If a site goes up on the web, but there’s no one there to see it, does it make any money?
Just because you have a stop on the information superhighway, that doesn’t mean the right people will visit it. Just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come. You need to get traffic to your website. And not just any traffic, but the right traffic.
There are myriad people who will try to sell you the latest fool-proof traffic technique, because traffic is a key element of a website strategy. Unfortunately, most of these traffic techniques don’t work. Or at least they aren’t magic bullets. There are no magic bullets. If you buy into Dr. Terminus’s cool new website traffic program, it won’t magically send you all the right customers and turn you into a millionaire overnight. Yes, I’m sure Dr. Terminus is making a bundle. As Perry Marshall recently warned, “In the ’make money on the Internet’ category… a sucker is born every six seconds.” But you don’t have to be one of them.
The cold, hard truth is that building traffic is hard. And it can be expensive. Don’t let anyone fool you! Getting traffic to your website takes time, it takes money, it takes effort, and it takes smarts. But it’s a necessary part of any business website. Because without traffic, no one will discover what you have to offer, and so no one will buy your product or service.
So how do you build traffic to your website? I agree with Jim Edwards, co-author of Turn Words Into Traffic and Niche Advertising Secrets, and one of the good guys. There are basically 3 ways to get the right traffic to your website.
The quickest way to get visitors to come to your site is with advertising. And the quickest way to get started in on-line advertising is to use Google AdWords. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also the quickest way to give Google a lot of money.
Using Google AdWords is usually the first thing you want to use to drive traffic to your website. Because with AdWords, you can find people who are interested in exactly what you have to offer. [block:block=4] You do this by bidding on the words that your customers are typing into Google Search. You’ll also want to choose “negative” keywords that exclude users who are not interested in your offering.
Then you test your ads and keywords to find out which ones are working and which ones aren’t. If you set it up right, AdWords will tell you exactly how much each new customer costs, and exactly which ads and keywords are the most cost-effective.
But that’s not the best part about AdWords. The best part is that you can get this data almost in real time. Therefore, you can adjust your keywords and ads quickly. And by so doing, you can learn what words and ideas your customers respond to, before your competitors discover this. This is valuable knowledge you can use in other marketing channels. AdWords lets you do this faster and more inexpensively than any other system available today. Used well, AdWords is the fastest, most effective way to get high-quality leads and information, wicked cheap. The power of AdWords is that with 5 dollars and 10 minutes, you can have your own ad being shown to millions of people.
And the danger of AdWords is that with 5 dollars and 10 minutes, you can have your own ad being shown to millions of people. Used poorly, AdWords is the fastest, most effective way to give lots of money to Google. Please don’t do that. There are enough horror stories of someone opening an AdWords account, naively setting up an ad campaign, forgetting about it, and ending up with a $5000 charge at the end of the month and not one sale. Instead of doing that:
Borrowing traffic is one of the most effective ways to get free traffic to your website. It is part of the great power of Web 2.0. Borrowing traffic is the PR of the web. Just as PR gets you attention from people who already have attention, borrowing gets you traffic from someone else who already has traffic.
For example, you are borrowing traffic when:
Of these, getting recommendations from others is the most powerful. Because people will listen to an honest recommendation from a reputable third party. They are much more skeptical of an advertisement or press release.
I didn’t mention it in the above list. But if you have a blog, there’s a way of getting links on other blogs. It’s called a trackback. Not all blogs support trackbacks, but when you link to a blog that does, it’s a great way to get links. Here’s how they work. You publish a blog post that talks about a post on someone else’s blog and links to that post. Using your blog software, you “trackback” to his blog post. (WordPress even does this for you automatically.) Then on the same page as his blog post, a link appears to your blog post, usually with an excerpt of what you wrote.
This trackback link does several cool things for your website. It establishes a relationship with the other blogger, because it helps build up his website. This reflects well on you. It’s also better than leaving a comment on his blog, because readers tend to respect trackbacks more than comments. Linking to someone else’s blog also increases both blogs’ search-engine ranking, making it more likely that new people will find your blog posts.
Another way to borrow traffic is to show everyone you’re an expert in your niche. Since you ran your AdWords campaign well, you know what your customers care about, what they worry about, what keeps them up nights. So you can write articles about these subjects, and use these articles to generate traffic. I can’t go into this subject in depth here, because it’s too deep. But Turn Words Into Traffic, by Jim Edwards and Dallas Edwards, is a step-by-step guide that covers how to write high-impact articles that get attention, and how to get your articles published in e-zines, on websites, in article indexes, and more. Also check out the Turn Words Into Traffic electronic version, which you can download immediately, and which comes with several bonuses and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Lester Wunderman wrote, “Manufacturers, distributors and retailers, in fact all who advertise, are beginning to recognize that they must focus increasingly on making customers rather than just making sales.”
This is the essence of building your own web traffic. It’s the same as building your business. Getting repeat web visitors is the same, in concept, as getting repeat customers.
There are several methods you can use to build repeat traffic to your website. With each of these methods, to get the most out of it, you need to provide value to your visitors. A customer who feels they got a good deal from your business is more likely to buy again. And a visitor who feels they found valuable information at your website is more likely to return. And you use web copy to convert visitors into subscribers, as you might say “Come again!” to a happy customer.
All successful business owners understand this. Ironically, when it comes to the web, many become afraid to do the same thing online. When a prospect walks into their store, they’ll gladly give any advice he needs to make a purchase decision. But when a prospect comes to their website, they don’t want to tell them anything, because they fear the prospect will find out everything he needs to know and won’t take the next step towards a purchase decision.
The opposite is actually true. If you give a prospect valuable information that he can act on immediately, he can then trust you to deliver more value in the future. He’ll be more likely to come back to your website. And he’ll be more likely to buy from you. The first rule of the web is this: When someone visits your site, they’re looking for information. The best thing you can do is to give them exactly what they want… And then offer them even more. Good content brings visitors in, gets them to bring their friends, and gets them to come back.
So how do you actually implement this strategy? One method, becoming ever more popular, is to use a blog, because a blog allows visitors to subscribe to the blog’s feed. And they can even comment on your blog posts, which not only gives you valuable feedback but also encourages visitors to return to read the comments. A blog doesn’t just talk to your customers. A blog opens a dialogue with them. It builds relationships. And as a bonus, you’ll eventually get extra traffic and subscribers that you didn’t even know existed, because search engines love blogs.
But for even better results, you can use opt-in email lists. Use can use email instead of a blog, or to supplement a blog.
Never use spam lists. Always get explicit permission from people to send them email. Just as you keep a customer list of people who have bought from you, keep an email list of people who ask you to email them content. And then send them valuable content. Offer them a free report or white paper. Let them sign up for your weekly “tips” email or free e-newsletter. Or offer a course or informational series by email.
The way to send these emails is with an autoresponder. What I’m talking about is much more powerful than the simple “autoresponder” email feature you get through your hosting provider. That simple feature will allow someone to send email to, for example, info@mydomain.com, and the computer will automatically send them back an informational email. What I mean by “autoresponder” is a service that:
I use AWeber Communications, the leading email autoresponder service, for all my email lists, because they offer these advantages.