Thursday, July 31, 2008

Traffic Generation Techniques

By Eddie Watkins


The importance of traffic cannot be overemphasized, and traffic generation techniques are of extreme importance to the future of your online business. Why? Because without visitors you might as well have no website at all.

The whole purpose of a website is to get visitors. You can equate a website with a store in a shopping mall. No matter what you are offering: vitamins, ebooks, software, information or just advice, without anybody walking into your store, you might as well close shop. The mall is your environment, as the World Wide Web is the environment of your website. You have to advertise your offline store as you must your online website, and traffic is your life blood, as shoppers are to an offline store.

If you are not receiving website traffic, your online business will not succeed, as the shoe store without customers would have to close down. So how do you go about getting the traffic, that is the life blood of your online business? We will look at four different ways of obtaining the traffic that you need to your website.

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

There isn't enough room here to discuss all of these, and you will likely be familiar with many of the more conventional traffic generation techniques, so let's have a look at one or two of the less well known methods within each of these categories that can be used to attract website traffic to your site.

Search Engines

SEO and search engines are not the same thing. There is a lot of studying and reading in order to use SEO on your website. But with search engine you can benifit while receiving traffic your website, with less aggravation.

Smart pages is one technique that is used. Smart pages are created using keywords that people use in order to get information on the web. You create as many of these pages as you can using different keywords. Your visitors never see these pages, even though the spider can find these smart pages when they search the web. There is software that you can purchase to create these pages so you won't end up with duplicate webpages.

The way that the smart pages work is when a person is searching for a certain keyword phrase, using any one of the many search engines. Your web page has usually already been indexed for that certain keyword. So wouldn't you think that the person would be directed to your indexed web page. That not so. They would be directed to the page that the software has been programmed to send them to. A person can set up as many of these smart pages as they deem neccesary, and the visitor that does the search will be sent to the page that the software is set to send them to.

If you have certain information on your web site pertaining to certain keywords you can use this among other techniques to get the search engines to send visitors to your webpages.

Advertising Online

When advertising online there are a few option that a person can take advantage of. If you have a Facebook page, you can get free links from it. You can also get free links from your post that you put on Twitter. In my opinion the best priced pay-per-click option that you have is to go with Searchfeed. Searchfeed charges 1 cent for pay-per-click advertising, and that is a great deal compared to Adwords.

Classified Advertising

When advertising any product, any traffic that you can drum up is good traffic. Go to your local free newspaper, put an ad in it advertising your website URL. This has been proven to be a great technique for getting traffic to ones site. Sending out flyers through to mail, you can purchase mailing list on peel and stick labels of people that are interested in online business opportunities. Post cards are a great source of visitors to your website. Sometimes we forget that advertsing offline can be just as rewarding as advertsing online.

Buzz Advertising

Whether you know it or not, people are out there looking for your products. Talk about your website to everyone, to your relatives, your friends and family. You have to place yourself in front of your potential customers. Send out flyers, mail postcards, place an ad in your local newspaper advertising your products. People are always looking for a product that is going to solve a certain problem that they have, or an easier way to do a certain thing, and this is your opportunity to feel that void. Get the word out.

One thing that is for sure, is that you will always need traffic to your website. You will have to find what works for you. If you have not tried some of the ways mentioned in this article, you might be missing something who knows.

Visitors to your website is of the utmost importance and the traffic generation techniques that you choose, means that your business lives or dies. Without traffic your online success will be very limited.

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