Drive Traffic To Your Site Without Breaking The Bank

By Jon Keel
Posted Monday, October 11, 2004

Driving traffic to your web site at a reasonable cost is one of the biggest challenges you'll face. It makes no difference how good a site you have; no visitors, no business. But, if you pay too much for your visitors you will either lose money or not generate enough profit.

This article outlines a relatively inexpensive method of quickly driving targeted visitors to your web site. At the same time, understand that the methods we'll discuss are only one step of a multi-step process to accomplish your goal of getting qualified visitors to your site at a cost at or below your Visitor Target Acquisition Cost (VTAC).

This step, however, is generally the first step you will want to take.

Why is that?

If you do it correctly, you can generate targeted traffic to your web site in less than a week. That’s right, in less than seven days. Plus, you can quickly determine the metrics of your web site, which as a business owner you absolutely have to know.

Your Visitor Target Acquisition Cost

Let's first discuss your Visitor Target Acquisition Cost, or VTAC. Your VTAC is unique to your web site. It’s a function of how well your web site converts visitors to customers (presuming you're attempting to sell something from your site). Here’s a simple example:

Let’s say you’re selling an item that has a selling price of $100 and a gross profit of $50. Plus, let’s say it takes 100 visitors to your site to generate one sale. Your Value Per Visitor (VPV) is then $.50 ($50 gross profit/100 visitors).

The VTAC is the percentage of your VPV that you will spend to get that visitor multiplied by the VPV. Ranges of 25% to 100% are common; you’ll have to decide the percentage for your individual business.

In this example, assume you’ll spend 50% of your VPV; then, your VTAC will be $.25 (50% x $.50). This will be the maximum you’ll spend to get one visitor to your site.

If you’re just beginning and you don’t know your VPV or VTAC, you’ll have to make some assumptions, quickly test your assumptions, and make any necessary adjustments.

The Background of Quickly Driving Traffic to Your Site

The technique you use to quickly drive traffic starts with pay- per-click search engines. PPC search engines are a tool in which you as an advertiser (web site owner) bid on your search engine ranking for specific keywords.

When your keywords are typed in the search engine by the visitor, your results are shown ranked according to how much you bid on the various keywords. The highest bid for a keyword is ranked first, and so on.

You’ll only pay when a visitor actually clicks through to your web site. In other words, you only pay for performance.

As an advertiser, you gain several advantages: * You only bid on the keywords you believe visitors will use to find you targeted keywords. * You decide how much you bid based on your VTAC you’ll never pay more for visitors than you know you should.

For very competitive keywords (those that are very popular and tend to have higher bid prices), you have the option of finding related but less popular and less expensive keywords if you do this right you can drive equivalent traffic at lower costs.

You can gain top ranked positions at a number of conventional search engines by letting the ppc search engines do your work for you.

Which PPC Search Engine To Use

As of late October 2001 you have over 160 ppc search engines from which to choose. Your choices are simplified by the fact that one ppc search engine, Overture (GoTo) stands well above all the rest.

Estimates vary, but Overture (GoTo) says that you can be seen by 75 per cent of all web searchers by using Overture (GoTo). We recommend to our consulting clients that they begin their ppc bidding with Overture (GoTo) and expand to some of the other ppc’s if the results warrant it.

The Process of Quickly Driving Traffic To Your Site

You can drive traffic to your site in as little as five days if you’ll follow these steps:

* Develop a list of at least 50 (200 is better) relevant keywords keywords that relate to content on your site. * Use a ppc bid management tool to save yourself time and money both before and after you begin actually bidding at the ppc’s the best tool we’ve found for the beginning to intermediate web site owner is the Keyword Bid Optimizer (http://www.paidsearchenginetools.com) The KBO will even help you develop your list of keywords). * Open an account at Overture (GoTo) with your first keyword bid (Note: If you use the Keyword Bid Optimizer and open your account from within this tool, Overture (GoTo) will add an additional $5 to your account). * Once you’ve opened your Overture (GoTo) account (and submitted your first keyword bid), add additional keyword bids until you have at least 50 bid keywords. Overture (GoTo) offers several cool spreadsheet tools to help you do this, along with saving you time.
* Track your keyword bid submittals and follow up with Overture (GoTo) in case any of your keyword bids are rejected typically this happens for non-relevance. * Monitor your bids to achieve your desired position without exceeding your VTAC.

By the way, this complete process along with a large number of tips and tricks is spelled out in step-by-step detail in my newest E-course, “Instant Web Site Traffic” (http://www.instantwebsitetraffic.com) along with a FREE month’s subscription to the Keyword Bid Optimizer (http://www.paidsearchenginetools.com).

Using ppc search engines is more complicated that what I’ve shown here. At the same time, if you will focus on learning how to use pay per click search engines, you can and should be able to quickly drive traffic to your web site at costs below your VTAC...

Or... as the title says,

(You will) “Drive Traffic To Your Site Without Breaking The Bank.”

About the Author
Jon Keel shows you how you can quickly drive targeted traffic to your web site and get top placement at the major search engines… in as little as five days with “Instant Web Site Traffic” (http://www.instantwebsitetraffic.com ).