Driving targeted traffic to your website:

By Eric Wood
Posted Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Building targeted traffic can be an adventure. I've always said that the greatest adventure is in the journey and building targeted traffic is definitely a journey. We're going to look at several ways of doing this and explore some of the pros and cons of each.

Traffic can be bought. Goto.com and Kanoodle.com have a unique philosophy in that you pay to be in their search engines. Each listing in their directory comes from someone who has paid to be there. You decide how much you are willing to pay to be listed under a certain keyword. A note on this service (Goto will never tell you this): If you want the best results from Goto.com, don't pay to be listed as the number one resource. In some categories you can save up to $1.00 per visitor by being listed at space number 10. If you track your visitors, you will even notice that those who clicked from number 10 are 3 times more likely to buy your service as those who clicked from number 1.

Advertising can be bought or traded. Find an ezine related to your topic and advertise in it. Sometimes the ezine owner will trade ads with you. Another option is to write articles and submit them to ezines for publication. isyndicate.com will help you to syndicate your articles into ezines and websites, although they charge a rather large commission.

Tell-A-Friend service. This is done by a CGI script. It allows your visitors to tell others about your site quickly and easily. This is the ultimate in targeted traffic because it is free and people usually only recommend something that they think someone else can use.

I'm sure you could expand on these ideas and develop some of your own. If you've ever taken my online marketing course (http://www.fluffymoose.com/webdream), you'll discover that there was no real mention of Submiting your page to search engines, opt in email groups or the like. Keep reading and you will understand why.

Now for the fun part. We'll discuss several more ways to bring traffic to your website. Most of these are simple and easy, although none is guaranteed.

Submission to Search Engines: Usually promoted to newbies as the best way to market their website. This type of promotion is good if done once every three months. Be careful not to do it too much or you will actually HURT your search engine position.

Postcards: Also known as virtual cards. This allows your visitors to send a virtual card to a friend. This is a wonderful opportunity to build traffic and provide a service to your visitors at the same time. 20% of the traffic on my search engine comes from sending or receiving virtual cards.

Banner Exchanges: Some people (mainly the owners of banner exchanges) advocate their use. The concept is simple: you advertise for someone else and he advertises for you. In practice this is what I have found: for every 3200 banner ads I show from someone else, I get one visitor. People who take an honest look at banner exchanges will probably get similar results.

Clicktrade or Clickbank.com allows you to set up an affiliate program for your site. Basically you pay people to send traffic to your site. These often require a lot of up front money, but having an affiliate program on your website will really help you gain traffic. There is a fairly comprehensive listing of companies that will help you to set up an affiliate program at (http://www.twincitiesinfo.com/extremecash/)

I hope that these resources will help you to build traffic to your site. Let me know how things are going!

About the Author
Article by Eric Wood, Webmaster of Extreme Cash. Eric is an authority on website marketing. His advice has helped thousands of people to drive traffic to their websites without spending a fortune on marketing.

Thanks!

Eric Wood
Professional Website Developer
ICQ #56969340
Main Website: (http://www.fluffymoose.com/)
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