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What if you threw
a party and no one
came?
Simply uploading a site on the
web will not bring you visitors. The often
quoted saying from the Field of Dreams - "If
you build it they will come" - is a myth, a
fantasy. Increased web traffic comes from web
site promotion. So Advertise.
No one will come until they are invited and
no one will stay unless they feel welcome and
are having fun. To complete the experience they
should also go away with the equivalent of
a party bag of lollies! With your address
on it.
Increased web
traffic
Increased web traffic is the
difference between the success and failure of
your web site. There are so many ways to
achieve this but each one requires
time. If you think of the web as a city, and
your site as a country inn, then
imagine the network of roads that enable
people to travel from city to country, and you
start to understand.
Web site
promotion is the building of roads and the
erecting of signposts, so that traffic can
easily follow a sign posted road to your site.
You can't help but build your web site in the
field of dreams, but if you want them to come,
you must also budget time or money for web site
promotion.
Using only one
set of web traffic tools to build your roads
and signposts is like tacking a cardboard sign
on the electricity pole on the corner of the
one lane leading from a
single suburb to the inn.
You
will far more likely need several web
traffic tools to open multiple ways
for visitors to reach you. Each road you build
will bring a different stream of traffic and
for a varying amount of time. There is little
advantage to sign posting and building a road
for traffic that is unlikely to
want to stay at the inn. So you need to work
out who will want what you offer and target
your web site promotion to those
people.
Web Site
Promotion
The fastest roads are the freeways and they
are already built for you but you need to pay a
toll to use them. These are the pay per click
search engines. Their network is complex and
far reaching and the best way to get
fast and extremely targeted traffic.
Google is by far the largest network of these
and we have a complete section dedicated to the
use of Google Adwords to get
traffic.
People don't need to be a good driver
to use Google. If you set up Adwords well, your
targeted customers will easily find you. But
you need to be a great navigator to plot the
paths to your site and craete maps for your
customers to each feature.
Web site promotion with Adwords is as
complex (for you) as navigating from a city to
a country area is, without a map. You
need to be like a GPS system for your
clients, discovering the keywords they use and
then setting ads to specific pages like short
commands to "take the second turn at the
roundabout" to get to the page where you want
them to go and where they will find what
they want. Don't expect your customers to want
to wander around your site sight seeing, they
don't have time.
Creating these four line ads is an art form
and making sure that people find what they
are looking for is important, so you don't
pay to send people to the wrong place. If you
do this well Google Adwords rewards you with a
cheaper 'toll rate' and your customers reward
you with sales. Do it poorly and you pay a high
cost for advertising and people turn round and
leave immediately, not even stopping to
buy a cup of coffee!
Web Traffic
Tools
The toll ways of the search engines are only
one way to get traffic though. For every
highway there is a byway and there are
also freeways. Search engine optimization is
perhaps the best free way to increase site
traffic because it uses the network of roads
that Google and other pay per click search
engines have already built. You just need
to build entry roads or openings on to
these free ways. Use the lower competition
keywords that bypass the big competitors (like
McDonalds) and find the people looking for
Devonshire teas and bed and breakfast.
This sounds harder than is, with good
keyword research and some page formatting and
just a few external links, you can easily start
to build your entry points and a GPS system
using the free ways of search engines.
Other web traffic tools include email
marketing, article marketing, blog marketing,
video marketing, viral marketing, podcasting,
traffic exchanges, classifieds,
networking and social marketing.
Most of these are relatively free from
upfront costs but may well take their toll in
different ways. They take a lot more time to
implement and also take longer to pay
off with increased site traffic.
However some of these signposts remain long
after the fast traffic methods have exhausted
the budget. SEO is an especially great
long term traffic strategy.
Web site promotion is an essential part of
online marketing to get increased site traffic.
The articles on this site introduce you to the
variety of web traffic tools you can use to
build the road network and sign posts that will
bring targeted traffic to your site.
Web Site
Advertising
Of course in the offline world they
call promotion advertising. We think of
advertising in terms of pictures, stories and
branding. Offline advertising is rarely able to
reap the benefit of targeting a specific
audience. A TV or radio advertisement pays to
advertise to thousands or even
millions of people hoping that sheer
numbers will be enough to sway a few people to
divert time from their busy lives to visit and
buy their products. For all their market
research and demographics they are still
limited by the medium. Online advertising is
far easier to target.
Web site advertising approaches promotion
differently. Through search, it targets a small
group of people who are actively searching for
information on the topic. Against that they are
competing against pages from millions of
websites who also need traffic and the need to
be on the first pages of search results in
order to gain attention.
High Traffic
Sites
If this cannot be accomplished for your own
site, then advertising on those sites that can
is a good second option. Seeking the highly
trafficked sites in order to place your
'signpost' there, is also a way to specifically
target clients. If your link is displayed on
another web site displaying information that
the client wants, there's a good chance that
someone will click the link to get to your
site. For this reason video marketing is very
effective, as search engines rank video sites
high.
Article sites, sites where people ask
questions, popular blogs and sites where people
discuss things such as forums are all
great places to erect a 'signpost' or a link to
your site.
But how do you get your links out there?
That's what this site is about. Getting those
links out to places where people can see them.
Whether through Adwords or other ppc search
engines, through natural search engine results
pages or through high traffic sites, web
site promotion is an ongoing task that should
be taken as seriously as creating a fun and
memorable site to visit.
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