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.... |