Where does website traffic come from? Website traffic is essential, if you have no traffic to your website you are not going to get anyone buying your products or reading your articles. Traffic is one of the key components of your website and is available in these three forms.
1. Pay For It.
You can buy traffic typically using what is known as Pay Per Click advertising. The major names in this market are Google and their AdWords programme and Yahoo Network Sponsored Search. There are many smaller companies around also but they all follow the same premise.
You create your account, grab a bunch of keywords and create your adverts. You can define the amount you want to spend per click or per day, what geographical areas you want your adverts to appear in and even what time they should appear.
When someone types one of your keywords into for example Google your advert will be displayed down the right hand side of the natural search results. If the searcher then chooses to click on your advert and gets forwarded to your website you will get charged for that click.
The price you pay for each individual click depends on a variety of conditions such as how many other people are competing on that keyword. The more competition the more it costs to be higher up the ranks. The position you want to occupy. The percentage of people who click on your advert, the list goes on.
Pay Per Click advertising can be very successful but has a steep learning curve, it is essential that you do lots of research into your chosen Pay Per Click vendor and in the niche you are in.
2. Borrow It.
This option is not for everyone, but in certain niches it can be effective. The first method of borrowing traffic is what is called link exchange. This is where you put links to another website on your site and they put links back to you on theirs. This can be beneficial as you can get traffic from a more successful website reasonably quickly. However this traffic is not always targeted.
The second option in the affiliate marketing world is a joint venture. This is essentially where you would contact another marketer or company who had products that complement yours. If they are interested they may send a mailing out to their list or put an entry in their blog alerting their visitors about you and your relevant products.
The key things to remember about borrowing traffic is that you have to give something in return. This can make it tricky when targeting very successful websites.
3. Create It.
Creating your own traffic is one of the best ways to start get visitors to your website. There are literally hundreds of ways to start creating your traffic but I'm just going to tell you about two of the most popular.
Articles are a great way of generating traffic. You can write articles about your chosen niche, offering advice, definitions, explanations, news, reviews just to name a few. Once you have created your articles you can put them on your website or blog as content. You can also upload them to article directories or even assemble a few of them into a white paper or ebook to give away to visitors.
Video is currently the rage. Everywhere you look there are videos for everything. 50% of all web traffic is video and YouTube alone receives 12.5% of all the traffic out there. YouTube has made it possible for anyone to upload their videos for the whole world to see. Just as you can create an article about anything you can do the same thing with video. The best option is to do both: Create it in print and create it in video. YouTube is free, so utilise it for your business video/s and then create links from your website to your video.
