The best suite of Traffic Tips

Are traffic tips important?... Just think: someone told you that if you aren't on Internet, you don't exist. So you started reading about how to create a web page or you hired an expensive designer and finally, you are the owner of Internet's most awesome web page about your product. That's fine! But... Who's going to find your web page among other 3.000 million web pages? It doesn't matter if you have a home made web page or a professional expensive made web page. People won't find you unless you start attracting traffic to your web page. Suppose for a moment that you have succeeded and you start receiving 1000 hits per week in your web page, is that good enough? Well it depends... If you where receiving zero, 1000 looks pretty good to start, but the key question is. Do you just receive 1000 hits of ANY kind of people or 1000 TARGETED hits. By Targeted Hits I mean people who's looking for what you are offering. And believe me the key to an easy home business is to get TARGETED visitors. There are many different ways to attract targeted visitor to your web page: Search Engines Directories Links from other web sites Off-line media Word of mouth e-mail signatures Usenet Newsgroups Unsolicited e-mail Banners Opt-in mailing lists Ezines Why did I use different colors, just to point the difference between the: Good Never use Not so good Lets have a brief description of each one of them... SEARCH ENGINES & DIRECTORIES As you probably know 80% of the sales usually come from 20% of the promoting effort, and with Search Engines this numbers usually are 90% - 10 %. So, to have a good traffic wave, you will use a lot of different means of promotion, but 90 % of it will come from Search Engines and Directories; so they are the back bone of the Internet marketing, and here is where you have to apply your biggest effort to do the things in the right way. And the best part of it is that they are a free! LINKS FROM OTHER WEB SITES You can get links to your web page from two different sources: *Search Engines: when your potential visitor asks for information about one of your main keywords, the Search Engine will show your web address link in their results. This will result in a visitor to your web site IF you are listed in the first 20 web addresses shown, people very rarely go after the first 20 results *Other sites: every good marketer is interested in providing good content to their customers, because if they like the content of their web pages, they'll keep on returning for more information. So other sites might point to your web page if they consider that's a good information to give to their customers OFF-LINE MEDIA There are many off line ways to generate traffic to your site: *Printed media *TV *Direct mail *Telemarketing scripts *Stationary *Flyers *Catalogs *Billboards *Blimps *News releases to targeted media *Business cards. *Etc. I told you above that the first and best way to attract targeted visitors to your web page is through Search Engines and Directories, well... the second best way to attract visitors to your web site is to write an article for a magazine or newspaper that reaches your targeted market. And why is this so important? Because if an important magazine or newspaper shows an article written by YOU, there is an implied endorsement from them. Their customers believe in them, and if they show YOUR article the customers feel they should believe in YOU. WORD OF MOUTH Word of mouth will cost you nothing and that makes it a very cost-effective way of attracting targeted customers. What could be better than a real person's testimony? But it isn't easy to get. Why is people going to talk about you? They will only talk about you and refer you if your offer them extremely good content, and if you treat them as if they where your only customer! E-MAIL SIGNATURES Very easy to create and free too! This is a very powerful and legal way to attract targeted customers because every time you write an e-mail to one of your customers they see it. And it becomes a strong way of promotion if you write to newsgroups, mailing lists, or any other place where many people will see it. E-mail signatures are a combination of a business card and PS it should be located at the end of all your e-mail, and are the second most important part of any sales letter. USENET NEWSGROUPS We must distinguish between two kind of Newsgroups, Forums and Mailing lists *Loosely regulated groups: Where anyone can write about anything. Yes you will be able to put your add here, but as anyone can, they are flooded and scarcely anyone pays much attention to the *Serious groups: That will have strict self-enforced rules. Write any commercial stuff to them and you'll be flamed. Here you have to build a relationship with the group, honestly participate in their discussions and they won't care if your include your e-mail signature, but don't try to fool them. They will insult you or you'll get banned or both. As a matter of fact, unless your product or service and the Newsgroups topic have a perfect fit, it's better not to use them. You will have to read everyone's postings everyday, and contribute regularly to get a small response and a lot of spam. UNSOLICITED E-MAIL If you send un-targeted e-mail to anyone, and don't provide your name, reply e-mail address and a way to be removed, that's named spam My advice is no to use it, not only for moral issues, but because it doesn't work, you will end loosing your ISP, your web sites and hours of hard work. A different thing is to write to targeted lists of people that have specifically accepted to receive your e-mail. (Although most of them accept your e-mail because they want to receive some free gift offered to tempt them, and so are a low motivated un-targeted market) BANNERS Lets be direct: how many times do YOU click over a banner? A banner to be of any use has to be: *Very well designed to produce high impact *It has to be animated to catch attention *It has to load quickly *It should be at the top or the bottom of the page to get best results *It better be the only one on the site *They are too expensive for most of the companies That you read about a banner exchange program that's free. Don't dream about it. It's never free, it will cost you A LOT of money, because although someone MIGHT click over your banner that's shown in other site, when a targeted prospect that's browsing YOUR site, clicks over the exchange banner, you can say good bye to your prospect. And that's a lot of money! OPT-IN MAILING LISTS This is a good selling method! Because only targeted people will opt-in to your mailing list, BUT although opt-ins allow you to create a relationship with a targeted prospect that when they start trusting you, in many cases will by from you, this is a long term relationship, and here we are talking of TRAFFIC developers. This is NOT a good way to develop traffic, is a good way to develop sales in the long term EZINES Same as with opt-ins, this is a long term sales source, not a traffic developer. If you are looking for a good traffic building tips ebook, you can find it here: http://www.easy-home-business.com/how-to- sell.html Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi