and when a visitor clicks on your ad, you pay for that click in hopes that you will sell whatever you are promoting.
The industry average for PPC is 1 out of every 100 clicks will result in a sale. So you better make sure that the amount of money that it will cost you for a hundred clicks is far less than what you will make for a sale. The difference will be your profit so make that amount something you are comfortable with.
For example, if you choose a keyword that costs 10 cents per click and the product you are promoting will yield you a $30 sale, then you will have earned a $20 profit.
10 cents X 100 = $10.00
One Product Sale = $30.00
$30 – $10= $20.00 profit
The calculation of profit is easy, but PPC itself is a whole lot more involved than that, but I just wanted to give you a brief overview of how PPC works. Do not attempt PPC based on any discussion here or you will be sure to lose your pants.
Okay so let’s move on to the methods of traffic generation that are more reliable for long term effects – article marketing, backlinks and organic traffic.
I want to concentrate the discussion on these because they can be free to do and can yield the most long term effect. I am eliminating PPC because when your campaign ends, so does any residual effect.
Backlinks are generally used to increase your page rank (PR). If they are built properly you will naturally increase your PR over a period time, which is what the search engines are looking for.
The gradual increase of good quality backlinks will build your site up to get organic search engine traffic. So these two methods heavily rely on each other.
A long time ago people used to create hundreds of backlinks which were not relevant at all to the theme of their website. This increased their PR drastically, but the search engines finally caught on and now if you try that tactic your site could get permanently banned.
Now nothing has change from what was needed back then versus what’s needed now in regards to backlinks to raise your PR. The difference now is that you need to build highly relevant and high quality backlinks.
If your site is about building decks, then don’t try to link to a site about gardening just because it has a high PR….remember the relevance and quality factor? However, if your site is about fishing, and you link to another site about fish bait; well this would be a very good backlink. Can you see how the relevance of your backlinks plays such an important role now?
If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. Why should the search engines give you a high PR just because you can paste a bunch of links on your site that probably have nothing to do with your subject matter? That’s what is called a link farm.
But if you build these links the right way, the search engines will pay you dearly for it by giving you organic search engine traffic, which is THE best to have.
Also I did not forget about article marketing. You can use article marketing to help create those quality backlinks too. If you submit your articles to article directories, they will get published all over the internet.
Therefore when you write your articles and include that backlink to your site, you are killing three birds with one stone. You are helping fulfill the need of backlinks; you are gaining new subscribers and making sales.
And don’t forget that the more articles you write, the more quality links you will build, and the long term residual income is bound to come.
Unconventional Traffic Strategies
Here is a free report that will teach some unconventional methods to drive traffic to your sites. Some of the tactics you may have some knowledge of, but not the details to make it work effectively. So take about 15 minutes to read this report and put some of these strategies into place.
Traffic Strategies is a give-away, so feel free to give it away too.
Enjoy!
Use Your Signature When Article Marketing
For your online business to thrive, you need traffic to come to your website, and preferably, you want targeted traffic, traffic that will be interested in your offers when they arrive at your website.
While you can get some targeted traffic via Pay-Per-Click methods or by paying for ezine ads in newsletters that are related to your subject matter, that takes a good amount of money to continue doing, and unless you are a large and successful corporation, chances are, you don’t have that large of a budget to be able to buy targeted traffic consistently.
Therefore, you need to find some free methods of getting quality targeted traffic to your website. Fortunately, there are some good free ways to do just that.
One way that is gaining more popularity all the time is via article marketing. This is where you write quality articles about a topic related to the industry you are working in and that will appeal to your target market.
You also could pay quality writers to write the articles for you if you feel they will do a better job writing the articles instead.
In either case, you then insert your signature file at the end of the article. In this signature file, you have a 5-6 line paragraph (about 60 characters per line) that
includes a little about you and your business and a link to your website.
After you have added this, you need to place this article in places where it will be seen by many. The idea is to get interested people to read your article, look at your signature file, and then click on the link to head to your website.
Voila! Now you are getting targeted traffic to your site.
Search Engine Marketing For Newbies
Search Engine Marketing can get quite complex even for those who deal with it daily. However, we can break down bits and pieces of the information to turn it into a powerful marketing tool.
People use keywords in search engines, such as Google, to find the topic of their interest. If you in turn use these same keywords you can help direct your target audience to your site.
However, to be effective you have to have knowledge of the words and phrases they are using. If there is a disconnect between these two, your target audience will have a difficult time finding you, and you will have a difficult time finding them.
Fortunately, there are tools and services available online that will help you find the correct keywords that your target audience is using.
There is a program called Word Tracker that will find all the keywords that you should use to generate traffic to your site. Word Tracker is by far the most popular program but can be considered pricey, especially to those on a limited budget.
Another alternative is Good Keywords by Softnik. They offer software to help you find the best keywords that bring your targeted audience to you (optimize).
Softnik also offers some other very good free tools so be sure to check them out.
Now once you get the right keywords you have to understand Search Engine Optimization. In layman’s terms, this means understanding what the search engines are looking for when they find your site, and then tweaking the information so that more people will find your site. This is called optimizing your site.
When thinking of optimizing, one of the first places to start is your domain name.
You don’t necessarily have to have a keyword in the domain name unless you can make memorable and therefore easier for your visitors to remember.
You also don’t need to buy multiple domains for the search engines to find you. If you pick a generic domain name, you can add sub domains that are the names of your keywords.
Next, you should look at your title tag. You should include your keyword or keyword phrase in your title tag. You may have heard of meta tags. At one time meta tags was the talk of the town. Now, most search engines don’t bother with this anymore.
However, you should consider the meta description tag. This tag explains what your site is all about. This is the text that visitors will see, so make sure it written properly.
You can also add images and a site map to help with optimization. There is a lot of free and professional help online. So if you have problems just do a search on SEO. You’ll have a lot to look at 
Okay, now that you have your site optimized you need to submit it to the search engines. There are a few options. You can let the search engines find you. You can use free submit forms. Or you can pay the search engine to index your site.
Caveat emptor, you should exercise caution when paying a service. There is a boatload of scams out there promising you high ranks “just by using their service”. Be very careful and do a thorough investigation on any company before you spend your hard-earned cash.
Another consideration is link popularity. What is link popularity? Well again, in layman’s terms, the more links you have pointing to your site dictates how popular your site will be ranked. These links come from other websites, directories, or articles, and the more articles you have, the better.
Make sure that your site is appealing to your visitors before you worry about your links. Remember this is now a popularity contest. You must have good content to draw in your readers and keep them there. Once you have done this, then you can start submitting to directories.
The next step would be to find sites that offer similar information as yours and ask them about sharing links with one another. However, remember to only share with a site if it will benefit you.
Sometimes when inquiring about exchanging links some people may not want to do it, others may not even acknowledge your email. Just remember that you can always try again later.
As you can see, once you have a understanding about what to do, it is easy to uncover the secrets behind Search Engine Marketing once you know what to do. You now have enough information to start using Search Engine Marketing like the tool that it is.
