How To Drive Targeted Traffic To Your Website And Earn Lots Of Cash In The Process #ExpertWriter
Every website needs traffic. The life of every business on the internet is the amount of visitors you have and can drive to your website on a daily basis. There are various means of generating website traffic. Unfortunately, most people think that driving traffic to their website entails only one thing and that is building the site! Wrong. If you have been involved in any form of business at all whether offline or online, you’ll realize that the soul of every viable business is in the amount of customers or clients it can make and how many sales it can generate. This of course depends on the amount of prospects they can get to buy their products and services.
There are various methods of generating traffic to your online business. They are grouped into two major classes:
Online Traffic Generation Methods
Offline Traffic Generation Methods
Because this is a series on traffic generation, we’ll start with looking at traffic generation methods offline.
Now I know that seems like a contradiction. I mean how could you use an offline based method of advertising to promote an online based product and services? Well, let me show you. The various ways through which you can generate and drive traffic o your website are
Advertising in the dailies.
Use of stickers on your car, door etc.
Banner advertising.
Billboard advertising.
Writing articles for newspapers.
Buying ad space in the newspapers.
Printing flyers for distribution.
Creating jingles for radio and TV Ads.
Printing of Business cards that could be handed out to people with your website address on it.
Exhibitions and Trade Fairs.
Printing your company name and website address on your clothes.
These are some of the many forms of promoting your website offline. Note that these methods look pretty simple but they are very effective forms of advertising.
Advertising in the dailies is not as hard and definitely not very expensive if you were to place your ads in the classified sections of the magazine. To do this, all you need do is call up the advertising manager of each newspaper publication you intend to advertise in and ask the current rates for their classifieds. Most times, their rates are really cheap. If you want a database of national dailies that you could advertise in, visit nationaldailies.com (Include real website from Google cash). They have in their listings over 250 newspapers with a reach of over 1 million subscribers. This way, your ads gets to be seen by about a million people. Follow carefully here. All you need is just about $750 a month on these adverts. If just one percent of those who see your ads were to visit your website, you’ll have ten thousand visitors –some ads have been known to do a lot better than pull 1 percent to the website. Now, let’s assume you sell products worth just $29 each. If just 200 people buy from you, you’ll end up with a net sales of about $5800 and a profit margin of $5050. That’s an incredible 500+ percent profit from just one campaign. Now, you see how profitable that can be. Not to mention the number of people who will visit your website as a result of the ads you put in the newspapers.
We looked at how you could coin powerful headlines that is bound to cause a click through frenzy. Now, we’ll be looking at how you can build the body of the article to pique the reader’s interest so much that he’ll want more and then create a byline that will cause your audience to be very eager to see what else you have to say and offer.
Creating the body of an article is not as hard as it seems. It is simply outlining your thoughts in an orderly manner so that one point flows into another resulting a well written article. To be honest, there are quite a number of well written articles and billions of pages of poorly written, dry, boring articles. The important thing you want to cause is that readers get a lot more information. This is why we say we all live in the information age. Only those with access to the highest quality information will stay at the top and garner more readership support. Be sure that your content is something that your readers desire and then give it to them. This is one of the single most important ways to build a readership base and ultimately, make money while doing it.
Creating an outline only takes a few minutes. For example, let’s say I want to write an article on building a website. A sample outline would go like this:
Title
The importance of a website (Introduction)
Learning HTML
Setting out the contents of the site
Acquiring the tools or software necessary for building the website and do a comparison of their ease of use, dynamic functions etc.
How to Start building the website
Uploading the website using either the FTP provided by my Host or another FTP software etc.
You get the idea. Let one thought flow into the other. It helps make your readers understand the article better and gain a lot more from it. If you have valuable resources at your disposal, include the links in the article. This way, your readers get more value. Often a well-written article will create a hunger for more articles by the writer. Most article directories will include your expert author’s link at the bottom of your article after your Byline so it would be easy to access your other articles.
After you have gotten them to read your article, you want them to either visit your website or buy a product you are selling as an affiliate or as a merchant. This is where your byline becomes important. How well you write your byline will determine how many people will click through. Often, your articles should build their expectations so much that they would just want to click through. Still notwithstanding, it is good idea to craft your byline well. To craft your byline to get maximum results, look at bylines in any articles you might have seen previously. Start noticing the really good ones –those which caused you to automatically click- and copy their pattern of writing. I do not mean copy word-for-word. Take after them. Try to craft Bylines like they did. With practice, you’ll find you are able to create compelling bylines that your readers will only be too glad to click through to see what else you have to offer.
Remember today’s lesson: Create an orderly outline and learn how to write compelling bylines.
In the previous issue of this series, we looked at how you could use article directories to generate traffic for any product or services you are selling. In this issue, we’ll be looking at how we can move it a little further. You’ll be learning how to use your articles to even generate a bigger readership audience and make more money in the process.
Asides using the article directories, there are various means you can promote your articles with. Some of them are: Use of social network sites popularly known as Web2.0 portals, Submitting your articles to Ezine publishers who need quality content related to the topic you are writing on, News Sites and News feeds, tagging, allowing other people to publish your articles, increasing the Keyword Density of the article etc. Using these techniques is not rocket science. If you know how to check your email and type a few letters and emails, then you can use the techniques to gather as many visitors as you want.
