October 20, 2008

How to get Targeted Traffic to Your Website!

by Greg Smithers

Everyone who has a website knows that to have sales you must have traffic, but not just any traffic it has to be targeted traffic.

Targeted traffic involves enticing visitors to your site that are actually interested in the content of your website. If people are interested in buying tropical fish they will find websites about buying tropical fish interesting.

There are a range of techniques for getting traffic that is targeted.

Forums - If you are an active participant in a forum you can obtain targeted traffic through the link to your website you can add to the signature. If you spam you are likely to get banned. However, if you add value by joining in debates and answering questions you may even come to be known as an expert. If others like your style, the quality of your posts or even the promotional text in your signature you can generate targeted traffic that doesn’t cost you anything.

Reciprocal Linking - For most product websites there are usually many other related websites which aren’t direct competitors. You can contact the owners of these websites to ask for a reciprocal link. While a number of them will simply ignore your request, you will start to build up some useful links over time. Again, this can provide a source of targeted traffic.

E-zines provide a ready made source of targeted traffic because they are nearly always focused on a particular niche. Different e-zines tend to have different conversion rates, so it is good to do a test advertising run to check the return on investment, before spending too much on advertising with a particular e-zine.

Newsletters - As well as using other web owners e-zines, you should consider starting your own newsletter. In this way, you can build up your own list of targeted people and when the size of the list grows you can start selling your own advertising as well.

E-Books: Often used, these are usually free informational books for your clients and for others to give away free if they leave your links in the book itself. You can place links back to your website in the books you sell or give to your clients.

Joint Ventures: Contact online marketers looking for new products to sell. They often have large mailing lists with eager to buy customers. Normally they are willing to email their list for a cut of the sale price. This works particularly well with informational products. It has several advantages. It can give a very sizeable boost to both your sales and mailing list within a very short period.

Buying traffic through Pay Per Click (PPC) is usually the fastest way to get extremely targeted traffic. As you have control over the keywords, you can be sure that the visitors are looking for exactly what you can provide. This tends to result in a much higher conversion rate.

If the aim of your website is to make money then you really do want to increase the amount of targeted traffic it receives. By using some or all of these techniques, over time, that is exactly what you will achieve.

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