Traffic - The Lifeblood Of All Online Businesses
I heard an interesting stat the other day that there are more web pages in existence than there are people in the world. This ranks right up there with another astonishing stat that there are more people alive today than have ever lived. Think about that for a moment, the human race has thousands of years of history but right now there are more of us on this planet than have ever lived ? that means there is going to be some dramatic competition for increasingly scarce natural resources. And so it is with websites and online business ? fiercely competitive.
Having a great website is for nothing if you can?t get a decent number of people visiting it. This is what is known of course as online traffic. So what is a decent amount of traffic? Well, this is very dependent on the type of business you are running and whether your website is for a niche segment or a wider audience. Something like 3000 hits per month would put your site among the top 1 million visited sites on the internet. So are you getting 3000 hits per month?
Hey look, anyone can get 3000 hits per month. Just go to a traffic wholesaler and you can buy 3000 hits per month for less than $20. But then you are left with the problem of quantity over quality. Traffic derived from a traffic wholesaler is not likely to be high quality traffic, even if it is claimed to be targeted traffic. So what are the other mainstream options?
The most obvious one is search engines. It takes a lot of time to build up a sufficiently high search engine ranking to generate this level of traffic which means you are left with the pay-per-click (PPC) option. PPC is generally the best targeted traffic you are likely to get in any amount of volume but in most sectors it will normally cost in excess of ?1000 to get our initial milestone of 3000 visitors. You have to do the math and work out whether you are likely to be converting sufficient visitors to justify that level of expenditure. So are there any cheaper options?
Perhaps there are other forms of online advertising that can generate visitors of a better quality than traffic wholesalers and at a lower price than PPC. I have found this to be the best value method of generating visitors to my websites but it needs to be broken down further. By way of example, I?m going to explore the likely results of spending say $100 per month on online advertising ? and by the way, if you are only interested in generating free traffic to your site I would suggest that firstly, you are unlikely to get very high quality traffic and secondly, you are not particularly serious about your online business.
So what is the best way of spending $100 per month to generate the optimum mix of both quantity and quality traffic?
I?ll start by suggesting Link Referral as it is a really top quality online advertising opportunity. The site itself is broken down into main categories and sub-categories and you are only allowed to advertise one site per account. The basic premise of the site is that members can visit up to 30 other member sites per day and write reviews on up to 5 of these. Each site you visit and each review you write gives you a higher ranking in your chosen category. If you make the 30 site visits and write the 5 site reviews each day, you are likely to find your site in the top 40 sites in your category (maybe higher) for each 24 hour period. This will deliver somewhere between 100 and 200 targeted visitors to your site per month. Not bad but can you cope with the discipline and tedium required to visit 30 sites and write 5 reviews each day? To be honest I quite like visiting sites at Link Referral and enjoy writing reviews but the commitment of doing this each and every day is too much for me. Instead, I pay $35 per month to advertise on the main category page and within my chosen sub-category ? and my site is always within the top 10 sites of both. This delivers between 600 and 1000 targeted visitors to my site each month of which several visitors each day save my site as a favorite.
My second choice would be Adland Pro ? a great advertising resource. Anyone can place an unlimited number of free ads each day but the real value lies in the paid advertising option. For just $9.95 per month your ad gets renewed every hour which means that it sits at the top of the list of classified ads pretty much all the time. For an additional $5 per month you also get a monthly submission to 80000 search engines and directories along with 1500 traffic exchange impressions and 1500 banner impressions ? and this is all targeted based on your chosen category. I run several ads on Adland Pro each month and the minimum number of targeted visitors you will get for a well written ad should be 1000 per month.
So far that?s $50 for around 2000 targeted visitors per month. There is of course the option of running more than one ad campaign at Adland Pro but for the purposes of this exercise I will assume just a single paid ad, promoting a single site.
Now I?m not generally a fan of traffic exchanges but I make one exception ? Traffic Swarm. Again, anyone can join as a free member and surf other members? sites in order to earn credits and receive visits from other surfers. The issue I normally have with traffic exchanges is that most people are simply surfing for credits and not normally interested in looking at your site once the timer has expired. But there are a couple of things that make Traffic Swarm different. Firstly, their surfing is categorized which means people have a basic interest in the sites they are surfing. Secondly, advertisers get to place a text ad and your site will only be viewed if people click on your text ad first. These two factors make Traffic Swarm a much more targeted environment than most traffic exchanges. Personally, I add a third dimension to the sites I promote there and that is to make sure that there is an opportunity for either an immediate click thru or for the surfer to save the site as a favorite. Pro membership at Traffic Swarm costs $30 per month and for this advertisers get a minimum of 2500 credits which equates to around 1000 targeted visitors per month.
For $80 we have accomplished our target of 3000 targeted visitors already so let me put another couple of suggestions forward as ?optional extras?. Firstly, if you have the inclination to write articles, maybe one per week, then for $10 you can get 5 articles distributed by iSnare to 40000 subscribed members including hundreds of article directory sites. I primarily use this approach to support a link building strategy for search engine optimization but I have found that I am getting a lot of hits from the articles themselves.
The other optional extra I would suggest is an Exact Seek keyword listing. Unlike traditional PPC the Exact Seek program guarantees a top ten listing in 225 search engines and website directories. Each keyword delivers highly targeted traffic and costs just $12 flat fee per quarter.
By my reckoning an advertising spend of $100 should deliver between 3000 and 5000 targeted website visitors per month. That would put your website in the top 10% of visited sites on the internet. Whether or not that makes you any money of course is another matter and the subject of another article I will be posting soon.
Simon is webmaster of The netSuccess Directory http://www.netsuccess-directory.com where many of the resources discussed in this article can be found.
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