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Traffic for a New Website
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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