Giant businesses like Walmart, McDonald’s and a host of others became so big because of only one reason. They have customers…and tonnes of it! Likewise on the internet, big names like Amazon, ebay and even Google all owe their success to none other than…their customers. But before someone becomes a customer, they are first a ‘visitor’ or more commonly known as ‘traffic’ in the online world. So what are the ways to generate traffic? Read on…
We all know that for an online business to succeed, the essential key element is to have massive amounts of traffic. Merely having a great product and a top notch website accounts for nothing if no one sees it or do not even know it exists!
So how do potential customers or ‘traffic’ get to know about our website and pay a visit? In the broad sense, it is very similar to offline businesses – advertising. The idea is simply just to put it out there, spread the word or to gain exposure. That is not all, just as important as getting traffic is getting the right targeted traffic. Clearly, someone who is not interested in the offered product is unlikely to buy it. The following are some proven ways for traffic generation.
Article Writing is obviously one way. Just like this article, some good or creative content is given without selling anything. Note that an article is usually accompanied by a resource area (at the end of the article). This is where the author can direct an interested reader to get additional information or check out a website link, blog, video, forum, anything else the author has in mind.
Blogs are also used similarly as articles with some content and then followed by a suggested website or other resources the blogger have in mind.
Forums on the other hand, although having some similarities as well, are more of a discussion rather than focusing on providing content. The signature area of a forum post is the equivalent of the resource box for an article. Every time a post is made, the signature attached to the post provides exposure to everyone who reads the forum.
Article Video Marketing has also gained in popularity in the last couple of years. This is basically just an adaptation of the conventional article writing mentioned above into a video presentation. It engages the audience’s audio and visual senses and it saves the time it takes for reading an article.
The traffic generation methods mentioned so far can mostly be done for free depending on the site used to publish them. These are usually meant for the long haul as once they are published, they are available online to be searched and seen by everyone. However, these methods are usually slower because there is somehow a dependency on the targeted audience to search for them.
For faster but shorter term traffic, there are of course the paid methods. These again have become common recently due to the demand to have faster results. Paid traffic can potentially flood a website with visitors. Here are some proven examples below.
Banner Ads are the most widely seen. Every website we visit is almost bound to have some kind of banner advertising something. Even search engine results usually carry these. Basically, the advertiser pays an agreed fee to the owner of the website to put up a banner to advertise.
Solo Ads are good especially for targeted traffic. With this method, we pay someone to send an email to their database of targeted contacts in a particular niche. The more contacts the email is sent to, the costlier it becomes. It is usually also the responsibility of the solo ad buyer to provide the email template to be sent.
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a modified way of using banner ads. In this case, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on the ad and is directed to the targeted website. There is usually a limit set everyday for the amount to be paid as this can be very costly if uncontrolled. Generally, providers of this service are search engine sites.
Pay Per View (PPV) is similar to PPC but here, payment is charged based on the view of an ad instead of clicks. Pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitials are used for this method. There is no guarantee that a visitor will go to the targeted website, just that the visitor sees the ad.
As can be seen, there are multiple ways to generate traffic whether it is free or paid. Many new methods are also being continuously formulated to meet the demand to have more traffic. After all, it is traffic that determines the success of any website.
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