Need to attract visitors to your website? Check out this short guide on driving traffic and generating customers online.
Good
Traffic vs. Bad Traffic
No matter what kind of online business you are conducting, in order for your site to be profitable you need traffic. But traffic can be good and bad. Good traffic is visitors:
- with a genuine interest on what you are offering
- who spend time looking at your site and really consider buying what you offer
- who are likely to buy your product or service, now or in the near future
- who give you their email addresses or other contact information
In contrast to these valuable visitors are those who enter your site by accident while searching for something else. These people, since they eventually leave without doing anything on your site, constitute bad traffic.
While good traffic is the basis of your business’ success, bad traffic just consumes server bandwidth. For this reason it is essential that you attract good, highly-targeted traffic to your site. Fortunately, there are many ways of doing this for little or no extra investment.
Paid Search Marketing
Paid search, also called Pay per click (PPC) advertising, consists of buying advertising space in search engines. They charge you for every click a user makes on your ad. More than that, your advertisements appears among the top results for keywords you've specified, allowing you to target people who are already interested in what you have to offer. If you are a real estate agent, for example, your ads might come up when people type in 'real estate' or 'homes for sale.'
Perhaps the most widely known pay-per-click advertising program is Google Adwords, although other search engine providers offer similar services. Yahoo! has its own Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN offers Microsoft Adcenter.
If you would like to find out more about pay-per-click paid search marketing, take a look at Managing a Responsible Pay-Per-Click Campaign and What is Pay-per-Click. You can also search for the term “paid search” on any search engine.
Email Marketing
Email is a powerful tool that can bring large volumes of visitors to your site. It needs to be used wisely; abuse from spammers is widespread, so a lot of people delete any email message that comes from an unknown sender without even looking at it.
The trick is to send your marketing emails to people who actually want to receive them. You can build a list of email addresses for this purpose just by asking your visitors to give them to you. There are many ways to encourage them to give you their addresses; try offering them a free eBook, or let them sign up for a regular newsletter.
It is important, however, that you clearly specify that
you’ll be sending them information. If you fail to do this,
any user can report your messages as spam and get your
emails banned from major mail servers. What’s worse, once
you are labelled as a “spammer” it can be difficult to
recover respectability.
There are many services that offer email list management
with spam control and bulk mailing capabilities. One of the
most reputable and popular is
AWeber.
A good alternative is to get a deal with a webmaster that already has an email list. If the emails he sends are related to your business, you can pay him to get your advertisements, marketing messages or references to your site included in his emails. This has two great benefits: you don’t need to set up a mailing list by yourself, and in the case of any email being reported as spam, you won’t be the one responsible for it.
You can learn more about direct email marketing rights and wrongs by reading this article, this article or this one.
Blogging
Blog stands for web log, which is a special type of website chronologically organized and frequently updated, where the Blog owner or administrator writes regularly and where readers can comment on what he has posted.
Blogs cost little or nothing to set up (there are fully featured free services like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com). A Blog is a valuable addition to any web site because it will allow you to post news, product changes and other announcements without modifying your main site. Better yet, members of the global community of blogs (the “blogosphere”) are typically cooperative, placing links to other blogs (like yours) on their own, which increases the number of incoming links and visitors to your site.
While blogs are informal in nature, having a Blog for your business can give your company a professional appearance. It can also be a great channel of communication between you and your customers. They can ask you questions about your products or services, and you can answer those questions and give them advice. In this way a Blog can be a very effective customer support tool.
Blog readers are very loyal, in the sense that if they like what a post says they will come back frequently, and recommend for others to come by too. There is some excellent information on blogging for beginners on the Problogger.net site.
