Saturday, April 4, 2009

You Can Get Traffic to Your Website - Fast!

By Darrel Hawes

If you have a website, you need traffic.

What is website traffic? Website traffic is actual people browsing your site. Many people have spent good money for the nicest-looking site with all the latest bells and whistles, but lack the visitors that actually generate cash from that site. This is just like building a Walmart, with all the items in stock and employees on staff, and placing in the middle of the Sahara desert.

There are many ways to get traffic. If you need traffic fast, there are two basic methods you can use.

First, you can borrow traffic. Most businesses can use some form of this method, and I encourage you to creatively adapt it to your specific situation. In essence, you simply get another website owner to agree to recommend your product or service to their "list" of interested individuals. This usually involves offering a referral fee or commission to get them to agree to this.

This procedure gets results for these two reasons. First, the other website owner has already invested the time and money required to collect the names and contact information of interested individuals, sparing you from doing the same. Second, this method allows you to get "credit" for the credibility of the other website owner. Think about your own experience. Do you normally seek out self-serving, traditional advertisements, or do you rely more upon the advice of friends and trusted acquaintances when making a buying decision? The answer is obvious.

If you borrow traffic as described above, it will likely not cost money upfront, though in most cases you will pay a percentage of sales to the referrer.

The next fast-traffic method we'll discuss is paid advertising. There are several types of paid advertising, and the very first you should consider is pay-per-click advertising. Google's Adwords program is the easiest to begin with, and eventually you will want to research using Yahoo and MSN as well. Pay-per-click advertising's great benefit is the ability to hone in one certain keywords that people are looking for, and as an added bonus, you can start getting traffic in 10 minutes or less.

This method of advertising is attractive for numerous reasons. Chief of these is the ability to match the words people are searching for with your particular ad. Another great benefit is you can track many aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns.

Unlike the "borrowing traffic" method, you will have a cash outlay whether you make sales or not. On the plus side, Google will likely not charge your credit card until the end of the month, so you may actually have generated more than enough in sales to pay your Adwords bill when it is time to pay. When you first start, most people keep close tabs on their Adwords account, to make sure they are not spending more than they had planned.

We have only covered two methods of generating traffic to your site. In future articles, we will cover many more.

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