Learn How To Get A Consistent Flow Of Targeted Traffic To Your Website
Written by Dhruv Patel   
Thursday, 05 November 2009 13:47
It's so frustrating! You have an excellent product or service. You've had a professional design a snappy website for you. Yet you're still wondering, where's the business? Here's how to get a consistent flow of targeted traffic to your website.
by DhruvPatel


It's so frustrating! You have an excellent product or service. You've had a professional design a snappy website for you. Yet you're still wondering, where's the business? Here's how to get a consistent flow of targeted traffic to your website.

There are two key phrases in the last statement that sum up what online businesses should seek: "consistent flow" and "targeted traffic." "Consistent flow" means that customers visit your web site on a regular basis, one after the other, or several at once, as is possible with the Internet. "Targeted traffic" means that you draw the attention of people who are specifically interested in the products or services you're offering.

Businesses have used joint ventures for years. It's basically a short-term partnership in which you and another business mutually agree to promote one another's wares using your respective customer lists. Joint ventures work well for marketing if you take care to partner with a business that's related to your own business, such as a sewing machine company promoting a fabric store. You want to be careful about not doing too many of such promotions, however. Your customers won't like being flooded with emails about other businesses when they're mainly interested in yours.

Pay-per-click advertising is the Internet version of the familiar ad in print publications; you pay a publisher a fee for the use of space and then you come up with the best advertising you can think of to promote your business. The difference is that instead of paying for advertising according to the estimated number of print subscribers, TV viewers or radio listeners, you pay for your ad according to the number of online users who click on the ad to go to your website. This method brings you lots of traffic in a hurry. However, the volume of traffic doesn't always translate into lots of sales. This means that pay-per-click sales can be among your most expensive, business-wise; you pay more to get these customers to your website in order to get they to purchase your wares.

Ezine advertising differs from pay-per-click advertising this way: Rather than your ad showing up with others when connected to a particular search topic, your ezine ad captures the solo space under your classification. This increases your web traffic quickly, but again doesn't make traffic become sales instantly.

Joint Ventures are where you and another business swap mutual promotion. In a setup like this, you email their ad or offer to your subscriber or mailing list and they do the same for you. Since you're already working with a list of interested customers, this method tends to build up real business faster than pay-per-click or ezine advertising, which drive up traffic but don't help your conversion rate.

By far the most effective way to get a consistent flow of targeted traffic to your website is through the use of "article marketing." The Internet is a content hog; websites are always looking for fresh content. In article marketing, you write about your expertise on a given topic - such as increasing Internet traffic - and you include the website address of your business as a reference. Article marketing doesn't require you to write like Stephen King or John Gresham. Simply write what you know in about 500 words or less, but always include a paragraph at the end that identifies you as an expert and includes your website.

The easiest way to start with article marketing is to write up the questions that customers ask you about your field, and the turn your answers into articles of 500 words or less. You don't have to be a prize-winning writer to write these articles. Just use a style that's conversational, as if you were chatting with a friend. Make sure, though, that your article is spelled correctly (don't rely on your word processor's spellchecker), because nothing says "amateur" to an online reader quicker than a bunch of misspelled words. Care enough about the article - which, after all, is intended to market your business - to be sure that it's spelled right and uses correct grammar. Have someone else in the business read your article before you post it, just to be sure its factually correct as well.

Try any of these four methods, or a combination of them, to get that consistent flow of targeted traffic to your website in order to assure your online business success.

About the Author:

Dhruv Patel is a customer of DreamHost. He has created site to help new DreamHost customers and to promote DreamHost by giving DreamHost coupon.