Imagine your store in an abandoned shopping complex in a deserted town. Cobwebs are growing at every corner and you’ve wasted tons of cash in goods you’ve never been able to sell.
That’s what its like when your website has no traffic. As a business owner, you know that web traffic is important. That’s why online businesses spend so much of their marketing efforts trying to get traffic to their online businesses.
As you can imagine, getting traffic isn’t always easy. It takes diligent practice and perfecting your chosen traffic generation techniques to ensure a steady stream of traffic.
Thankfully, these traffic generation tasks can be outsourced. But it’s a good idea to have a better understanding of how each method works yourself so you know what is involved.
With so many traffic generation methods available, how do you know which is the right one for your business?
The best way is to learn and apply as many techniques as you can. You can never have enough traffic.
In this article we will show you a couple of sure-fire methods to create massive traffic for your online business.
Free Traffic
For those on a shoestring budget, free traffic is definitely the way to go.
Even if you have a steady cash flow, the potential of free traffic sources in bringing you extra visitors shouldn’t be overlooked.
Free traffic is essentially drawing visitors to your site without having to pay for advertising fees.
There are several ways to draw free traffic to your site, such as:
- Article Submission
- Search Engine Optimization
- Link Exchanges
- Ad Swaps
- Offline Traffic Methods
Article submission basically involves submitting articles related to your niche topic to high traffic article directories so that people searching for information will find your articles, which leads them to your website through an author’s resource box.
Search engine optimization is the art of getting your page to the top of Google or Yahoo’s search engine by targeting high search volume “keyword phrases”.
Link exchanges is the exchanging of links between your site and other people’s websites so that visitors from the other site will visit yours and vice versa.
Ad swaps basically entails mutual promotion of 2 partners websites through email marketing or blog posts. When used correctly, can hugely benefit both parties.
Offline traffic methods deal with promoting one’s website through offline methods such as banners, flyers, direct response marketing and name cards.
In this article, we will look into each of these free traffic methods in more detail.
SEO
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization” which is basically the art of getting your website onto the first page of the search engines such as the big “G” (Google), Bing and Yahoo.
The SEO strategies change from time to time, but there are still many basic SEO techniques for getting your website favoured by Search Engines.
The first of all is in-site optimization. Basically, it involves tweaking your website and blog posts in such a way that its easy for Google “Spiders” to crawl your website and index it so that people can find your website easily.
For example, you should always include keyword phrases into the titles of your blog posts, as this will help you articles get found by people who search for these phrases in the search engines.
Also, it is helpful to include keyword phrases and keywords in the first sentence of the first paragraph and bold or italicize them.
However, exercise caution when using keywords as excessive keywords will come off as “spam” by Google spiders and your website will be punished, so only use it when necessary.
The key is to find a good balance between SEO optimization and user readability. You don’t want to sound like a robot in all your blog posts, as this will turn people off.
Next is backing linking. The more links your website gets from outside authority websites, the higher your page will rank in Google. As a general rule of thumb, it is better to get more quality backlinks (e.g. more reputable websites of similar niches) than many links from smaller websites – A move that is often frowned upon as may be mistaken for “link farming”, which is something that you don’t want your site to be associated with.
You can also link between blog posts within your website to boost SEO points but this does not contribute nearly as much as outsider links.
Recently, a new trend has emerged in SEO, which is social interaction. Which means, people must actively interact on your website, whether if it’s through sharing, tweeting or commenting on your blog posts. Search engines love this and it will greatly boost page ranking for your if you make your website interaction friendly.
Paid Traffic
One of the fastest ways to get traffic is to pay for traffic. If you set yourself a healthy marketing budget, you stand to grow your business exponentially, very quickly.
There are a few paid options for fast traffic. One of the more prominent ones being Google Adwords (www.google.com/adwords)
You’ll have to set up an Adwords account with Google and your website must comply with the stringent guidelines set my Google. Recently, Google has banned many Adwords accounts for not adhering to their guidelines. Ask us for advice if you are unsure.
Facebook advertising is similar to Google Adwords where you can start your own advertising campaign and set your own budget.
Another form of paid advertising is by paying other web masters to advertise your links on banners on their high traffic websites. This usually informs some form of agreement with the Webmaster such as a monthly fee or a one off payment for a permanent link.
The amount for payment on such sites will ultimately depend on how much traffic that website receives and also you’ll have to consider how relevant that website is to yours so that you won’t be paying for unqualified traffic.
Paid traffic can be a fast way to get leads fast at an affordable price and should be considered once you have a solid business sales funnel set up.
Google Adwords
As mentioned earlier, you can leverage on Google’s advertising platform Google Adwords to get your website on the front page of Google almost instantly.
One common form of Google advertising is known as Pay Per Click or PPC. Basically, Google advertises your text ad at the side bar or on top of the searches as a sponsored ad and you pay Google each time someone clicks on your ad.
Clicks range in price depending on the competitiveness of the keyword. The key is to target keywords or phrases with low advertising volume but yet high search volume.
To make things easy, you can use Google’s keyword tool to determine suitable keyword phrases for your advertising campaigns
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Another form of paid advertising is called Pay Per View (PPV) or Pay Per Impression. Basically, you pay the advertiser a fixed fee for a fixed number of eyeballs on your banner ads.
For example, 1 dollar for 1000 views regardless of whether they click on your link or not. This is great if you have a high converting banner ad.
Cool Tip: Not sure how to make good banner ads? Just take a screenshot of your best performing text ad and use it as a banner.
One of the largest Pay Per View networks is Yahoo’s Advertising network:
http://advertising.yahoo.com/products-solutions
You can choose from a wide variety of advertising options that best suit your business.
Social Media Traffic
With the emergence of Social Media sites, which are growing at a phenomenal pace such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest your business stands to benefit a lot from tapping into these platforms.
Social Sites
For example, you could start a Facebook Fan Page for your website. When someone “Likes” your fan page, it appears on their news feed and ALL of his friends will see that he “liked” your page.
From there, perhaps more curious souls would hop into your page and “like” it as well. That way, the news about your business would grow exponentially.
Not only that, your Facebook fan page or Twitter Page can serve to provide tons of useful information to your target audience. This will get people interacting and more and more people will join the conversation.
You could also hold contents on your social media pages and reward people with gifts for participating. These activities build hype and generate interest among followers and often get the news about your business out further.
Not to be overlooked also is social sharing websites such as Digg.com and Reddit.com. These sites allow people to “social bookmark” websites of interest and their friends can see what stuff they are interested in and get more eyeballs for your business.
Last but not least, Facebook also offers a highly targeted advertising platform for you to advertise your business to get more leads for yourself.
Choosing What Works Best For Your Business
The best way for success in traffic generation is by eliminating what fails to work and trying new stuff to see what really works.
Once you have found what works best for your business, replicate and multiply your efforts and in no time you’ve built yourself a solid business empire streaming with thousands of followers.
We know that many small business owners don’t have the time to run their bricks and mortar business and their online campaigns. It is a huge learning curve and requites lots of hours and practice to get it right.
If that sounds like you, contact us today as we can create custom marketing campaigns that is guaranteed to bring lots of new customers to your website. Find out what we can do for your business by contacting us today.
