Part 2 Advertising for Traffic Part 1
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Advertising for Traffic Part 1
Advertising, by and large, is a flexible part of your sales plan – traffic generation itself is also pretty flexible. You’ll need to ensure that your site is ready for the traffic – which is a whole separate, ongoing project. Once you’ve created a site that is search and visitor ready though, you’ll find that fitting in an hour of traffic generation a day will do wonders for your sites.
Big Tip: set up a budget to stick to, you can then plan what offers you the best bargains for your investment, which in turn, will give you an idea as to how much legwork you’re doing and how much of your investment is monetary and should be evaluated accordingly.
That evaluation, of course, is subjective – what might work for one group of sites, and produce strong traffic, might not work for others, so you have to track your ads.
And though that can be as simple as installing a piece of software on your website and feeding everything through there, or as complex as making several different domains and redirects and manually tracking your traffic based on landing pages, articles and linking.
Which is less exact, depending on how you – and others link to you. From there, you’ll be able to roughly estimate what traffic produced which sales – or generally, work out how worthwhile any traffic generation is based on your earnings from affiliate links and adsense earnings, if any.
Foundation:
Before you dive headlong into the actually generating traffic, you may want to make a shortlist of the sites that you want to target, and HOW you plan on targeting them. If you’re going to use your blog to drive traffic (more on that in part ) then you’ll need to post content – and set it up fully. If you want to undertake and invest in a PPC campaign, you need to do a lot of research on keywords, set and define a budget that won’t break your bank.
All of it requires research and some groundwork.
Website Content:
Website content is the ‘stuff’ that makes up your site – it can be articles, blog posts – images or videos. And it should be as unique as you can possibly make it.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use content that people have provided from free reprint sites, but instead, that you should try to keep the overall percentage of articles and other written content to a minimum of reprints. Use them, but ensure that you’ve got other content that is unique and original to make up the rest of your site.
PLR is, of course, one way to achieve this, and can make all the difference, when edited and expanded upon. But if you’ve got no access to PLR, writing content for your site isn’t too difficult. One article a day isn’t all that hard to do, but will mean that unless you start writing around a month before you found your site, that you won’t have the content to make up the site itself for nearly a month.
Its recommended that you start a site with between 20 and 30 articles, and then ‘trickle’ any additional content into the site as you’re going – that way, you’ll find that your content is both regularly updated, and regularly linked to (people are more likely, on average, to link to and discuss ‘new’ content on websites that they visit, rather than older content. Older content gets linked to because its part of an ongoing conversation, or for reference.
Content is of course, something that needs to be optimized – and that’s where one of the dangers of content production, and use, lies.
Link exchanges:
Link exchanges are a great way to build strong, two way links, to sites that will HELP YOUR READER and link back to you to help THEIR readers.
The key to this is to make sure that you understand the cardinal rule of link exchanges – once you do, you can apply it to blogs – information sites – affiliate sites – even E-books, if you do it right – and best of all, its free!
Once again, your keywords will come in handy whilst working on finding where you should request link exchanges – you’ll need to do some research. Target the sites that you’d turn to for information first – and then search for sites that are similar to it. Check out the sites that are linking to your ‘possible exchangees’.
Requesting a link exchange:
Its important to remember that the link exchanges that you undertake should be done with the utmost respect and personalization on your part. You can’t just BCC to a couple of dozen sites and hope you’ll get hits and feedback.
Dear (name),
I have visited your website, and was hoping you’d be interested in exchanging link information with my site. We’re both within the same niche, so I thought you might want to exchange links with me – to exchange traffic between our sites.
(You might briefly elaborate on how your products or services are complimentary rather than competitive)
Please visit my website at http://whatever.com. After you have reviewed my site and if you are interested in a link exchange, please contact me at
Your Name
Your Telephone Number
Your email address
Thank you,
Your name
Company name
Website address
Link exchanges are best undertaken to sites with a PR rank that don’t have links to sites unrelated to them. This is important because your primary goal in this, is not only to develop traffic, but to develop your page rank – with a higher page rank you’ll find that your site appears more often in search engines.
