- 11 Dec 2008
Traffic Traffic Traffic is the internet’s equilivent to Location Location Location, and is the name of the game, and without it, you have nothing. It doesn’t matter what you are promoting…Make Money, Memberships, your MySpace, your ebay, whatever…if you don’t have traffic, you won’t be successful. You will not even be able to give FREE stuff away without traffic.
Bookmark this page and refer back to it frequently.
How to get Traffic?
You Have Many Options!
- Your Website
- Email Advertising
- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
- Traffic Exchanges
- Free Classifieds
- Free For Alls (FFAs)
- Blogs
- Articles
- E-Zines
- Search Engines
- Social Bookmarking
That’s a lot to choose from, so which one(s) should you use, which methods get better results? Well, they all work, and it is true that some work better than others. Until you get regular, automatic traffic…you should be using all of them. Using all of them is quite time consuming, but there are ways to be efficient.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Most internet traffic starts with KEYWORDS! Keep that in mind...keywords are to traffic traffic traffic as signs are to location location location.
Your Website
Starting with your website, if you don’t have one…get one. All of your efforts should be centralized around branding your business name(your .com name). That means having your own site(eg. thesellerdoor.com).
Setup your email addresses at that site and use them(mine is ricky@thesellerdoor.com).
Select a good hosting site that will allow you to easily modify your website. We are using Lunarpages for TheSellerDoor.com, and it has been working well for us.
Since we first regestired the site a month or so ago, I have been able to add a few useful things:
a wordpress blog, an auto-responder, a SafeList at dormouse.thesellerdoor.com (That is making use of a subdomain. I did that to associate it instantly with thesellerdoor.com. That way users of our SafeList would automatically know of thesellerdoor.com).
The point here is I didn’t have any problems with the hosting service, and building out the website was pretty easy.
Having a website that changes regularly is a really good thing to the search engines. A frequently changing site does better than one that rarely ever changes. So keep updating your website, keep putting new stuff on it. Add a list of something useful; for some reason people seem to bookmark lists more than other parts of a website.
Here is a list you should bookmark. We are updating this list almost daily.
TheSellerDoor Resource Lists
Your website is your main attraction, so make it good, and keep it good. People will bookmark your site and come back.
See: Getting Traffic and Keeping It
and
See: Web Designing 9 Helpful Tips
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Email Advertising
Email Advertising is one of the best ways to bring in new customers or site visitors. Follow the code of conduct for advertising by email, and it will be a tremendous benefit to you for as long as you want. See: Email Advertising – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly …and Don’t Spam! USE SAFELISTS. You will save yourself a big headach.
Here is a List of FREE SafeLists
Just because you can send to a given list many times a day, does not mean you should…use some discretion. You don’t want your readers to be turned off by the fact that they have 10 messages in a row all from you. Send only one email message a day, or at most two, to any given list.
And remember to write good ads! See: 10 Steps to Writing Traffic Generating Ads
Your final ads don’t have to be as long, just try to cover all the steps.
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Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is where you create a simple 1-3 line ad and then you pay a click fee everytime someone clicks on your ad. The amount you have to pay varies.
What you do is bid on keywords, and if your bid is a winner you get an ad placement. Lots of different things effect the final bid amount you will pay. For example, if you create an ad that has the keyword ‘free advertising’ and you set the bid on that keyword to 35 cents, if a lot of others are bidding 1 dollar for that keyword, your ad will not be placed. If it is placed, it is ranked 2-3 pages out. In other words, your ad will go towards the bottom with the other low bidders.
If there is not a lot of competition for the keywords you choose, then your ad will get top placement at a lower click cost.
It’s all about keywords, which ones cost and which ones are cheaper. Which ones are competitive and which ones have not been exploited. If the cost is of no concern…you can use this to instantly get thousands of visitors to your site – literally in a few hours.
One of the greatest things about this type of advertising is that once you set up your campaigns, they run 24 and 7…unlike email advertising that requires a little more interaction on your part.
PPC ads are one of the best ways to guarantee you will get traffic…it will just be a matter of how much it will cost you. I have a few tips here to help you reduce the cost.
See: Pay Per Click – Tips to Keeping Costs Low
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Traffic Exchanges
Traffic Exchanges are sites where you get credits for viewing other websites. You can then use your credits to get views to your website. This is a very time consuming way to get traffic. You literally have to spend hours to gain enough credits to even make a dent. The goal here is to only surf about 1 hour a day, and surf 5-10, no more, no less. Less than 5 and you will be waiting for the timers to expire. More than 10 and your efforts will be spread too thin.
Use a tabbed browser like FireFox and set it up so that all your Traffic Exchanges come up in tabs. Then you can use the ctrl+tab to go from one tab to the next, and then click on the image required. Do this for about an hour a day.
Try to promote your traffic exchange’s referral links so that you will acquire a downline. Having a downline in these traffic exchange programs is great, because others will be surfing and you will get credits for their surfing efforts. You then would not have to surf nearly as much.
Free Classifieds
Have you seen this ad…
I’m answering the ad you posted the other day. If you’d like to speak with me about this reply, I can be contacted at the number below. I am really looking forward to our chat.
I know you’re very busy, but there is something you need to know about your ad and it’s very important. See, I used to post these same ads a while ago myself. I did it for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. I did it for 5 months straight. Believe it or not, I didn’t make one DIME from those ads. Trust me, you won’t either. Nobody sees them.
I have received that ad so many times, and every time I see it I think…don’t they ever get tired of using that same ad? I do get tired of seeing it, and have learned to quickly identify it and hit delete.
They use that tactic to imply that free classified ads don’t work. My suggestion to this form of advertising is…use free classifieds, but don’t just use free classifieds. If it is your only way of advertising, then you probably won’t go very far very fast. That said, I have received sales, and signups by using free classifieds…so they do work just not as good as email marketing or PPC.
