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How_do_I_drive_traffic_to_a_brand_new_website
| How do I drive traffic to a brand new website?
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites
to the Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be
hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not
considerably more!)
The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to
make their existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to
one of the most common questions I am asked and the subject of
this newsletter:
'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'
Of course, there are a number of different answers to this
question and what I would do myself is probably very different
to what a completely new Internet entrepreneur would do. The
reason I say this is that the first thing I do when launching a
new site is make use of my existing website traffic by
advertising the new site on my other established sites. In
addition, I have the luxury of a large mailing list which I can
use to drive traffic to the new site.
I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't
have these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I
when I first started), so let's look at things from the
beginning. Day one of your first website.....
It is a fact that the quickest and probably most effective way
of bringing targeted traffic to your website is by paying for
it. Now before you rush off and sink $50 into one of those
'50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T, this isn't what I mean.
Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money. Even if you
get the traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some
software script visiting your site and pretending to be a
visitor), it will not be targeted and therefore there is a very
low chance that the traffic will generate sales. When I talk
about buying traffic, I mean by using the pay- per-click
services offered by most of the big search engines.
You probably already know the sort of thing I mean - for
example, Google Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will
display a list of adverts down the right-hand side of the page
and these are all paid adverts. Every time you click on one of
them, the advertiser pays Google a fixed amount which could be
anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive
the keyword is).
Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which
keywords your advert is shown for and this allows you to target
your advertising perfectly. Other big names in the pay-per-click
market include Overture, Espotting and Findwhat.
Now, before you all start emailing me and saying that you
already knew about PPC let me just say that I am well aware that
people know about it. The problem (as I see it), is that people
aren't using this type of service because of the fact that they
don't want to spend any money on advertising. That's all well
and good but the fact is that the Internet is getting more and
more competitive each day and the chances of you building a
successful website business from scratch without investing any
money are tiny to say the least.
If you want to attract a decent level of traffic to a brand new
website in a short period of time, it is almost a necessity that
you use pay-per-click on one of the main search engines. If you
don't, then the growth of your traffic levels will be painfully
slow and inconsistent at best.
When I launched my very first websites I invested heavily in
pay-per-click advertising. At one point, I was spending over
$6000 a month on Google Adwords alone!!! Seriously I really was
spending that much money. It was a constant battle to tweak the
website sales copy and continue to test the advertisement text
just to make sure that my sales were covering the advertising
payments each month. At the time I was probably just about
breaking even but buying traffic in this quantity meant that I
was able to fine-tune my sales pages and start to build up a
list of mailing list subscribers.
Once you have got to the stage where you know your sales pages
are converting visitors into buyers, then you can start to gear
up with other methods of getting traffic to your site - writing
articles, linking strategies, viral methods (ebooks etc), using
your eBay 'About Me' page, using your link as a signature when
you post on forums etc. All of these methods will win you
traffic (and in most cases it will be completely free) but it
will take time for the traffic to build to a worthwhile level.
If you rely solely on free traffic, you really will be building
your business one hit at a time.
Of course, once the free methods of gaining traffic start to pay
off, you can begin to wind down your paid methods, though you
may not want to - after all, if you are earning more in sales
than you are paying for your pay-per-click traffic, why stop it?
As your portfolio of websites grows, you will also be able to
share the traffic around a bit by linking to your own sites and
of course, if you are capturing your visitors email addresses,
you will be building a mailing list of people interested in the
products you are offering.
Like I say, I appreciate that the above may not be the
ground-breaking secret that you were hoping for but as with so
many things online, there really is no secret. Achieving success
is simply about taking action and whilst you can succeed online
by spending very little money, the chances are that you will
succeed a lot quicker by making a bit of an investment. You
don't have to be spending thousands of dollars a month as I was
but any new business owner should be prepared to invest a few
hundred dollars a month in order to get things off the
ground....
About the author:
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since
1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two
weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit:
http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html
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