The number one thing most Internet marketers need is traffic. Without traffic how would you make any sales? It doesn’t matter how great your website is. You could have the best headline and ad copy in the world, but without a sufficient amount of traffic you will not do very well. These are proven methods for getting targeted traffic flowing to your site.
Write articles. This is a great technique that does more than just bring traffic to you. It puts you in the position to show your expertise and build trust in your prospects’ minds. This is very important. People have to trust you if they are going to order. Nobody will buy from you if they don’t first feel comfortable with you. Articles are a great way to “break the ice”. Here is what to do. Write a series of articles relating to your market niche. Distribute two articles per week to major ezines such as http://www.ezinearticles.com/ or http://www.goarticles.com/. At the bottom of the article you are allowed to have a signature (or bio). You can include a small amount of information about your website and a link to your homepage. If people like the information you give them, they will click the link and visit your site. This is why it’s important to provide useful, high quality information. People will only want to visit your website if you give them something of value first.
Exchange links with popular sites. This method works on two levels: first of all, you will receive traffic through the your links posted on other sites. Also, as more and more websites link to yours, your search engine rankings naturally begin to rise. This can be a major source of traffic. Showing up on the first page of results in the major search engines can bring you tens of thousands of visitors per month.
Here is how to get links to your site. Look up sites that relate to the theme of your website. Ask them to do a link exchange with you. In the email provide a link to the page that you are displaying their link on. Now the ball is in their court. They will either accept your offer or not. If they refuse to do an exchange with you take their link off of your site.
Use Pay Per Click advertising. Although PPC costs money, it can be a great way to drive highly targeted traffic to your site. If you select the right keywords and make intelligent bidding choices it can prove to be very cost effective and useful. Google Adwords and Overture are the two largest PPC companies. However Yahoo and MSN also offer pay per click advertising as well. To get the most out of PPC you need to be armed with a fair amount of knowledge. I suggest buying a book or ebook on the subject before embarking on a campaign.
Campaign Blasts is a great ebook that will teach you how to set up your campaigns.
While any one of the traffic generation strategies above can make a major difference, I suggest using all of them combined. This will give you the most traffic possible in the shortest amount of time. The more effort you put into the tactics provided in this article the more they will work for you.