How to Market a Web Site: Web Site Traffic Strategies
For your website, as for any business, to succeed, you MUST bring people to it. Visitors, or traffic, is the lifeblood of any business.
But not just any traffic –- what you want is targeted traffic, i.e. visitors interested in your product or service.
Strictly speaking, getting web site traffic is usually done after you start your site. We discuss it at this point, however, because your choice of web site promotion strategies may affect the type of web business you build, and vice-versa. You'd therefore need to roughly understand what's involved, to help you decide what kind of website or business to go for.
There're many web site traffic promotion strategies. These can be loosely grouped into:
Paid Traffic Strategies
Paid traffic is traffic you pay for. It can be from ads or other paid means by which your website is promoted, such as in newsletters, or by people to whom you pay a commission.
Paid traffic can be used for any type of website, and is implemented after your site is up. It has the advantage of bringing visitors to your website instantly, which is a very important advantage. It is good for launching a new site, or getting people to subscribe to your mailing list.
It is, however, mostly used for promoting a product, either directly selling something using a salesletter website, or indirectly to affiliate products, since you need to make money to pay for the cost of the traffic as well as make a profit.
If you do not have the funds to go for paid traffic, then you need to look at getting free, or organic, traffic. The other strategies below are targeted at getting free web site traffic.
Search Engine Strategies
Search engine strategies are aimed at getting traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live. This happens when your website appears among the top 20 or 30 search results when web surfers search on terms related to your website.
To get that to happen, you need to carry out a number of tasks, collectively called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Some of the SEO tasks can only be done after your website is up and running. However, and here is what you need to note, some of them have to be incorporated into the design of your website itself.
For a start, one of the biggest factors in ranking highly, at the top of search results, is quality content that is constantly updated and added to. That is why this method of getting web site traffic can be used for blogs with regular postings, or content websites with many pages of useful content, but usually not for 2 or 3 page salesletter minisites.
A point to note is that organic traffic does not spring up overnight. It needs to be grown and nurtured, which takes time and effort. On the other hand, it has one advantage over traffic from ads, apart from the fact that it's free -- which is that 'free' traffic is generally less resistant to buying, as ads tend to put people on their guard against being 'sold to'.
Link Strategies
Link strategies involve getting backlinks, or incoming links, from other websites to yours. This brings web site traffic in 2 ways. The first is that incoming links channel traffic to your website, when visitors at the originating website click on the link.
The other, more important reason, is to do with the search engine strategies above. Having backlinks is a major factor in ranking well for search engine results. That being so, link strategies are typically used for sites which get traffic from search engines.
Link strategies are implemented after a website is up, so you need not be too concerned about it at this stage.
Email Strategies
This last method centers around mailing lists. By having a mailing lists of subscribers who have expressed interest in hearing from you, you have a ready audience to whom you can send newsletters to publicise and promote your products or services.
Which makes it ideal for any kind of web business. But because it's so highly targeted, it is usually used for selling products, whether your own, or an affiliate product. In fact, there is a saying among internet marketeers, that the 'money is in the list'.
However you first need to build such a list. One way is to pay for ads at the beginning, to bring interested visitors to your site so that you can get them to opt into your mailing list.
Another way is to joint-venture (JV) with others, or to get affiliates to promote your business, in return for a fee or commission. Those visitors who buy can then be added into your mailing list.
We will go into the details of exactly how you implement each strategy, later, at the appropriate time.
But from the brief overview above, you have a rough picture of the different web site promotion methods, and the web businesses they suit. Against this you assess your situation, and what you want to achieve.
For instance, are you on a shoestring budget or do you have the funds to throw at ads even at the risk that you may not make money immediately? If you don't have the money for ads, are you prepared to spend time and effort to build organic traffic from the search engine and link strategies?
All this will shape the web business, and in turn, the website type you should build. So bearing this in mind, we now move on to the next step...
