How do I drive traffic to a brand
new website?
by: Richard Grady
Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to
the Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands
of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!)
The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to make their
existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to one of the most common
questions I am asked and the subject of this newsletter:
'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'
Of course, there are a number of different answers to this question
and what I would do myself is probably very different to what a completely
new Internet entrepreneur would do. The reason I say this is that the first
thing I do when launching a new site is make use of my existing website
traffic by advertising the new site on my other established sites. In addition,
I have the luxury of a large mailing list which I can use to drive traffic
to the new site.
I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't have
these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I when I first
started), so let's look at things from the beginning. Day one of your first
website.....
It is a fact that the quickest and probably most effective way of bringing
targeted traffic to your website is by paying for it. Now before you rush
off and sink $50 into one of those '50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T,
this isn't what I mean. Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money.
Even if you get the traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some software
script visiting your site and pretending to be a visitor), it will not
be targeted and therefore there is a very low chance that the traffic will
generate sales. When I talk about buying traffic, I mean by using the pay-
per-click services offered by most of the big search engines.
You probably already know the sort of thing I mean - for example, Google
Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will display a list of adverts
down the right-hand side of the page and these are all paid adverts. Every
time you click on one of them, the advertiser pays Google a fixed amount
which could be anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive
the keyword is).
Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which keywords your
advert is shown for and this allows you to target your advertising perfectly.
Other big names in the pay-per-click market include Overture, Espotting
and Findwhat.
Now, before you all start emailing me and saying that you already knew
about PPC let me just say that I am well aware that people know about it.
The problem (as I see it), is that people aren't using this type of service
because of the fact that they don't want to spend any money on advertising.
That's all well and good but the fact is that the Internet is getting more
and more competitive each day and the chances of you building a successful
website business from scratch without investing any money are tiny to say
the least.
If you want to attract a decent level of traffic to a brand new website
in a short period of time, it is almost a necessity that you use pay-per-click
on one of the main search engines. If you don't, then the growth of your
traffic levels will be painfully slow and inconsistent at best.
When I launched my very first websites I invested heavily in pay-per-click
advertising. At one point, I was spending over $6000 a month on Google
Adwords alone!!! Seriously I really was spending that much money. It was
a constant battle to tweak the website sales copy and continue to test
the advertisement text just to make sure that my sales were covering the
advertising payments each month. At the time I was probably just about
breaking even but buying traffic in this quantity meant that I was able
to fine-tune my sales pages and start to build up a list of mailing list
subscribers.
Once you have got to the stage where you know your sales pages are converting
visitors into buyers, then you can start to gear up with other methods
of getting traffic to your site - writing articles, linking strategies,
viral methods (ebooks etc), using your eBay 'About Me' page, using your
link as a signature when you post on forums etc. All of these methods will
win you traffic (and in most cases it will be completely free) but it will
take time for the traffic to build to a worthwhile level. If you rely solely
on free traffic, you really will be building your business one hit at a
time.
Of course, once the free methods of gaining traffic start to pay off,
you can begin to wind down your paid methods, though you may not want to
- after all, if you are earning more in sales than you are paying for your
pay-per-click traffic, why stop it?
As your portfolio of websites grows, you will also be able to share
the traffic around a bit by linking to your own sites and of course, if
you are capturing your visitors email addresses, you will be building a
mailing list of people interested in the products you are offering.
Like I say, I appreciate that the above may not be the ground-breaking
secret that you were hoping for but as with so many things online, there
really is no secret. Achieving success is simply about taking action and
whilst you can succeed online by spending very little money, the chances
are that you will succeed a lot quicker by making a bit of an investment.
You don't have to be spending thousands of dollars a month as I was but
any new business owner should be prepared to invest a few hundred dollars
a month in order to get things off the ground....
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
About The Author
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998.
He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe
(and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html.
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