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Generating Traffic for your Site Once your website is built and uploaded to the web, you must receive visitors ( traffic ) in order to make a sale. Just because it's out there doesn't mean it can be found, even if you are the only one in the world that is offering a certain product that people want. If your site isn't listed in the most popular search engines with a high ranking, it will never be seen unless you put the wheels in motion to make it happen. I will now cover 5 of the best and fastest ways to get traffic to your site, without any ranking at all. 1. Google Adwords - The absolute fastest way to get exposure online is with Google Adwords. Your ads will be running within minutes of submitting billing information. There are more than 150 million searches on Google every day, and millions more on Google's partnet sites. Google is the number one search engine used by internet surfers and shoppers. With that much market reach you'd be wise to advertise with Google. There really isn't a faster or more cost effective way to get your site in front of the masses. If you have ever done a search on Google, then you have seen them. They are the ads that run along the right side of the search page. Click on the picture to see a larger version. Your ads may be shown on search results for Google, Google Directory, Google groups and Google'g partner sites including their partners' directory results pages. Or you may choose to have your ads shown only on Google if you don't want to participate in the syndication program. Google's current syndication partners include: • America Online,
Inc. For a more exhaustive look into how you can optimize your experience with Google Adwords, see Greg Heslin's book Google Adwords 123. 2. Pay-Per-Click search engines - The second fastest way to get quality traffic to your website is through keyword-generated pay-per-click search engines. The way it works is, advertisers bid on keywords that are relevent to their site. When someone types that keyword or keyword phrase into the search box and then clicks the search button, a list of websites are shown. In the advertiser's statistics report, these "showings" are called "impressions". The advertiser does not pay for impressions. They only pay the bid amount each time someone clicks on their ad, linking through to their site. The grand-daddy of all pay-per-click search engines is Overture and it's partners. They reach 80% to 85% of all internet users, receive more than 2 Billion search queries per month, and appear on the Web's leading search sites including: MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Infospace, AlltheWeb and NetZero. Pay-per-click advertising should be at the top of your marketing strategies. Once you have begun to get an abundance of traffic with this method (and similar amounts of money) you can then begin to tweak your website for search engine optimization (SEO) for better search engine placement. There are literally hundreds of pay-per-click search engines on the web, but most of them really don't count. The best ones are listed below in alphabetical order. The top three search engines in terms of traffic volume, are Overture, Miva and Kanoodle. • http://7search.com 3. Paid Yahoo Listing - Yahoo currently charges $299 for their "Yahoo Express" expedited listing service, and $600 for Adult oriented sites, which is actually a small price to pay for the amount of traffic that Yahoo will send to your site. The service must be paid in advance, and is non-refundable. Paying does not guarantee that your site will be listed, but it does guarantee that someone (a real person) will look at your site and consider listing it in their directory, and get back to you within seven business days with their decision as to whether or not they will ad your site or deny it. If denied, you have the right to appeal and/or make changes to your site in a specified period of time, and re-submit it without being charged again. If your site is legitimate and professional, there is little chance of it being denied. To stay listed you will be charged $299 each year to renew. Though it sounds pricy to list with Yahoo, it is well worth the investment. Yahoo still has a number 1 ranking with Alexa. That means it gets more traffic than any other site on the World Wide Web. Getting your site listed in Yahoo's handpicked, human-compiled directory is one of the best ways to ensure that Google (Alexa rating = 5) crawls and picks up your home page quickly. And a link from Yahoo will also improve your ranking with Google. 4. Email Marketing - Without a doubt, permission-based email marketing is the most cost-effective method of marketing on the internet today. The keyword here is (permission-based). Blasting ads through email to a multitude of email addresses that you purchased from someone else or harvested through email harvesters or other ways of obtaining the addresses is NOT effective advertising. That is considered SPAM, and SPAMMING is illegal. No one wants to receive email advertising they didn't ask for, and doing it is more likely to hurt your business than help it. The only effective way to advertise through email is to build your own list of opt-in email addresses. These are addresses of people who have requested to receive emails from you by submitting their email address to you personally, in a request to receive your information and/or offers. And even though they have opted-in to receive whatever it is they signed up for, by law you must always include at the bottom of every mailing, instructions for them to "unsubscribe" or "opt-out" of your mailings, if ever they decide they no longer want to receive them from you. And by law, you have ten days from the date of their request to stop all mailings completely. Bottom line? Never SPAM. EVER! Now, with that out of the way, here is the reason your own opt-in email list is your most valuable marketing tool. Every day, millions of people are surfing the internet looking for products or services. Many will come across your site, brouse around a while and then leave, continuing their search. Later on they may want to return to your site because there were things there that interested them, but they just can't remember the name of your site or how they found it. You will loose many potential customers if you don't have a way to get what you offer back in front of them. If you have their email address, you can send them a reminder of what you offer. However, getting people to give you their email address is like pulling teeth. And for good reason. SPAM is running so rampant these days, that more and more people are becoming wary about handing over their email address to just anyone. But if you offer them information they need - information they are looking for - they will be glad to give you their address in order to receive that info. The best way to build an opt-in list is by offering a newsletter. Just make sure that it contains quality information that is relevent and beneficial to your subscribers needs. If it's filled with junk and jibberish, they will unsubscribe in a heartbeat. In fact, according to an Ipsos-Reid poll, 71% of all internet users have unsubscribed from at least one email list because the information delivered was not sufficiently interesting or relevent. Once you have built a fairly large list of subscribers, you will need to automate. A good autoresponder can take care of all your subscibes, unsubscribes, and mailings automatically, freeing up your time to do the more improtant things, like counting your money. :o) 5. Ezine Advertising - What are ezines? They are e-lectronic maga-zines. Pronounced e-zeen, not e-zine. One of my biggest pet peeves is the mispronunciation of simple English words. Ok, sorry for the digression. There are thousands of ezines published on the internet today, and there is a great chance that many of them are published on topics relevent to your site. Placing ads in ezines is a very affective way to get tons of traffic to your website for very little advertising cost. Some even charge less than one dollar per ad depending on the quantity you buy, such as partenon.com. Be sure you don't confuse ezine advertising with safelist advertising. Safelists are subscribed to by advertisers only, and their sole objective is to sell their product through their ads, not purchase from other advertisers. All safelists are a waste of time, whether they are free or paid, because in my estimation well over 90% of the advertisers that receive them don't even look at them. The only thing they get you is a ton of ads from other advertisers. A safelist ad-blaster looks like this - Blaster-Man. There are thousands of variations to these. Don't waste your time with them. TrueTest Marketing has blasted thousands of ads through over fifty different safelists (both paid and free) that guaranteed results, with almost NO results at all. And our ad copy was GOOD. There is however, one exception to this rule. It is a system called 1st Family Classifieds, which is the world's leading provider of online classified ads. In this fast growing market, 1st-Family Classifieds is the only serious choice for online classifieds, and the only classified ad system that runs on hundreds of servers, is the oldest running system on the Internet, allows remote submissions and has over 30,000 individual classified sites and continues to grow exponentially. First Family classifieds offers free advertisement
for business opportunities, personal ads, automobiles, real estate,
and much more. Your ad is placed in more than 30,000 sites, and
there is no limit to the number of free ads you can post. Ezines are subscribed to by people wanting them for their content, and they READ them. That means over 90% of all ezine subscribers see (and read) the ads in them. Below are some reputable sources for finding the best ezines to submit your ads to, and one that shows you how to create and publish your own ezine.
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