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Traffic Generation Techniques

By Eddie Watkins


The importance of traffic cannot be overemphasized, and traffic generation techniques are of extreme importance to the future of your online business. Why? Because without visitors you might as well have no website at all.

Obtaining traffic is one of the main reasons for having a website. Let's compare your website to a shoe store. In your shoe store you sell tennis shoes, loafers, pumps, flip flops and golf shoes. If no one comes into your store to purchase your array of products, your business will soon go down the tubes. Whatever medium you choose to use, you must advertise your business. Just as with your website, you must have visitors in order to thrive.

Without website traffic you may as well give up, as a shopping mall store would close its doors, so what can you do to attract the traffic that your survival depends upon? The answer to that question could fill a book - and a very large book! Much depends on how you look at it, but there are basically four different ways of directing traffic to your website:

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

There isn't enough room here to discuss all of these, and you will likely be familiar with many of the more conventional traffic generation techniques, so let's have a look at one or two of the less well known methods within each of these categories that can be used to attract website traffic to your site.

Search Engines

This is not about SEO because you will have read all you can about that. It works if you know what you are doing, but generally not if you just follow instructions by rote. However there are ways to use search engines to get to your web pages.

One of these techniques are smart pages. Your visitors never see these pages, but the search engines can find these pages when they spider the web. The way they work is for you to create as many of these pages as you can using keywords on your website that people use to seek information. There is software out there that you can use to make this process easier.

The way that the smart pages work is when a person is searching for a certain keyword phrase, using any one of the many search engines. Your web page has usually already been indexed for that certain keyword. So wouldn't you think that the person would be directed to your indexed web page. That not so. They would be directed to the page that the software has been programmed to send them to. A person can set up as many of these smart pages as they deem neccesary, and the visitor that does the search will be sent to the page that the software is set to send them to.

If you have certain information on your web site pertaining to certain keywords you can use this among other techniques to get the search engines to send visitors to your webpages.

Online Advertising

Let's look at a couple of online advertising techniques that one can use. You can use your blog to advertise your webpages, and also articles for the same purpose. You can also use PPC and Adwords, even though you can go through a lot of money using these options. Searchfeed is a resource that you could use, their pay-per-click ads start out at 1 cent per ad.

Classified Advertising

A lot of people forget about the power of classifed advertising. Putting a small ad in your local newspaper has a lot of power. Sending postcards through the mail, advertsing your website has also been proven to be quite productive. Having flyers made up from your local print shop, and distributing them to certain areas around town is also a great way to use the power of offline advertising. These avenues are sometimes forgotten by people trying to get the word out, when promoting their products.

Buzz Advertising

Buzz advertising is a good way to promote your products. Get talking about your products and the benefits that they can bring, get your family and friends to do the same get the word out. Wherever you go drop a couple of your business cards, at the doctors office, the car repair place, pin a couple up at your local grocery store. The more your advertising is placed in front of people the more likely they are going to respond to it.

Website traffic is very important to your online business, and it is the lifeblood of your business. You will have to find and use the techniques that are best suited to you. Why don't you go out on a limb and try some of the methods that are mentioned above.

Visitors to your website is of the utmost importance and the traffic generation techniques that you choose, means that your business lives or dies. Without traffic your online success will be very limited.

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