Get the Quickest Traffic to Your Website

By Darrel Hawes

If you have a website, you need traffic.

You may be asking: what do you mean by "traffic". I'm glad you asked. Website traffic refers to people checking out your site. Consider the possibility of laying out the investment to build a website, and thousands of dollars later, you have nice-looking site that no one knows about and thereby not earning you money. You may as well put a McDonald's smack-dab in the middle of Death Valley.

There are many ways to get traffic. If you need traffic fast, there are two basic methods you can use.

The first basic fast-traffic method is to borrow the traffic. This may or may not work for your industry, but try and get creative and adapt it to your business because it can be very effective. What is done is to convince another website owner with a list of prospects and customers that would be interested in your product or service, and encourage them to recommend your products or services. In most cases, you will have to give them an affiliate or referral commission in order to encourage the referral.

This method works for at least two reasons. First, someone else has gone to the trouble of identifying people interested in a particular topic, saving you the time and expense of locating the same. Second, you are "borrowing" the credibility of the person who refers people to you. Think about this for a minute. When making a buying decision, whether for a film, restaurant, or clothing store, do you rely more upon traditional advertising or do you prefer to get recommendations from friends and trusted acquaintances? The answer for most is the latter.

The "borrowing traffic" method can generally be performed without upfront cash, though you will have to pay a percentage of sales.

The next fast-traffic method we'll discuss is paid advertising. There are several types of paid advertising, and the very first you should consider is pay-per-click advertising. Google's Adwords program is the easiest to begin with, and eventually you will want to research using Yahoo and MSN as well. Pay-per-click advertising's great benefit is the ability to hone in one certain keywords that people are looking for, and as an added bonus, you can start getting traffic in 10 minutes or less.

Pay-per-click advertising is effective for many reasons. One reason is that you can match exactly what people are searching for. Additionally, pay-per-click advertising can be tracked. As an example, Google can identify which keywords generated the most "clicks" and using their conversion tracker, you can also determine which specific keywords led to a sales conversion.

This method does mean you will pay before making sales, although Google probably won't charge your credit card until the end of the month. As a caution, in the beginning you will want to monitor your Adwords account often to make sure you are not spending more than you intended.

We have only covered two methods of generating traffic to your site. In future articles, we will cover many more.

About the Author:

If you are trying to increase visitors to your website, see Darrel Hawes' site for tips in getting more visitors, plus generating more leads.