by John Eberhard
Almost everyone who comes to me wants to get more traffic to their web site. The trick is that certain website marketing actions are geared towards getting traffic immediately, whereas other actions are medium or long term.
The medium and long term actions have to be done, but you have to know that they’re not going to get results right away. For that you do other things.
Immediate Traffic
There are two main things I recommend for building immediate traffic to a web site: pay per click advertising, and blogging.
Pay per click advertising, through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center, and Facebook’s pay per click program, is very effective in driving traffic to your web site right now. I have written numerous articles on this subject. A new account can be started, you write your text ads, come up with a list of keywords, create customized landing pages on your site, determine your budget and where you want, and let her rip.
Google AdWords is still the big daddy in the pay per click realm. I have not gotten much in the way of results on Yahoo over the last year, so do not recommend it. MSN gets good results, is cost-effective, but small volume. I have gotten good results with the Facebook pay per click program, which allows you to target your public in several unique ways.
One caution is that in the last year or two the popularity of pay per click, combined with the fact that the price you pay for the clicks is based on bidding, has caused bids to go up significantly in some markets with some keywords. If this is true for your product and your set of keywords, this just means you have to be smarter and more skillful in handling your campaign.
Blogs are another way to drive traffic to your site quickly. Put up a blog, then make sure there are multiple links from your blog to your main web site. With my blog I have links to the home page and various other pages within the site, as well as links to my other blogs, my Facebook corporate page, my Linkedin profile, MySpace page and so on.
Then when you write your articles, use keywords in the articles, and link those keywords to appropriate pages within your main site. Write something once a week or more. Your posts can be short too, 150 words, or much longer, up to 1,500 words. You can even write a short post, about something interesting you read on another site, and link to it.
Once you post something, it is vital to send a notification, called a “ping” to the blog search engines. This is the thing that drives traffic to you, although of course you have to write things that will be interesting to people.
Medium to Longer Term Traffic
Once you have some actions in place to drive immediate traffic, you should take actions to drive traffic that are more of a medium or long term nature. These include:
- Content Hubs: Taking articles, 500 words or more, and submitting them to content hubs, is one of the best actions you can do to build up volume links to your website. This in turn improves your ranking with the search engines for your target keywords, and thus drives traffic.
- Optimized Press Releases: These are press releases written more to consumers than just to media types. It is a voice from you direct to the public. You write a release, ensure it contains some of your target keywords, then submit it to several online PR sites. This builds higher quality links, as these online PR sites tend to rank very well with search engines.
- Social Media: I recommend getting on Facebook and putting up a corporate page. MySpace is good too, and tends to have a younger audience. Also it’s good to take your articles and put up pages for each one on sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com. Then bookmark your pages on sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon.
The key to all these longer term actions is to keep them going for 6-12 months. If you give up before that point, you won’t see much benefit. But if you keep at it, you will build significant traffic.
