Traffic Building Information |
|
Traffic Generation: The Number One Skill That Will Generate Cash Flow (Part 1 of 3)
If you're feeling a bit of confusion and frustration about how to get visitors to your website and generate more sales, I know exactly how you feel. I felt the same way until I stopped listening to every "big time" marketer that came along with the latest traffic generating trick. You've got dozens of gurus vying for your attention and every one of them has the solution to all of your problems. Right? The proliferation of messages that promise a traffic explosion using new techniques can become overwhelming. Time out. Take a deep breath. Sit back in your chair. Relax. Now, if you will focus your energy on a very short list of traffic generation strategies that actually DO work, and commit to continually improving your skills in these few areas, you will be amazed at what you can achieve... WILL achieve. Websites come in a wide variety of flavors, including... - Minisites designed to sell individual products Of the above site species (minisites, portal sites and content sites), which do you think has the best chance of selling a product and putting income in your bank account? ANSWER: Minisites. Let's talk about web traffic. Imagine 5 different internet users going to Google, MSN, Yahoo or whatever their favorite search engine happened to be, and each individual enters one of the following search queries: Search #1: hazards Search #2: household hazards Search #3: chemical household hazards Search #4: chemical household hazards for infants Search #5: protecting infants from chemical household hazards If you had a website that sold a device that guaranteed the safety of infants by locking cabinets containing hazardous household chemicals, which of the above visitors do you think would be most likely to buy what you're selling? I know. I hear you. "That's pretty obvious, Ron." We want internet user #5 most. We may also want #3 and #4. Do we want #1 and #2? Maybe... Maybe not. The answer to that is going to depend on what it takes to get them to our site. But before we attempt to answer that question, HERE'S SOMETHING CRITICAL... My Question to You: "If you were assured that you could get visitor #5 to your website, where would you send them?" Let's say that your website had a variety of home safety products available. You sell everything from fire extinguishers to first aid kits to carbon monoxide detectors to child safe locks. Your site's home page has just a little bit of information on each of your home safety product lines. Would you send visitor #5 to your home page? Or... Since visitor #5 just did a search for "protecting infants from chemical household hazards", would you have better results by sending them directly and immediately to the web page where they can order your device that guarantees the safety of their child from chemical household hazards? Please don't think that I'm trying to insult your intelligence. I'm not. It's just that I have received correspondence from other direct marketers online concerned about the low sales of their websites only to find out that whenever that person sent traffic to their site, the traffic was going to their home page rather than to a page that spoke directly to the needs and desires of the visitor. Alrighty then? Traffic time. There are only 3 ways to get traffic to your website: 1) Buy it. Since #3 is not an option we're going to consider, that leaves us with "buy it" and "borrow it". Before we go any further, let's talk about the "Holy Grail" of web traffic. What is it? FREE TRAFFIC! I want it. You want it. Every disillusioned internet marketer wants it. Here's the truth... It's a myth. It doesn't exist. There is no such thing as free website traffic. "Ya but Ron, what if I could be #1 in Google for 'Internet Marketing' or 'Website Tools'?" If you were able to get there or anywhere close, what would be required? What investment in time and resources would be required to land a prized spot such as this? Would you be able to get there for free? Furthermore, how long would you stay there? Let's face it, neither Google, Yahoo, Altavista nor MSN wants any individual to be able to control the results of their search engines. That's why they spend millions upon millions of dollars every year taking steps to ensure that nobody has the knowledge to control all of the top positions. Is search engine positioning something to aspire to? Perhaps. Given time. But it will not put any money in your pocket in the short term. That's pretty well guaranteed. There are only 2 ways to get traffic to your website: 1) Buy it. Buy it? Yes, buy it. We're not talking about fortunes changing hands. There's no need to take out a second or third mortgage on you home to use this strategy. Traffic can be generated to your site for literally pennies per visitor. Where will you buy traffic to your website? PPC Search Engines. PPC ("Pay Per Click") search engines give you the best opportunity to find the most motivated buyers and get them to visit your website. This is what you should be considering for your primary method of generating traffic to your website. Remember above where we considered searcher #1 - searcher #5? We want searcher number five on our website, right? Right. We can and will find searcher #5 on the PPC search engines if we take the right approach. In a little bit I'll give you a list of PPC search engines to consider using, but first let's formulate a game plan. Here's the basics of PPC advertising: 1) We have a product to sell. 2) We determine what the product has to offer and why someone might want to buy our product. (hint: focus on benefits, not features) 3) We do some keyword research to see if people are out there actually looking for the solution that our product offers. 