Great Website! But where are your customers?

Great Website! But where are your customers?

A great website without customers is like a mega mall in the middle of a desert with no road leading to it. In order to sell you need customers, but how do you get the traffic to your website?

There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website, in this article we shall examine the paid methods of getting traffic.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Nothing new to anyone on the net. Every major search engine offers it in one form or the other. A great way to drive traffic to your site. But only if you know how to use it.

You must select keywords that will drive traffic to your site but will not cause your CPC bill to skyrocket without converting prospects into sales. Your description must also complement your keyword so that it reinforces your products and services.

The persons who click have interest in your goods but are still prospects. What goods are they interested in however. If my food site should use a keyword phrase "oral pleasure" relating to food and tastiness, I might be surprised to get a lot of clicks but no sales. Why, you might ask? Most likely the persons clicking on my link got there while searching for adult links for oral pleasure.

Funny you might think, but everyday, advertisers haphazardly choose keywords that have no bearing on their site. They now start to receive customers but have no conversions as these were not targeted visitors. By now the CPC bill is high and sales are still low to non-existent.

So for my food site, a better choice of keyword would be "jerk seasoning", and if I wanted to narrow my target market more with specific searches, I would use "Jamaican jerk seasoning". This would be sure to send me only targeted customers searching for my products. My conversion rate will be higher out of this batch of qualified prospects.

2. Text Ads

Advertisers can sponsor text ads for varying periods on different search engines.

4. Links

Joining paid link exchanges is a great way to get incoming links to your site. This method until recently was a good enough method, but Google's recent change to its view on paid Link Exchanges means that less value is placed on incoming links.

It is still a fairly valuable tool as the other members with whom you link, the traffic from their sites now have a link to you. The drawback is when your link is so far down the page that customers to that site will never have easy access.

5. Search Engines

Not by any means last or the least effective method. The major search engines will drive most of your traffic tot your site. Google delivers at least 60% of a sites search engine traffic, and so websites must be optimized and tweaked to achieve higher ranking in the engines. Higher ranking translates to appearing in the first few results. the higher up you rank and place the more your traffic from the search engine. With this method, optimization and submission of the site is paramount. A good SEO can tweak your site to make it search engine friendly including optimizing your meta tags such as Keywords, description and title.