You should also ensure that your link exchanges is fresh, and haven’t dropped in page rank – every month, you should check your linked sites. Make sure that they aren’t dead, offline, or hard to access, that they haven’t changed to sites that you would not want to link for, for any reason, and that they aren’t turning into link farms. Doing so will preserve YOUR page rank (cause linking to lower ranked sites).
There’s an important caveat to link exchanging – you can’t just offer to link exchange and then not follow through. If you’re not committing a two-way exchange, then you should be honest, and up front with the sites in question – and consider, instead, purchasing a link. And in which case, be aware that search engines frown on this, and feel that its an artificial way to gain page rank, so may penalize you, AND the site(s) in question if you are discovered.
Whilst there’s no conclusive evidence that this is acted on frequently, there are rules in the Google Webmaster guidelines about buying, and selling links.
Is your website ready?
This is a simple question to answer – if you’re planning on driving traffic to a funnel or squeeze page via PPC for example, is all of that ready?
If you’re collecting emails from your visitors, are your opt-in boxes and auto responders ready?
Is there content on your site?
All of these questions are of equal importance, though having ample content and information for your visitors, your sales pages tested and opt-in boxes completely live is one of the most important steps you can make towards ensuring your traffic won’t leave your site, never to return.
Once you’ve put everything on your site you can then start driving traffic towards it without needing to do additional work.
Though it’s very hard to do so without seeing results, and can be very disheartening to work on a site that isn’t showing any results at all, you’ll find it far easier to sustain your traffic generation efforts if everything is in place in advance.
You’ll also have to pick up a few tools – if you don’t already have them. One of the biggest ‘tools’ you’ll need to pick up is an auto responder
It might seem odd that you need to pay a site to run your email campaigns but given the way the Internet has become overrun with spam, the average Joe can’t run his own auto responder Even if you’ve got your own auto responder, you’ll need to set up targeted collection and response systems directly designed around the traffic that you want.
Now the only question left is where to put those opt-in boxes on your pages.
Opt-In Boxes:
The placement of opt-in boxes on your pages is a vital decision and one that is going to have a direct effect on exactly how many people do, in fact, opt-in to your list. What information you ask for is an equally important factor in your opt-in success.
You should always make sure you’re not asking for too much information from your sign ups – people are becoming more and more aware and wary of giving out information about themselves to sites, with identity theft ever on the increase. So if you’re asking for information, make sure you’ve got a valid reason for doing so – or just don’t ask.
You do not need a potential customer’s address, or phone number, until you have them place an order – so asking for it on your opt-in is likely to make them not sign up.
You should also always ensure that you’ve placed your sign up box above the fold, on every page. Make sure its in a consistent place – that way, people will eventually ‘decide’ to sign up, through impressions, and will know that its the same sign up every page, so know that no matter where they are, they can sign up. This impression of steadiness is important in any online company.
The Opt-In Incentive:
Its important to remember that part of what will drive your traffic is incentive. The same holds true for sign ups once on your site. Offer an valuable incentive for people to join your mailing list and they are more likely to do so – and you’re on the first rung of ‘trust’ with them. As it takes an average of seven to fourteen impressions for a user to buy from a site, especially a site they’ve browsed to (with a few notable exceptions, such as pre-qualifying themselves for an adsense ad or similar or that your site offers exactly what they are searching for), then by far the easiest way to get opt-ins to your auto responder is to offer a copy of an E-book that matches your niche, appeals to your targeted prospects, and most of all, is both valuable, but very cheap for you to provide.
Do you have a traffic tracking system?
Before you even consider posting ads, you need to think about whether you can track what you’re doing.
Ad tracking is important because you’ll find that you can see where your traffic is coming, easily, efficiently and can work out what to continue with, and what to adjust, or ditch.
Ad tracking is important because not only can you see what is working and what isn’t, but you can also refine your niche plan, and targeted areas within those niches – refining, further your information for the groups you’re approaching and whether that works.
Traffic tracking isn’t too hard – you can choose one of several ways to do so – either by redirecting your traffic through software on your sever, or free, through projects like ‘Google analytics’.
Both will require that you change some code on your site for tracking, but will give you the opportunity to keep an eye on your best performers, and cut your losses if something isn’t working.
The Next Post will talk about you Advertising Plan.
To Our Success,
Brandi J Roberts
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