Promote Your Business

Do you have a website? If so, you absolutely need traffic.

You may be asking: what do you mean by “traffic”. I’m glad you asked. Website traffic refers to people checking out your site. Consider the possibility of laying out the investment to build a website, and thousands of dollars later, you have nice-looking site that no one knows about and thereby not earning you money. You may as well put a McDonald’s smack-dab in the middle of Death Valley.

There are many ways to get traffic. If you need traffic fast, there are two basic methods you can use.

First, you can borrow traffic. Most businesses can use some form of this method, and I encourage you to creatively adapt it to your specific situation. In essence, you simply get another website owner to agree to recommend your product or service to their “list” of interested individuals. This usually involves offering a referral fee or commission to get them to agree to this.

This particular method is effective for two reasons I’ll mention. Firstly, the website owner has already gathered the list of people who are interested in your specific topic, saving you the expense and time of identifying them. Secondly, in so doing you are “borrowing” on the goodwill of the referrer. Consider in your own experience. If you need to make a buying decision, do you place more weight in traditional, self-serving advertising or upon the impartial recommendations of friends and advisers? Most people choose the latter.

The “borrowing traffic” method can generally be performed without upfront cash, though you will have to pay a percentage of sales.

The second basic fast-traffic method is to pay for advertising. You have many options available for paid advertising, and I’m going to recommend pay-per-click advertising. Google Adwords is the easiest venue to start with this method, although Yahoo and MSN have similar programs. With pay-per-click advertising, you are able to target specific keywords that people are searching for, and you can start in a matter of minutes.

This method of advertising is attractive for numerous reasons. Chief of these is the ability to match the words people are searching for with your particular ad. Another great benefit is you can track many aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns.

This method does mean you will pay before making sales, although Google probably won’t charge your credit card until the end of the month. As a caution, in the beginning you will want to monitor your Adwords account often to make sure you are not spending more than you intended.

These are only two methods of getting traffic to your website. Future articles will reveal many more methods.