4) Assuming that there's sufficient demand for our product /solution, we make a list of the keywords and keyword phrases that people are actually using to conduct their searches. 5) We write an ad for our product in such a way that it gets the attention of the searcher. This may mean changing ad copy slightly from one keyword phrase to the next. Try to put yourself in the position of the person doing the search. 6) We bid on the keywords that we're targeting with the ad that we've written and... Wa-la! Traffic. Is this a viable option? Absolutely. Google Adwords ads can be had for as little as $0.05 per click. Overture traffic can be had for as little as $0.10 per click. If you're selling a product for $19.95, how many clicks can you buy and still be profitable? One sale out of 199 clicks and you're profitable. At this rate you only made a nickel, but that was at a conversion rate of only 0.5%! What if you had a conversion rate of 3%? 3% (3 visitors out of 100 become customers) doesn't sound like too much does it? If you did indeed have a 3% conversion rate on a $19.95 product and were able to buy traffic for $0.10 per visitor, here's how the math works: 100 visitors cost you $10.00 3 visitors became customers and spent a total of $59.85. Subtract your $10.00 advertising cost from your $59.85 revenue, and you have profited $49.85 (or somewhere close after PayPal or other selling fees). So now, how much can you afford to spend on traffic? If you've been running the above advertising campaign long enough to feel confident that a 3% conversion ratio is something that you can count on, then do the math backwards. Your net profit is $49.85 for 100 visitors. Therefore, your "per visitor" value is $0.50 (I'm rounding up very slightly). Knowing this is a huge advantage. Can you find more visitors to your site for $0.20, $0.30 or even $0.40? Of course you can, and it will still be profitable! Obviously, the less you spend on advertising, the more you keep. But if you could find a source of automatic traffic that you knew was profitable, wouldn't you buy as much as you could find? This is exciting stuff! PPC traffic can work for you. Yes, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but that's true with anything new that you do. Here's a list of PPC Search Engines that you should consider starting with: Google AdWords (http://www.adwords.google.com) There are only 2 ways to get traffic to your website: 1) Buy it. In part 2 of this series, we'll continue our thoughts on "(1) Buy it" - traffic that is. Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive Online", for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. 17 Free Cool Tools... http://www.gothrive.com
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Use Free Articles To Create High Quality Backlinks Part I Nowadays, we have created numerous methods so as to bring about well defined backlinks for a particular web site. On one hand, there is the well-known pattern to use the reciprocal link; on the other hand, some use various directories to place their site to. Moreover, there are persons who take advantage of both of these techniques. Maximum Exposure: Ten Ways To Effectively Increase Your Sites Prominence On The Web It's a strange world, this place we call the internet. Many things here are stark opposites of their real life counterparts. Take for example the following. Whereas blind dating is a most dubious manner of meeting people in real life, it is the norm in cyberspace. Whereas multi-level marketing carries with it a stigma of disaster in the actual world, it is a venture very much sought on the web. And whereas traffic tends to irritate us in our daily existence, online denizens would kill to increase the same for their websites. 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies In search engine optimization, "off page" factors have become more and more important as they relate to rankings. In particular, solid link popularity can literally make or break a site with the search engines. How To Get Repeat Visitors To Your Site When you have a website online it is important for you to try and get new visitors to your site, but it's also important to take care of the visitors that you actually already have. This is because you will want your existing visitors to keep returning to your site again and again. How to Increase Web Site Visitors For Relevant Terms Using Your Less Relevant Listings Completely by accident and through no effort of my own, besides the effort to get my site spidered by Yahoo's Slurp Search Engine Spider and Google's Googlebot Search Engine spider, I've seen an accidental increase in the visitors to my web site. 25 Common Link Exchange & Search Engine Terms In today's world of website promotion and traffic building, a whole new set of terms and definitions have developed. To be a successful webmaster and/or website owner, it is important to know the meanings