Internet Business Consultant

Traffic To My Website Video

This article discusses paying other websites for the privilege of sending people to your website.

Note that Pay Per Click (PPC) the process of paying the search engines to list a sponsored link to your website in search engine results is such a large topic that it has it’s own article on this Website.

Now you may feel some reluctance to pay for advertising, and like any expense you should ensure it’s relevant and worthwhile to what you are trying to achieve.

It’s also critical that when paying for web traffic that you ensure you know your statistics.

You need to know the number of click throughs you are getting for a particular ad in order to gauge its effectiveness.

If your not actually tracking these statistics in some meaningful way they you have no way to determine if the paid traffic is providing a return on your investment. In other words you need to know exactly how many people are visiting your site by clicking the link on the site you paid advertising on.

This is one of the areas where I see a lot of people fall down, they make the decision to buy some advertising space from another website (or mailing list) and then do not track the effectiveness of it. How can you measure the effectiveness of an ad if you are not keeping statistics? (hint… You can’t!).

This is where decent ad tracking software comes into play, what you can do is set-up a new tracking link for each and every paid ad you set-up, so that you can know with certainty the amount of traffic you are receiving for it. Because each paid ad has a separate tracking link you know with certainly how many clicks you are getting on the link, and this gives you much more power as you have some real statistics you can use to gauge the effectiveness of each ad you pay for.

Now before we go into more detail, lets talk about the type of traffic you can buy, and discuss the pros and cons of each type of paid traffic method.

Banner Ad’s on Competitors Websites

This can be a great way to leverage visitors from another sites traffic. Usually you pay a fixed fee per month for the banner ad and it’s displayed for a full month on the website.

Depending on the amount of money you pay, it may be a fixed ad, or may be mixed in with a number of other ads and displayed on a rotational basis (e.g. visitor 1 is shown ad 1, visitor 2 is shown ad 2, etc).

Other options may include paying for a fixed number of impressions. E.g. 10,000 impressions would in theory mean that your ad would be displayed for 10,000 visitors to the website.

It’s very important that you choose your websites to buy ad space on very carefully. Obviously you want to ensure the website has products or services related to your particular niche, and that the website does have good number of visitors.

Usually when you approach the website the webmaster can give you some statistics on how many visitors they get per day on average, etc. If they can’t provide you some real life statistics I would suggest you pass on using that website.

Using various tools it is a relatively simple matter to determine how relevant the website is in the search engines.

Many people claim to be experts in the area of free pay per click. We suggest you do some careful research yourself first before jumping in.Traffic web sites.

Another method of paying for web traffic is traffic websites. These are websites that you pay a membership fee to, and they will then guarantee to send you a number of visitors. Sounds good in theory, and there are many good sites out there.

Remember that in general you don’t want just any type of traffic, rather, you want qualified targeted traffic.Which would you prefer 1,000,000 people arriving at your website with absolutely no interest in your product? Or 100 people who re interested in the exact products you have for sale?

I’m sure you will agree targeted traffic wins out over sheer volume any old day. You need to ensure the traffic website you sign up with does allow targeted traffic.

Also be wary of some of the less reputable sites that guarantee traffic to your website, as sometimes they achieve this by using automated computer software. It may appear that you have received the traffic (and your web logs may confirm it) however it is all traffic generated by a computer, meaning a human has not visited your site. Result? No sales, and a waste of money.

Ensure you use reputable companies to ensure you don’t get burnt. If you see a super duper offer offering a million visitors for it’probably is too good to be true!

General tips

Some general tips for any type of paid advertising.

1. Ensure your ad is of interest to and relevant to the visitors/readers.

There is no point advertising on a website or paying for an ad in a mailing list where visitors/readers have no interest in your website, most of the time you will be wasting your time as well as the visitors/readers. You will also be wasting any money you have paid for the advertising.

2. Do your sums to determine what you are trying to achieve – Weigh up the cost of the advertising, vs expected click throughs and profit. What is your break-ever point, how many sales do you need to make to break-even.

3. Use a decent tracking software for each ad so you have the information at
your fingertips on how many people have connected, etc.

Check out Pro Track Manager, it is a fantastic product that I use myself and recommend.

You will be absolutely blown away by the features of this package and exactly what it can track. It can even track where people are leaving your website from, easily highlighting web pages you may need to work on some more.

Technorati Tags: free pay per click, pay per click search engine marketing, pay per click services, pay per click software, traffic to my website

There are a number of steps I always follow when optimizing a site for SEO (note these are just the high points, there are others that I don’t mention here, but these WILL take you a long way):

1) On a new site, I will include the keywords in a non hyphenated domain name (if you can get a .edu or .gov TLD snap it up, otherwise a cheap .info will be ok)

2) If possible, I will rename the URL to each SEO relevant page to include the main keyword for that page.

3) Implement Google Analytics for the site and ensure the tracking script is added to every page (if not already done).

4) Go through the “money” pages and make sure that the title, meta descriptions and meta keywords tags are different and optimized for the keywords on the page. In a competitive niche (over 1 million result pages in Google), I would limit the keywords to one main phrase, a couple of local modifiers and one or two more closely related terms per page.

5) Go through the non-money pages (i.e. pages that don’t matter from an SEO perspective) and ensure the title and meta description tags are not duplicates of any of the money page tags. Google Webmaster tools will identify this for you once your site has been registered and crawled.

6) I nofollow any links to overhead pages from all of the pages on the site other than the home page. I leave the home page links as follow links, since I want the SEs to index all pages on the site and having privacy, contact, disclaimer, etc pages add to Google’s view of the “trust” for the site. On all other pages I want only the link to the home page to be a follow link, so I can build up the page rank of the home page. I handle this in Dreamweaver by using two different site templates, one for the home page and one for the rest of the pages on the site. If your main keyword page is something other than the home page, modify your approach accordingly.

7) I then optimize each pages content for it’s main keywords, modifiers and related terms. It’s critical that each word or phrase used in the keyword META is found on the page to avoid keyword spam penalties.

At this point the on page optimization is complete enough to start with link building. Link building is the toughest part of the SEO process. I use articles, blog posts, submit forms on relevant sites, reciprocal links, etc. There are ways to make this process easier, without going black or even grey hat. Contact me at Mississauga Search Engine Marketing if interested.

Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine ranking improvement, SEM, SEO