[Show Transcript]
I’m Randy Charach from RandyReport.com and THIS is the show that takes you from internet zero to business hero!
In this week’s lesson we’ll dig into the topic that is one of the most important topics of all — and that is traffic. Getting traffic, visitors to your website, is like getting customers in the door of an offline business and it’s something you must focus on in order to have a successful Internet business.
Fortunately for you there are many ways that are fast and free or really inexpensive to create a stampede of qualified visitors to your website, and today you’re going to learn some of the best ways to do just that.
I’m Randy Charach, and this is the show that takes you from internet zero to business hero!
You can have the best product in the world with the best website and the best sales copy and a perfect system to capture and process orders, but without people going to your website all that effort is wasted and will not earn you a single dime.
In the off-line world that would be equivalent to setting up your store in the middle of the desert with no roads leading in or out. There are a few big DON’T’S and lots of options for Do’s when it comes to getting traffic to your site.
So let’s start out with what NOT to do. It’s a good place to start because as someone new online your easy prey for people who will sell you useless traffic and not only waste your time and money but possibly get you into trouble. I’m talking about advertisements that you’ll find that say 10,000 or 100,000 or a million visitors to your website for a hundred bucks or $2000 whatever is. I’m also talking what is known as a safelist, and anything that smells like mass e-mail broadcasting. In other words, if it looks really easy, or worse yet, requires no work on your part and it’s relatively cheap to reach thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of potential prospects — stay away. At best, you’ll be wasting your time and money. You also run the risk of being pegged as a spammer and can be subject to fines and even jail, although that would be unlikely in this case. More likely you’ll end up dealing with a lot of angry people, including search engines who may decide to ban your site altogether from their search engine.
Okay, let’s move on to more positive things and dig into some legitimate and really effective ways you can quickly get qualified visitors to your website for no or low cost. One of the best ways to get traffic to your site, or a website that you’re promoting as an affiliate, is through article submission. The process of submitting articles starts with writing or having an article written that relates directly to the topic of your website and in including a link back to your website in the article.
Once you have the article written there are many places online where you can have it included in a directory of articles. These directories are where other people with websites look for content and will display your article on their site. By providing free content to other websites by way of your article, you gain traffic directly from the sites displaying your articles. On top of that, you also create inbound links from other sites to your website and this alone whether people click on those links or not, help to get your site to show up when people search for your topic on the Internet.
As an alternative to writing articles yourself or even hiring someone to write the articles for you; you can look for public domain material. Public Domain material includes most publications by the government, and anything published before 1923. You can also get content from material that is available to be private labeled. Private Labels works allow you to attach your own name to the content as author….but if you do this I highly suggest you customize it enough so it’s not recognizable as the same material that will appear elsewhere on the Internet otherwise the search engines will likely ignore it as they don’t like to see duplicate content. In addition to that, even if you’re just looking for direct traffic from people clicking the link from the article, you’re going to get more people interested in the material and clicking to your site if you’ve added value to it by customizing it and focusing it more specifically towards your target audience.
I’d have to say that article submission is my number one choice for you to get traffic and improve your search engine rankings for your website. It does take a little bit of time though, and certainly some effort and a small expense so it’s something I definitely suggest you do but in the meantime if you want traffic right away, like the next day, then you probably want to go to a method called PPC or pay per click advertising. This method is relatively cheap and fast to get started and a very effective and targeted way to get targeted traffic to your site. PPC advertising involves setting up an account with a major search engine; Google for example calls their PPC advertising program Adwords. So, in Google’s case, you get an Adwords account and start bidding on keywords related to your topic, then your advertisements with a link to your website show up when people search for your keywords on, in this case…Google.
Another great way to get traffic to your site, and this one’s free and somewhat effortless, is to be available for interviews by credible people or provide testimonials for products that you believe in. Typically when you provide an interview or testimonial your name and website appears along with the posting.
Yet another free and simple way to get traffic to your site is to post comments on blogs related to your topic, post in forums and provide valuable content…for example…answers to a question…basically anytime you go online and have an opportunity to provide a useful comment on someone else’s website, you’ll typically have an opportunity to include a link back to your site and this is how you build credibility, search engine fuel and direct traffic to your website. Make sure when you do this you actually provide real insight and an intelligent response to the topic of which you’re relating to. It may become tempting to not even read what you’re responding to on a blog or in a forum just so you can get your link posted. In many cases, the webmaster will not include your post and if it is included and doesn’t say much or doesn’t make sense, then you’re wasting your time and hurting your brand.
Another way to get traffic to your site is through effective use of social networking. Social networking sites are those where an online community of people share similar interests. These are also known as Web 2.0 sites and some of the most common are FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace and Squidoo. You can get free targeted traffic from the proper use of social networking sites, but as in all forms of effective marketing it’s important that you play by the rules and develop relationships then pull people towards you as opposed to attempting to blatantly push people into doing business with you.
It’s all about starting and joining conversations related to whatever it is that you focus on at your website. When you set up your own social networking page or profile, and join groups of various social networking sites, as well as participate on other individual profiles of which you’ve developed a relationship with then you place yourself in a position to be able to direct traffic to your site. Once you become an authority at your profile on any given social networking site, or a valued contributor to someone else’s page or group…then, and only then will people seek more information from you, and that’s when they will go to your website hungry for more of what you have to offer.
So go set up your profile if you haven’t already in the most popular social networking websites include a link back to your main website and actively contribute content to your profile and engage in conversations related about the topic of your site. This also takes time, but not a lot of time for the type of results you can achieve. It’s a free way for you to get new visitors to your site and new customers for your business.
Remember, people are mostly online because they’re looking for information!
In order for you to get qualified traffic to your site and people interested in buying what it is you have to offer…you really must be a credible source of information with a specific point of view and provide solutions for people seeking out the type of information you’re providing. This is assuming that you’re in the information publishing business online. Most people who are making money online are selling information, and I’m going to assume and even suggested that’s what you do. If you’re the exception to the rule and you’re selling something other than information then everything I’ve said in this lesson and in other lessons still apply to you, because providing information and being a credible person and company is essential to every type of business and service both off and on-line.
There are many more ways for you to get traffic to your website… today I covered the top handful of ways to do it and suggest that before you start looking for more ways to get traffic, dig deeper into what we discussed today and put some of your new knowledge into trackable action.
Our question today is from Mark S. who wrote: “I get quite a bit of traffic to my site but very few sales, what types of things can I do to change this?”
Okay, Mark there are a few things that I would look at, and the first would be to quantify exactly how much traffic you getting and how many sales you’re getting from that traffic. If for example you’re getting 100 unique visitors to your site per day and making one sale per day, then you’re getting a 1% conversion.
This brings us into a whole new topic of converting website visitors to customers and a whole new set of variables that need to be looked at, such as elements of your website, price of your product, and many more things which we will cover in future lesson that focus on this topic.
As your question relates to traffic though, I want you to look at your weblogs, your traffic statistics, and see where that traffic’s coming from and how long the average visitor stays on your page. I don’t know what you consider a lot of traffic, but this will help you at least see where that traffic is coming from and how long they stay on your site. That alone may help you figure out whether the people coming to your site are actually looking for what it is you offer; as opposed to getting to your site and leaving within seconds because they thought they were coming for something else.
Well, that wraps up this episode of Randy Report
Today you learned that submitting articles, using pay per click advertising, and getting involved in social networking are three very important ways for you to get traffic to your website. Learning this will NOT get a single visitor to your website. However, applying this information will bring you all the traffic you’ll ever need to raise the bar in your business and go from Internet zero to business hero.
[End of Show Transcript]
