Getting Clients To Your Website
No matter how pretty your website, it isn’t worth much if no one ever sees it. That’s why the study of attracting Internet Traffic is so important.
There are 6 basic ways to drive traffic to your website.
1) Search Engines
Search Engines exist in order to match people searching for content with the content they are searching for. In that effort, it’s the search engine that makes the determination of which websites are relevant to your search. Improving your website so that it ranks highly for certain key words is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
2) Pay Per Click
Several popular (and many more unpopular) search engines will also sell advertising space on their search results page. Typically, they sell this space on a “per click” basis. The main advantage to this type of marketing is that YOU get to determine which keywords are relevant to your website. If you’re not at all familiar with Pay Per Click, then the AskAboutAdwords program would be a great place for you to start. Those who really want to learn more about Adwords can’t do much better than examining Perry Marshall’s materials. Perry is my Adwords mentor, and I’ve learned a lot from him. But, if you are looking for some specific Pay Per Click services, learn more about our Autopilot Management service, our Copilot Coaching service, or our new BusinessClass Marketing Mastermind group.
3) Affiliate and JV Marketing
One of the most important methods of driving traffic is through Affiliate Marketing. Essentially, the website owner pays a sales commission to his affiliates, or sales people. In an effective affiliate marketing campaign, everything is automated so that computers do all the work of tracking leads, recording sales, and reporting results. JV Marketing basically follows the same model as affiliate marketing, but the relationship between the two parties is much closer. Typical affiliate commission rates are one fourth to two thirds of a sale for information products (ebooks, teleseminars, etc) and 5% to 10% for labor intensive or physical product sales.
4) Link Generation
Another very powerful method of marketing involves all those techniques which result in links back to your website being published throughout the web. You can accomplish this by publishing articles on topics relevant to your website (bylines would include your website address), link exchanges (you trade links on your website for links on someone else’s website), and link sales (an outright payment to have your link placed on someone else’s site).
5) Banner and Text Link Advertising
While Pay Per Click marketing is purchased on a per-click basis. there is still a large and growing world of banner and paid link advertising. You usually pay for having your ad displayed on a website for a specific amount of time (days, weeks, months) or for a specific number of impressions (an impression is a single display of your advertisement). One of the simplest and fastest ways to get started with Banner and Text Link advertising is with AdBrite, a company with over 10,000 websites in their network. Take a look through their directory to see what I mean.
6) Feeder websites
This may sound a bit unconventional, but building additional websites to drive traffic to your money-making website is a fantastic way to get new business. Of course, then you have to worry about generating traffic for these feeder websites, and so it may seem like a bit of a pyramid scheme. Well, it’s not, and here’s why: Some great traffic generation methods have the potential to drive traffic away once it arrives. If you use these methods on your primary website, you’ll be sending buyers away. But if you use these methods on your feeder websites, and you get PAID when traffic leaves and goes elsewhere, the advantage of building feeder websites becomes more clear. There are thousands of people making tens of thousands of dollars a month using Google Adsense. (When you make over $10k, Google even sends your check by Fedex. Take a look here to see a $25k payday and the package it came in.) Whether you see yourself making money on Adsense or not, these Adsense Secrets are worth a look.
There are other ways to drive traffic as well. Whatever you do, don’t stop seeking them out and make sure you measure the traffic and performance of each and every one of them. Learn more about measurement and testing on the Improve pages.
–Mark