I have a list of 11 that I submit to about once a week, and it takes about 20-30 minutes. So for the small amount of time it takes…it is worth it.
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Free For Alls (FFAs)
FFAs have been around for quite a while and are still in abundance. That alone tells me that people still use them, and still want them. I think that they may be loosing their significance to social bookmarking sites(which to me is FFA with a twist).
The term FFA is somewhat an illusion or mixed up with other concepts in internet marketing. Concepts like safelists, banner exchanges, link exchanges, etc…
What I mean is that sometimes a safelist site is calling itself an FFA. That is OK since Free For All can be applied to any site that offers it’s services for free, or has, at least, a set of free services intermingled with a set of paid services.
For this writing the term FFA will apply to mostly link exchanges, since that is how they started out.
When you are first starting out, I recommend that you pick out a few of these sites, and put your link out there. Let’s face it, until your site naturally gets top Google ranking, you will need all the linking to your site you can get. If you only get a few hits from this, that is OK. You’re just beginning and the more the merrier.
This approach to advertising is not much different than the classified ads approach. Again, just don’t spend your entire day doing this. If it only takes a short while…do it.
One last thing to say about this form of online advertising. If it is within your power to create one of these FFA sites, then, by all means, do it. There are tons of free FFA resources out there, and many are very easy to set up. You can easily register a new domain and setup the website, then install the FFA script(which really isn’t much), and you are on your way to selling the shovel. I can help you set that up if you like…for a fee of course!
FFA’s are really the greatest benefit to it’s owner. The owner gets to send ads to all members of the FFA.
See: FFAs, Useful or Waste of Time?
Blogs
The wave of the future…or is it the wave of the now. Now I think! Write a blog or three. Keep them updated regularly(daily if you can). For every blog that you write…put your name at the bottom and your company URL below it. People will click over to check out your business. Be careful to abide by the rules of the blog site. An Example…WordPress.com will not allow you to advertise on their .com site, but they do provide a wordpress component that you can install on your website. Then you can advertise all you want!
IMPORTANT NOTE: Don't get discouraged. You will find that when working with companies other than your own that they have rules. Most of us don't read the rules until we get in trouble for breaking one of them. When we do...we are quick to start dogging the company. Wordpress will take down your blog if you advertise your business, and that is their right and their rule. There are ways around it, so don't stress on it. Don't give them the power to upset you. The less you have to rely on other companies to market your business, the better off you will be. And you can do much more with your own website, and your efforts will be focused on your domain name not theirs.
Articles
Article advertising is a lot like blogging with a few subtle differences. Blog is short for web log, and a log is a cronoligical set of events. An article on the other hand is an attempt to relay specific information on a single topic, or to solve a problem of some kind.
Using Articles as a means for advertising is a great way to establish your business. You can write many helpful articles about your business and related topics, and you will generate continuous traffic that you won’t have to spend any further time on. It is simply there living on the internet, and that is a goldmine. Like the blogs, at the bottom of your article put your link to your business, and your name. The more informative information you write, the more you brand yourself and your business as an authority in that area.
TIP: After you write your article, submit to 50-100 article posting sites. There is a tool called Article Submitter that greatly reduces the amount of time to do this by eliminating 90% of the cut and paste effort and steps you through 100+ article sites. I only submit to about 50, but you can choose more. It's up to you.
Here is a link to the Article Submitter!
The more Articles you publish, the more residual, self-sustaining, traffic you create.
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E-Zines (Solo-Ads)
E-Zines are good for sending solo-ads. Use them but only send to the E-Zines with the largest subscriber base. The cost of sending varies greatly depending on popularity, subscriber base, and how many times they will run your ad.
The click through rate is better with solo ads in e-zines than it is with regular email because the subscribers asked specifically for information from the e-zine. It automatically makes anything coming from that company more important to the subscriber.
Search Engines
Search Engine Advertising is best described as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’m sure you have at least seen SEO or heard about it. The short of it is this, search engines have a very specific way of looking at your site, and grading it. What you have to do is to make your site search engine friendly, and if you do, you get better rankings when people search for the terms you supply. Better rankings means more clicks. The goal is to get #1 on Google or Yahoo. If you get to that you are doing really good. That will generate tons of traffic for your business.
There is a lot to cover where SEO is concerned. There is also a ton of information on the internet about SEO. Make it a point to read up on it as much as possible to fully understand what you have to do to your website in order to climb the rank ladder to the #1 position. Even if you don’t get to #1 right away, try to get on page 1 or 2. That is pretty good and will be just as rewarding…at least where traffic is concerned.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is roughly the equilivent to link-exchanges. They differ in that you don’t have to put their link on your site, so it becomes a one way link to your website, and that is good according to the search engines. Some of them also want you to enter your thoughts about the link you are submitting, so as to, describe what you have found.
Every time you write a new article or create a new webpage with content…submit that link to the social bookmarking sites. Your search engine rankings will soar, literally within hours.
The search engines seem to favor these sites at least a couple that I know of for sure…such as Digg and Propeller. They get favored by Google I think.
Thanks for reading my article, and please leave comments!
***Check out all our resources at TheSellerDoor.com! ***
Rick Brown
TheSellerDoor.com
- Tags: Article, Article Submitter, articles, blogs, concepts in internet marketing, e-zines, email advertising, email marketing, ffa, ffas, free classifieds, free for alls, Make Money, pay per click, ppc, search engines, social bookmarking, solo ad, solo ads, traffic, traffic exchanges, traffic traffic, traffic traffic traffic, Wordpress
- Category: Business, Make Money, Marketing and Advertising, traffic