Part 15: Traffic – Form an Orderly Line.

If you build a better mousetrap they won’t buy it. They won’t buy it unless they know where to buy it, that is.

Websites are like that. You can build the best darned website on the Internet and it’ll just sit there looking pretty. Nobody will visit. There won’t be a virtual line out of your door. The hungry crowds will not be clamoring to get in. Why? Because they won’t know about it.

On the other hand, you could build a really crap website, filled with junk content that seems to suck visitors in like an online vacuum cleaner.

The difference is that one site knows how to attract traffic and the other doesn’t.

And that, my friend, is what Internet marketing is all about – getting traffic.

In the end, nothing much else matters – if you don’t have eyeballs looking at your web pages, you don’t have zip.

It sounds simple – go tell people about your website. In old-fashioned terms, that’s called advertising. But of course, if it really was that easy, everyone would be doing it and the sad truth is that most people fail at Internet marketing because they never get to grips with the idea that they have to do something to get the traffic.

There are dozens, or perhaps even hundreds of ways to build a stream of traffic. In this installment of this course we’ll look a few that I use – but just be aware that this is by no means a definitive list. There are lots of other methods, and part of the trick is in finding the ones that best suit you (and your potential audience).

1. Search Engine Free Traffic.

We’ve touched on this in the blog building lessons. If you create web pages that the search engines consider to be ‘authority pages’ then they will place them high in the indexes when folks go searching for related keywords. That can bring you anything from a trickle to a flood of well targeted visitors and it won’t cost you a cent. of course, getting your pages recognized by Google as an authority worthy of ranking on page one is no mean feat in itself. Especially if the keyword is a particularly popular one.

The whole process is called search engine optimization (SEO) and is a complex subject that entire books have been written about.

Suffice it to say, you can ignore most of the advice you’ll read and concentrate on a couple of known facts: 1. Search Engines love blogs. 2. It is easier to be ranked highly for lots of less popular keyword phrases than for one massive keyword.

For example, you and I will never get a page one listing on Google for the keyword ‘acne’, yet it is very possible for us to get onto page one for ‘acne treatment in the UK’ or ‘acne treatment Texas’. A well written blog entry targeted to acne treatment in the UK, and surrounded by the kind of related words and phrases that the SEs think make such a page an authority, would stand a very good chance of high listings.

A small amount of free traffic from a multitude of web pages or blog entries is just as good as a lot of traffic from one page. And a whole lot easier to achieve.

2. Search Engine Paid Traffic.

You know about placing Google AdSense on your web pages to make money from them when people click, but here we are talking about the opposite side of AdSense: AdWords. When an advertiser places an ad that will ultimately become an AdSense listing, they are buying an AdWords campaign. Here, you would bid on words and phrases and have you ad displayed when those keywords are entered into the search engines – or when people land on participating websites that are targeted for that word.

You pay ‘per click’. In other words, every time someone clicks on your ad to visit your web page, you pay Google (or whichever PPC network) for the privilege.

If you’ve calculated that for every 100 visitors to your website, 2 will buy something from you, netting you a profit of $30, then you know that you can bid up to 30 cents for each ‘click’ to break even. More realistically, you’d probably bid somewhat less than that to make a profit.

Sometimes an advertiser will pay far more for each click than the break even point because they know that once they’ve found a willing buyer, the lifetime value of that buyer is likely to be much higher.

3. Article writing.

At the current time, articles are in vogue. If you can write a decent article you have several opportunities for creating traffic:

a. The search engines like good articles.

b. Article directories like good articles and reward you by allowing other people to use your work on their websites in exchange for links back to your nominated pages. This can, in itself, be a good traffic generator, but it also builds up the number of backlinks your web pages have. This in turn raises your page’s authority status with the search engines and helps boost your rankings and your free traffic.

4. Viral Stickiness.

Let’s face it, some websites can be very dull. You arrive there and then can’t wait to leave. But every now and again you land on a page that is not only interesting, but it is so interesting that you bookmark it to visit later. Sometimes it is even interesting enough that you want to tell your friends about it.

That’s viral stickiness. And it can be one of the biggest and fastest traffic generators known to man or woman.

You don’t always need clever flash gimmicks to make your sites sticky and make them go viral – a poll can often be enough. Or a free report that folks can download.

A recent trend has been for people to write (or have ghost written) a shortish report on a popular subject that is deliberately controversial. Then they will let it be known that other websites can give the report away free, but will receive a dollar for everyone they refer who downloads it. The dollars can mount up – but the result is that the originator’s site can get a flood of traffic – and have a massive mailing list built for them in no time.

If the report refers people back to the originators web pages, the traffic is recirculated.

You can do much the same with the $7 report method – create a controversial report that everyone wants to read and talk about, set it for sale at a couple of dollars, give everyone who ‘sells’ it 100% of the proceeds, and watch as your site traffic and mailing list swells.

It works.

5. Offline Opportunities.

Some of the most successful people I know online have built their businesses by advertising them offline. There is so little competition!

If you are in a niche market and have built a website you can be proud of, tell your trade magazine about it. Take a classified ad.

We are all so focused on the size of the International online marketplace that we tend to forget that offline there are billions of people who don’t surf the net as much as we do.

When I was a kid, I had an elderly great-uncle called Bob Smith. Old Uncle Bob had a glass eye, a fierce temper, was a died-in-the-wool communist and drank himself into a stupor every day, but he taught me one of the most capitalist poems I know:

He who whispers down a well
About the goods he has to sell
Will never reap the golden dollars
Like the man who stands and hollers.
 
Getting traffic to your web page is the modern-day equivalent of reaping the golden dollars (or should be if you’re doing your job properly). So don’t whisper down a well – stand and holler and watch as your stats counter shows you an ever-increasing stream of visitors to your site.

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