Targetting Traffic To Your Site

Traffic is the life's blood of any business, whether online or off. Without traffic, there is no customers, without customers there are no sales. Without sales, there is no business. Yet many webmasters seem to fall into the notion that traffic is traffic and the more you get the more sales you can make. This statement is both true and false.

It is true that, using the law of averages, you will make a few sales by throwing more and more traffic at a site. But those sales will, in all likely hood, be few and far between. Certainly not enough to sustain a business.

But take the same idea and apply it to targeted traffic. The big difference is that unlike the untargeted traffic mentioned above, the potential audience WANTS to check your site out. This type of traffic results in sales. This is the type of traffic webmasters want and demand. But few seem to know how to go about getting it.

Here are a few ideas that can help build that kind of traffic.

1. Article Marketing. Of all the types of marketing available, this one is among the best. It has the potential to reach an ever growing potential audience with any further effort on the webmaster's part. The market for fresh, original content is growing and the search engines reward sites that have it, whereas plagiarised material is penalized. Best of all,if you are on a budget this can be free and it works.

2. E-mail Marketing. This can be one of the best and fastest ways to build traffic and profits to your website. But this type of marketing comes with a warning. Be sure you know who it is you are dealing with and their reputation. There are the unscrupulous out there who will deliver your message to millions by spamming. Failing to abide by the CAN-SPAM laws can get you in more trouble than you think. Check them out through the BBB and FTC before spending your money.

3. Viral Marketing. To clarify what this means is that you are advertising through the use of free e-books or reports that you simply give away. You may allow your potential readers to repackage the e-book (so it looks like they wrote it), but the material inside remains untouched. The advantage here is that your readers are giving it away to still others thus increasing your potential market geometrically.Using this type of marketing, you can reach a potential audience of thousands or more. BUT, when using this type of marketing, make sure the information you supply has value to the reader. It may be in the form of "how to" or giving tips on a particular niche or subject related to a particular niche. The point is the reader should be able to take the information given him and use it.

4.Link Swapping. This type of marketing involves two webmasters agree to place links on each other's sites that link back to each other. It is a good way to build traffic and also build on your search engine rankings at the same time.

These techniques can help build laser targeted traffic to your site. Some take longer than others to reach the desired levels of activity to your site. The point is that you, as the webmaster, have to be consistent and persistent in your efforts. Only through consistent and persistent advertising efforts will you succeed online.

By Ryan Smith

How To Get Website Traffic For Free

We know basically two ways to get website traffic. You can buy it, or you can get it for free. I have tried both methods, and although the easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to just buy it, I do not like it. There is no guarantee that buying website traffic you will get great results even though you spend a fortune.

I begin to look the other way, free traffic. Why spend money buying website traffic when you can get traffic for free? It is more time consuming but there is no risk involved in this method and the quality of the traffic can be better in many cases because you can generate targeted traffic.Oh, and since you will be investing your time, a very precious commodity, I will mention this... Make sure the website you are trying to drive traffic to be properly optimized to accept opt-in list signups and/or make sales. Otherwise you will be wasting your time.

Free traffic techniques that work:
1. Submit your site to as many search engines you can, including the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
2. Write 2-3 articles each week and submit them to the free article directories. The link to your site must be in your bio box. The articles should be optimized for a keyword your site is targeting.
3. Submit those same articles to email newsletter publishers in your niche and add them in your site as well.

4. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site

5. Find blogs related to your niche and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site.
6. Answer questions related to your sites topic at answers.yahoo.com. Be sure to put a link to your site in each of your answers.

7. Join the most popular forums that deal with your sites topic and become an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.

8. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.

9. Start a blog on blogger.com and a blog on wordpress.com, link them to your site and submit them to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep your blogs updated.

10. Post ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.org, usfreeads.com). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But do not neglect the other ones. If your add is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser.

11. Write an interesting email signature that includes a link to your site, and use it with every outgoing business email you send, I use a signature when I respond to eBay messages as well.

12. Start a page on myspace.com and on any other high page rank social bookmarking site you can find and link them to your site. Create squidoo lenses which are so easy to create and add your site URL in them.

13. Submit a viral video to youtube.com. You do not really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job.

14. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.

15. Write an e-book or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free e-book directories you can find online.

16. Give the free e-book or short report to your list as well or add it to a giveaway event.

It is a lot of work, but you do not have to use them all at once. Just pick one at a time, invest one hour today, pick other one tomorrow and so on and in a month you will build your free traffic.

By Michaela Cernescu