Copywriting Tips And Tricks

Secrets Of Boosting Website Traffic, Part 2

Posted on January 6th, 2008 by Ray Edwards

In this second part we look at other ways to drive traffic to your website that are targeted and ready to purchase your product or service. Although all these strategies are not free many are and can be very effective when used consistently.

1. Use Solo Ezine Ads. Solo Ezine ads remain one of the most low-cost but effective means of advertising on the Internet. A solo ad is sent out by itself to the entire Ezine database and therefore gets good exposure compared to a classified ad.

You can simply do a SE query for Ezines in your market segment that offers solo advertising. You can also check out a site such as http://www.litsz.com for a number of widely read Ezines. With over 300,000 Ezines published online you should have little trouble finding advertisement space.

2. Buying Leads. Buying leads or mailing list is traditionally associated with Network Marketing and the direct mail industry. However, this is not so anymore. Many Ezine publishers are now buying subscribers from so called “co-registration” companies that send you subscribers at a price.

This is also known as “pay-per-lead” or “pay-per-subscriber” services and they offer a guaranteed way to build your optin list for a very reasonable fee. You can then market to these leads and offer your affiliate program to them. A few such companies are leadfactory.com, hiplists.com and worldlist.com.

3. Offer low-ticket items at auction sites. It’s no secret that auction sites such as ebay.com receive a ton of traffic. If you offer cheap products you can build your customer list very quickly. You can then offer back-end products to increase your return-on-investment.

At least this is one case of “If the mountain cannot come to Mohammed then Mohammed will go to the mountain” Go to where the traffic is and the traffic may follow you!

4. Run off-line ads. Many of the companies that do very well on the Internet are those companies that already had an off-line presence. They had their branding done before they entered the dotcom world.

It is very easy to forget newspaper classifieds and magazine ads when marketing on the Internet. You can use a car decal with your website address and tagline for example to lead visitors to your site.

5. Run an affiliate program. Once you’ve set up a website and a product that sells well you can organize an affiliate program with a generous commission structure. Those who sign up for the program will have to send traffic to your website to get sales. You can then invite those new customers to also become your affiliates and the viral effect takes it from there. This is really a marketers dream come true because you may have to do little promotion yourself.

6. Provide a Press Release. Do you think that you have a website or service that the world should know about? Then maybe they can know about this. You can pay a company such as pressreleasenetwork.com to do a press release for you. You can never tell which online and off-line news network will pick up your story and give you that shot in the arm that you are looking for.

If you need help in the writing of your press releases you may check a service such as ereleases.com.

7. Use Google Adwords. Google Adwords are what feeds the ads that show up to the left as ‘sponsored links’ on Google’s search results. This is a type of PPC search engine except that you pay only after your ad is clicked instead of making a deposit. You are able to set your budget-how much you are willing to spend per day-so you can keep your spending in check.

The same tips as applied to normal PPC will apply here, except that your position or ranking depends on more than the amount of your bid for the keyword. You also have to indicate if you are an affiliate in the ad text itself.

If your ads are not getting a set minimum click thru rate (CTR) then your ad can be dropped from the listing. Some marketers will click on their own ads to avoid them dropping from the listing.

8. Perform a linking exchange campaign with other webmaster to get incoming link to your website. The number of incoming links from pages with high ranking can boost your own page ranking in SE like Google. Determine your present linking popularity by using http://www.linkpopularity.com and then contact other webmasters to ask for a link exchange.

9. Use the social network sites such as YouTube and MySpace. This is a more indirect way of getting traffic as you’ll not want to directly advertise your business but provide entertaining nuggets of information that would lead interested viewers and readers to come to your website to get more of you. The type of videos that work best on these sites are short (less than 10 minutes) and very entertaining. So you’ll want to inject some personality in these traffic generators.

10. Give away free ebooks and reports seeded with your website links and make them viral by providing an incentive for other webmasters to distribute them from their websites or give away as bonuses.

Traffic generation is becoming more and more competitive and expensive but at the same time those who make a consistent effort to generate traffic will be the ultimate winners in the online marketing game.