One of the most important elements of success in internet business is mastery of internet traffic generation – particularly, the art (and science) of attracting targeted web traffic.
Many internet marketing beginners start out their journey on the wrong foot by purchasing e-commerce storefront packages, or website hosting plans that emphasize the “low cost” of setting up a website or storefront.
Unfortunately, if you are similarly new to internet marketing, you may not have been told that there are literally hundreds of millions of indexed websites out there. As a matter of fact, just a few years ago, the Google blog announced that they had officially indexed over 1 trillion web pages!
If you just build an e-commerce storefront or a run of the mill “brochure” website of 1 to 5 pages, you will still be faced with the enormous challenge of figuring out how to get web traffic to your online presence.
Here are a few simple ideas to help you attract enough internet traffic that you can achieve your personal and business goals.
1. Web site traffic generation
There are three key elements in making your website a traffic magnet. First, it should be full of relevant, engaging content – written, graphic, video, audio or otherwise.
Next, it must be compliant with good search engine optimization (SEO) principles that make your web pages easy for the search engines to find and pull up when your target market searches for information.
Finally, it should have lots of in-pointing links from other relevant and authoritative websites (and web pages) in your category. These links are known as inbound links and figure heavily into the algorithms that Google uses to rank web pages. And since Google is the dominant search engine, it pays to play by their rules.
2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising with programs like Google’s AdWords program may be the single fastest way to generate loads of traffic to a website or landing page. However, it can also be very expensive, especially if you don’t take the time to study it and take precautions.
Some commonsensical AdWords strategies include targeting so-called “long tail keywords” which are often 3 to 4 word combinations that are searched for by your target market, but do not have quite the competitive pressure of phrases like “Mortgage loans”, for instance.
It’s also a smart idea to set a very small daily budget when you’re starting out so you don’t hurt yourself (or your wallet).
3. Affiliate-generated traffic
Another way to generate lots of targeted online traffic is through the product-centered strategy of joint ventures and affiliate marketing. The key here is to create a product that gives you the leverage to offer incentives to high-powered partners who can send you traffic from their lists.
By pursuing a strategy of combining an online infopreneur model with an affiliate strategy, you can drive tremendous amounts of traffic to any website, landing page or product you create.
4. Media Content Sharing Sites
Websites like YouTube (Video sharing), Slideshare.net (PDF, video and PowerPoint presentation sharing), and podcast directories can be excellent traffic generators. By converting your content into various media and sharing them in other formats and on other sites, you get the benefits of greater search engine exposure to your content, referral visitors from those websites, and the SEO value of links to your web from your content and profiles on these sites.
5. Social sharing and bookmarking
Another way to drive powerful flows of online traffic is through the amplifying effect of using your social networks to spread your content even further out online.
An example of social media content amplification is easily seen with Twitter. A single tweet sent out to just a few thousand (or even a few hundred) followers with a link to your valuable eBook or whitepaper can result in viral sharing of that content to many thousands more.
In the past, some websites have even crashed after unexpected traffic spikes from an article being voted to the first page on Digg.com.
6. Content Syndication Tools
Finally, you can take advantage of various tools that help you spread the same content among many websites in an automated way.
If you are interested in generating traffic through online videos, you can utilize services such as Onlywire.com (bookmarking/sharing) to syndicate your content. For video, TubeMogul and Traffic Geyser are just two examples of services that let you upload to many video sharing sites. If you apply effective search engine optimization principles to your videos, doing this regularly can result in tremendous flow of traffic to whatever websites or pages you target for increased traffic.