You have lovingly made a website and put it online on the World Wide Web. Now, all you have to do is wait and see who visits.
Right?
No!
You have to do something to make people come to your website.
There are plenty of ways that you can generate traffic towards your website, but I am going to concentrate on only 3 of them; that tend to produce very quick (if not instantaneous) results.
The three strategies are:
1. Buy Traffic for your website
2. Send offers and information to individuals in your mailing list
3. Request reciprocal links/endorsements
1. BUY TRAFFIC FOR YOUR WEBSITE
As the name suggests, this strategy would require you to dole out some money!
You can place advertisements of your website on other websites that are similar to yours or you can place advertisement of your website on search engines. This way, when some one is searching for a product similar to the one that you are selling/promoting, your website’s ad will come up in front of them. Therefore, you will be able to target people from your niche, and these “targeted” people have a higher potential of buying your product because they were already looking for it.
You have to pay for the advertisement ONLY when they click on the link. Such ads are known as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements. Some of the highly recommeneded PPC ads sites are:
Google Adwords
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Miva (formerly findout.com)
Goclick
When you choose a PPC, do make sure that it offers a tracking software that helps you find out how useful it is to you. This way you will be able to choose the ones that are more profitable and get rid of those that are not.
2. SEND OFFERS TO MAILING LIST
Brian Campbell (A successful Internet Marketing Guru and best selling author) says that the 1st Internet Marketing Commandment is: “You can’t promote anything online without first capturing the email address of your website visitors.”
He says, “You shouldn’t attempt to get even one visitor to your website without having a mechanism in place to capture the name and email address of the website visitors that come to your website.”
You need to capture most of the email addresses of your in-coming traffic because it is more than likely that they will not buy anything from you on their first visit to your website and they might never come back again! To prevent that from happening, you offer them something that they would like to sign up for (like some valuable information for FREE and its VERY important to deliver what you promise!). After that you keep their attention by sending them more free content, and sandwich promotional offers in between. One e-mail from you will bring most of them back to your website!
A word of caution here: do NOT overwhelm your e-mail list clients with too many promotional offers, you will lose your credibility. You should send them valuable free stuff in between offers, so that they would want to read your emails.
3. REQUEST RECIPROCAL LINKS/ENDORSEMENTS
There are thousands of websites out there that are selling products similar to yours. Instead of thinking that they are your competition, instead think of them as your potential partners; ask them to promote your product in return of you promoting theirs. These website owners can help you in several ways:
They can put links and banners of your website, in exchange of you putting theirs on your website. Or, they can just add your link to their website and you can then pay them a previously agreed commission when they produce a sale for you.
Or; they can send an email to their email list, endorsing and promoting your product, while you do the same for them.
Such “deals” are known as Joint Ventures (JV deals) and these are one of the most powerful strategies that you can use to send more traffic to your website.
Try out these strategies for your websites. Better results are produced when all three of these marketing approaches are used together. You might want to try these out and then see which one works better for you and then concentrate more on that one. These three strategies, combined with other marketing methods can sky-rocket your website popularity and sales and make you a very happy online business person.
**********************************************************
