Need Traffic? Pay for It !
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. Everytime
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.
About the author:
K Valentine is owner of
A Webhosting Site and
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