Traffic
If you are running your own home based business through a website, then you will be needing plenty of traffic entering the site. Free traffic through search engines, link exchanges and the likes is brilliant, but it takes time to get to this point. How can you quickly and easily generate traffic from day one? Well the simple answer is paying for traffic. Here’s some basic methods to use.
First are the Pay Per Click adverts such as Google’s Adwords. The idea is simple. You set up your own advert, with a title, description and a link to a relevant page on your website. You then type in some keywords that you want your advert to appear for. Think carefully about the keywords and don’t go too general. If you are not specific enough the advert will appear for irrelevant searches, which counts against you. You might also get too many visitors to your site, which could cost a small fortune.
With this system you are paying the service provider every time someone clicks on your advert. If people don’t click, you don’t pay. So the cost is directly related to the traffic achieved. You can usually choose between having your adverts displayed on the search engine itself and also partner sites. The latter is great if there are not many searches or your product is a bit unusual and people might not be searching for it. Instead of relying on searches, your advert can be displayed on relevant websites.
Another popular scheme is popunder advertising. Here your website is opened in a new window when a visitor visits a related website. But with many people using popup blockers, whether this is useful is debateable. One theory says that because blockers are readily available those that do see them are happy to view the adverts. But on the other hand, it could be that they just ignore the adverts anyway.
It is easily possible that the success, or failure, of this sort of advertising depends on what you are advertising. Some types of sites will benefit more than others. If you are promoting a free service then people might be happy to sign up, but if it’s an expensive product it might be harder to convert people. The only way you will know if it works for you is to give it a go.
Along the same lines is expired domain traffic. Here wholesalers buy domains that have not been renewed, that still have an amount of traffic. They then point the traffic at other websites. Because they know the sort of domain generating the traffic, in theory, it is possible to direct closely related traffic to the new site.
Again, it’s a type of traffic that may or may not work for you. As with any marketing schemes it doesn’t cost a fortune and the only way to know is to give it a try.
