How to drive traffic to a brand new website?
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.
How to Get Targeted Search Engine Traffic Quickly
There are a lot of different search engines - six in particular that give you about 90% of all web-traffic. Of those Google has the most web traffic so we'll focus on it.
by: Matt Bacak
Here's the How-To-Do-It Guide for driving search engine traffic right to your website.
I only speak about methods I have used and that worked well for my business. There are a lot of people out there who will steer you in the wrong direction because they are just regurgitating old information that might have worked years ago. I'll help you discover what's happening right here, right now. Let's get started with the plan.
Your first step is to define your target market. The better you are able to define your niche, the better your future clients will be able to find you and your products or services.
Next, you want to get very specific about what you're going to market on your webpage and make sure that it's congruent with our next step. When a person finds you on a search engine, you have a window of only 3 to 5 seconds to convince them that you are exactly what they were looking for. Make it crystal clear what you offer. If your meaning is unclear, the prospect will jump to the next site and you'll lose that business.
The following step is to brainstorm your keywords - keeping in mind your target audience. How would they search for me? What would they look for? Don't focus on how you identify yourself. The closer you are to your target audience, the more hits you will get, which equates to more customer traffic. The more specifically you target, the better off you are. You're not going to have success if you list yourself too generically, there is too much competition and you'll be lost in the crowd.
Once you have established your target market, define what specific categories you should be linking to and add them as part of your navigation page. A linking strategy is very important for building your link reputation. Links to your page will count towards link reputation and link popularity.
There are a lot of different search engines - six in particular that give you about 90% of all web-traffic. Of those Google has the most web traffic so we'll focus on it. Google has a link page rank feature which rates the importance of your page. You'll want to download their toolbar http://toolbar.google.com . This will allow you to view the ranking of every site you visit and how important it is in the almighty eye of Google. This is a key ingredient in determining linking strategy. Google ranks itself as a 10 on their scale of 0 to 10 (the higher the ranking, the more important a page).
This is determined essentially by who is endorsing and linking to you.
You must map out how you're going to get Google give to you a high page rank. For Google, the most important attribute is the title tag. You want to make sure you use your most targeted key word in the beginning of your title tag. Google will typically list the first 83 characters so the title is where you put your most valued key word(s) so it can be easily accessed.
The next maneuver is to focus on your link relevancy. Link relevancy is how well the text on your pages relates to your title tag, also taking in consideration the content of neighboring web pages. The analysis of all of this data enables Google to return results that are relevant to user queries. You want to be sure you are listed in user queries so make your content match your title, match your links, and match your products and or services. Remaining consistent and obvious is your key to directing traffic to your site.
Copyright 2005 Frontier Marketing Intl, LLC
Monitor and Increase Your Search Engine Visibility with the DIY SEO Tools
Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul
In this three part article, you'll find many tools that any webmaster can use to monitor your site's search engine position, and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com/
Most of the coverage I've seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to "View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links".
And that's a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. But one great thing missed about this tool are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands off monitoring of your site.
Fagan Finder's URL Info
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/
This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg.
You can use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if you're a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.
Spannerwork's Spider Simulator
http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html
Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to include in their databases? Go to this page to see what information is seen by the spider and what it skips over.
Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up to a spider but doesn't, with its HTTP viewer. They also have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.
GoRank.com's Top Ten Comparison
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/
If you've been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you haven't hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.
In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization efforts are going wrong. Don't forget to stop by Google for your API key at http://www.google.com/api as you'll need it to create your free account.
Search Guild's Keyword Difficulty Checker
http://searchguild.com/difficulty/
This one's an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking your pages, it's a good idea to run it through this tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts.
You'll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that nailed, it's pretty reliable in telling you whether it's worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities page as well.
In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools specific to Yahoo and Google that will help you track your rankings and study your site.
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You can find hundreds of pages of tips and news on traffic generation, search engines, blogs and RSS every day at http://www.freetraffictip.com
GoogSpy: Business Counter Intelligence for Everyone
Copyright 2005 Sandra Stammberger
So, you want to know what your competitors are up to these days, or maybe you want to research a keyword campaign that will rank you at the top of the heap for whatever product or service you're selling? Meet GoogSpy, a special search engine that not only shows you what Google AdWords your competitors are buying, but it will display all of the search terms that rank them in the top 10, PLUS it even displays their top 25 competitors.
What search engine does it base all of its intelligence on? Well, with a name like GOOGspy, there can only be one. GoogSpy.com is powered by a product called "WebScraper+" which is the brainchild of Arizona-based Velocityscape. According to Michael J. Roberts, Velocityscape's President, GoogSpy extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads them into the GoogSpy.com database which it then makes available for anyone to search.
Normally, when it comes to business intelligence software, a sentence which read: "which it then makes available for anyone to search." would end with the phrase "for a fee.", but that's not the case with GoogSpy. At least for the time being the tool is 100% free to use by anyone who cares to go to http://www.GoogSpy.com and use it.
So, what's the value of such a powerful tool for the average business web site operator? That depends upon how much value you place on being able to see how a competitor spends their advertising dollar and who else is competing with them.
The interface is fairly straight forward. You enter your search term in the text box and click the "Search button. If GoogSpy finds content it will display the company name, if any, as a hyperlink under the company heading and the search terms, also as hyperlinks, under the Search terms heading. If it doesn't find anything then it doesn't display anything. For about two minutes more development time the programmers could have added a "Sorry, your search term did not return any results" message but I guess less is more with these guys.
The fact that they are still building their database is apparent when you enter some company names that should be found yet are not. However, when a hit IS found, the information is spot on. On top of that, the tool is pretty good at ferreting out things you wouldn't normally consider. For example, do a search on CIA.gov and you'll discover that the CIA buys several AdWords in Google. Now that's spying!
They also have an option to browse by Company and Search Term, but the interface for doing that is relatively useless for a serious search. However, it can be a lot of fun if you're simply killing time and want to see what you can see.
It takes a few minutes of clicking around before you get the hang of what you are reading and how powerful a tool this really is. If you are working on an advertising or marketing plan, whether it be one that you'll really use, or one that your banker wants to see, be sure to make a few passes through GoogSpy.com to see what the rest of the your market is doing and how much they're spending. It will be worth the trip.
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