of some of the most popular link exchange and search engine terms. TARGET PRACTICE - Generating The Website Traffic That Matters But a mere increase in the volume of website traffic is not the end all and be all of a successful marketing campaign online. There are countless instances of sites garnering thousands of visitors a day, with not a single sale to speak of. Surely, there would be something wrong if a marketing strategy is purely focused to increase website traffic. Do You Need to Marry The Daughter? For the sake of this article let's forget about search engines, paid leads and your own affilate programs. Let's concentrate instead on pro's and con's of putting much effort into recruiting downlines in those multi-level "viral" programs that are intended to help you promoting. Increase Your Tourism Web Traffic & Sales ? Guaranteed Web sites are a major part of the tourism marketing success strategy used by international tourism promoters in the new millennium: tourism boards, Associations, lodging, tour operators, etc. If your tourism web site does not have these four primary elements clearly and quickly represented, you are missing opportunities and losing sales. A Beginners Guide to Exchanging Links Reciprocal linking is an effective, free way to get more visitors to your website. Link Popularity for a Successful Website: How (Not) to Go About Getting It A classic way of getting seen and noticed on the web is to make sure your site is linked to as many other sites as possible. The strategy of link-exchange has been so overused and abused that search engines are now wary of it and may penalize sites that are linking to "link farms", or to any other sites with non-relevant content. How To Increase Your Website Traffic With Zero Cost How to increase your website traffic with zero cost'. It's a bold statement don't you think. But, believe me it's true. You can increase your traffic by 1000% with no cost involved if you do it the right way. Continue reading if you want to know how. Free Targeted Internet Traffic Let others help with your marketing efforts. You can have strangers pass your site to others and span the globe with viral marketing. Create viral marketing with a free e-book or inviting email, it is powerful and free. To start a viral marketing campaign that grows exponentially and without effort send a witty or clever joke, picture, or poem to people in your address book. If enjoyed the recipient will pass it on to those in their list and so on. You may have received the Bill Gates free offer in your own box. This email has been circulated around the world for over three years and seen by countless. Be sure to include your url with a heading, either near the bottom or in a signature file. Do this once a month and watch your web traffic grow. Common Website Mistakes It used to be that simply having a website meant that your organization was ahead of the curve. Those days are long gone. Today more that ever, organizations need to fuel business and their bottom lines through savvy internet tactics. Linking Your Website To Others Around The World Finding quality traffic though effective website promotions is the number one area all website owners deal with on a daily basis. There are many advantages to linking your website to others around the world. There are marketing companies that have various ideas on how to increase your exposure. One of these ideas is to increase exposure to your site by having over 750,000 incoming links from websites around the world. The sign up process can be accomplished in as little as five minutes. I have found most website owners are extremely knowledgeable about their product but lack the knowledge to properly market. Dont Just Concentrate on Web Site Traffic - Focus on Sales Conversion I cannot stress the importance of targeted traffic for the survival and prosperity of any web site and the importance increases when this web site is an ecommerce web site. But getting more and more traffic is not always the answer to increase your profits, I am not saying to stop working at increasing your traffic but I am saying that you must also focus on your 'traffic to sales conversion rate'. Making Effective Use of Traffic Exchanges ? What are traffic exchanges? Winning the Traffic Exchange Game Winning the traffic exchange game can be done. I was just starting out online and had no money so I was looking for a free way to drive traffic to my site. That is when I first found traffic exchanges. I found the concept to be great and signed up for everyone I found and started clicking and clicking and clicking. After countless hours, a blistered clicking finger and a lot of frustration I found the secret to the game. More of What You Need to Know About Your Website Traffic is Contained in 3 Other Key Stats Their is an old Saying it goes something like this 'Figures Lie and Liars figures. While it is true that you can skew Statistics anyway you want, it is also true that with properly gathered statistics you can learn a great deal about your web site traffic if you know what to look for. 3 Fastest Ways To Get Traffic To Any Website After all the debate over website design, shopping carts and credit card processors, every website owner eventually comes to the startling realization that they need one more thing to survive - website traffic! |
home | site map |
© 2005 |