Let’s start with using social networking websites. These are communities online that cater to providing an avenue through which people can get to meet each other for the first time, or where old time friends can catch up with each other. It’s like a get together joint for people across the globe. Examples of these include MySpace, Orkut, hi5, etc. Some of these websites have as much as a billion hits daily. At least hi5 has that much traffic on a daily basis and MySpace has about the same. Imagine the potentials inherent here. A billion hits! What if you could divert some of that traffic to you so other people can visit your website, blog etc.? The potential is limitless. How do you divert the traffic to your website or blog or get people to read your article?
Register with any of these websites that you choose. I am more familiar with MySpace.com although the dynamics of the other websites are not too different. So, we’ll use that as our working example.
Then create your profile page. The key to this is making your profile attractive and funny except if you intend to join the very serious-minded folks or “no-jokes” groups. Make your profile page appear interesting. Let people see that you are a fun guy to be with etc.
Set up your blog. This is highly important as you’ll be needing it on a daily basis. MySpace provides you with facilities so you can create your blog and start posting. Note that your blog address is different from your MySpace page. Your MySpace page is where you tell all about yourself. In short it is where the world first gets o meet you. Their first impression of you will definitely result in their either wanting to know you better or not. You can insert your blog link here as they’ll want to see what you have to offer if they are interested in knowing more about you.
Then start adding your articles, videos, and audios to your blog. This is what your invitees will see when they visit your blog and may either keep them coming back or keep them away. There is no limit to the amount of articles you can add. So as long as you are producing those, post them on your MySpace blog.
After setting up your blog and your page, you are good to go. Browse through the groups you like and start sending invites. Sending invites simply means adding people as your friends. This is your first step of introduction. When you send them the Request to add as a friend, they get it in their inbox. More often than not, they will want to check out who wants to add them; that’s the reason the initial preparation of the home page and blog page is highly important. Be careful about adding too many friends. MySpace has placed the limit of friends you can add to 400 a day. Anything above marks you out as a spammer. But as a starter, add 250 a day. It’s safe. As you get used to the modalities involved with using MySpace, you can increase the number of invites you send out.
Then start posting bulletins to your friends who have accepted you. Bulletins are a form of message. After the bulletin, include the link to your article at the bottom. Then, send and in no time, they’ll get your message. If you have just 12,000 people on your friends list, they are bound to read it if it is interesting.
That’s it. No rocket science at all. If you spend one hour a day working on this, you’ll get appreciable results in no time and lots of people will get to see your articles and probably tell their friends about it which will result in increased website traffic.
In the previous issues of these series, we have look at how you can promote your products and services using articles. In the another edition of this course, you learned how to use MySpace to promote your articles and hence, your products. In this edition, we’ll be looking at how to harness the potentials of articles and drive targeted traffic to your websites through Ezine publishers.
One very important point you have to take note of is the fact that Ezine and newsletter publishers in all fields are consistently seeking for high quality articles loaded with thorough information that can benefit their subscribers. Has it ever occurred to you that one of the top ten challenges Ezine and newsletter publishers face is consistently getting high quality articles and content to send to their subscribers? They need this because they know that if they were to keep giving their subscribers junk, their emails are likely to get ignored if not outrightly blocked resulting in them losing money they could have made from their subscribers reading their emails and purchasing their products and those recommended by them. This potentially means loss in sales and dwindling income from the list.
This is the reason they outsource the jobs of article writing and content production to freelance writers who do it for them at a token price. Now imagine how much costs you would be saving these publishers if you were to consistently offer them quality content –your articles- for free. The only catch being that your bylines remain and not be tampered with. This could be used not only for the subscribers but also for the blog readers.
If you want to explore this avenue, it is better that your content/articles be good enough for them –ezine and newsletter publishers- to want to collect and accept them. By now you would have noticed that there is a lot of emphasis on high quality content. Yes it determines your success rate in marketing your products, services, promoting your website and affiliate products using articles. This method works very well because the subscribers see your byline and click through to the page you want them to; hence increasing your sales. You are bound to make a lot more sales using this method because the subscribers trust the publisher who sends them the email.
So, how do you find these publishers who need your articles?
Visit online forums, discussion groups and message boards. Participate and look out for potential publishers who will like your articles. This can be easily done by typing “Forex trading forums” in the search bar if you are writing articles on Forex Trading etc. It is important that you also contribute to the boards to make you get recognized as a qualified individual. There is problem with well-meaning people who join message boards and start posting offers. After collecting a list of the publishers, send a sample article to them with a promise of more for free if they would only let you include your byline. Most times, the publishers jump at this offer because it helps them cut costs.
In your favorite search engine’s search bar, type in the keyword “‘niche’ Ezine publishers”. If for instance you have articles on real estate, type in the keyword “real state Ezine publishers”, “real estate newsletter publishers” etc. Then get a list of all of them and subscribe using an email account set up for receiving their newsletters. The reason you want to do this is to give you a feel of the quality of their ezines so you can meet up or even surpass the standard. Then, fire off your emails introducing yourself and asking them to take a look at your articles to see if they are “fit for consumption” by your subscribers. If they like it, they’ll often get back to you for a steady supply of articles.
There you have it. You cannot continue to complain that you are not getting traffic anymore. You have enough information to help you generate lots of traffic. Use these techniques and reap the benefits. In the next issue, you’ll learn how to use Content Syndication Websites and News Feeds to promote your articles.
Source: Aurelius Tjin
http://www.aureliustjin.com
