No matter what you are promoting online,
in order to succeed, you got to get website traffic, and lots of
it...
Whether you are promoting products,
services or affiliate programs, more website traffic means more
income.
This article will share with you the best free and cheap
ways I've learned to get website traffic to my website.
Newbie Note: If you're new at e-commerce, before concentrating your
efforts of getting site traffic, take the time to make sure "what"
you will be promoting will actually sell. If you
plan to market your own products or services, you'll need to
identify a large group of potential buyers first.
If you plan to promote an existing product, service or opportunity
get some real income figures from others already
doing it. Once you've accomplished this, you'll have some solid
figures to shoot for and you can start pouring on the traffic.
Here's what really works for growing lots of site traffic...
1. Give away value with no strings attached
Giving something of value away for free is a great way to attract
website visitors. Thanks to the web, distributing freebies is in
itself, free. You don't have to spend a dime to pass out freebies
left and right. All you need are a few quality freebies.
2. Go "viral" with your freebies
Viral strategies allow you to multiply your marketing efforts
without actually doing more work. Take that example above. You offer
a great freebie like an ebook or tutorial. Now, let others give it
away for free at their site too, as an incentive, bonus or just for
the heck of it. Why not? It adds value to their offering and it
creates more visitors to your site as your freebie spreads.
3. Position your site in the search engines
While you absolutely must add your website URL to
all the major engines, search engine promotion does not stop there.
You need to improve your raking so that your website is not lost
among the millions of sites on the web. Unfortunately, many
webmasters spend FAR too much time on their search engine ranking.
The best strategy in my experience is to optimize all your pages for
good ranking, concentrate on getting links, then let the rest take
care of itself.
4. Use "pay per click" search engines
Google AdWords provides just about everything you could want in pay
per click search advertising. It's quick and easy to set up an
account and you can have your ads up and running in about 5 minutes
from sign-up. There are excellent tutorials to help the new
advertiser, and a number of good tools to assist advertisers to
increase conversions. I suggest you try a few. Here is a useful link
about PPC search Engines
Top 10 PPC Search Engines
5. Advertise in email newsletters
Still a bargain. Have you noticed the larger companies jumping on
the ezine advertising bandwagon? They know the value of a dollar.
For a few thousand bucks they can take out a half-page ad in ONE
magazine offline. For the same price they can advertise in multiple
ezines and reach literally hundreds of thousands of prospects,
faster and cheaper.
6. Publish your own ezine!
An e-newsletter brings customers back to your site on a regular
basis. Every webmaster should offer a way for surfers to sign up for
a regular email notice. It doesn't have to be an ezine, you can send
specials, freebies or even site updates notices. The key is to keep
in touch with the people you manage to get to your site. It's hard
work getting traffic, don't let them leave without offering to stay
in touch!
7. "Rent" Opt-in email lists
Here's a promotion method that works. It can be a bit more costly
than the other methods mentioned here, but it does pull in lots of
website traffic. Just visit www.postmasterdirect.com -- arguably the
net's most prominent opt-in list services provider, and click on
"read some case studies". There you'll see an unsolicited
testimonial from yours truly. Although I don't spend money on opt-in
list rental too often (I'm cheap!) I do use opt-in services when I
need a quick boost in sales.
8. Offer an affiliate program
If the product or service you are promoting is your own, adding an
affiliate program to your site is a great "pay for performance only"
method of increasing website traffic and in turn sales. It's no
wonder that thousands of websites now offer to "share the profits"
with their customers.
9. Write Articles
It still surprises me how many people don't try this. All it takes
is a few hours each week or month to write about what you know and
then have it looked over by someone with editing skills. Then, you
tack on a small footer with your URL and fire it off to a list of
editors who publish material related to what you're marketing. You
then post the articles at your own site with re-publishing
permission for other webmasters.
Article Submission Sites:
www.ideamarketers.com,
web-source.net