Friday, October 31, 2008

How to get Targeted Traffic to Your Website!

By Greg Smithers

Everyone who has a website knows that to have sales you must have traffic, but not just any traffic it has to be targeted traffic.

Targeted refers to finding visitors who are interested in the topic of your website. As an example, speed boat enthusiasts will find websites about speed boats more interesting.

There are a range of techniques for getting traffic that is targeted.

Forums - If you are an active participant in a forum you can obtain targeted traffic through the link to your website you can add to the signature. If you spam you are likely to get banned. However, if you add value by joining in debates and answering questions you may even come to be known as an expert. If others like your style, the quality of your posts or even the promotional text in your signature you can generate targeted traffic that doesn't cost you anything.

Linking from/to other websites: Contact website owners that have similar but not competitive websites to yours, ask them for a reciprocal link from their website to yours. Be sure to select your link partner to match closely your customer profile. Software programs such as Arelis are very helpful in this process.

E-zines provide a ready made source of targeted traffic because they are nearly always focused on a particular niche. Different e-zines tend to have different conversion rates, so it is good to do a test advertising run to check the return on investment, before spending too much on advertising with a particular e-zine.

Newsletters - As well as using other web owners e-zines, you should consider starting your own newsletter. In this way, you can build up your own list of targeted people and when the size of the list grows you can start selling your own advertising as well.

E-books - People like to receive things for free. You can give away e-books which contain useful information and are valued (and read). The trick is to include links back to your site. If the information is really useful, the books tend to be passed on from one person to another creating a viral effect.

Joint Ventures: Contact online marketers looking for new products to sell. They often have large mailing lists with eager to buy customers. Normally they are willing to email their list for a cut of the sale price. This works particularly well with informational products. It has several advantages. It can give a very sizeable boost to both your sales and mailing list within a very short period.

Buying traffic through Pay Per Click (PPC) is usually the fastest way to get extremely targeted traffic. As you have control over the keywords, you can be sure that the visitors are looking for exactly what you can provide. This tends to result in a much higher conversion rate.

By applying a number of these techniques you can increase your level of targeted traffic which, in turn, can increase the profitability of your website.

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