Getting Traffic to your website (4)

4.1 - Paid Traffic Methods - A lot of Internet marketers are intimidated by paid traffic. They might have been burned in the past, or they might be afraid of losing a lot of money. This is definitely a concern, so you need to approach paid traffic with a certain amount of caution.

But the fact is, if you do it right, paid traffic doesn't have to cost you a lot of money to test, and once you figure out how to make it profitable (or just breaking even) it isn't actually costing you anything- you put X dollars in and get Y dollars in return.

There are lots of different paid traffic sources so we can't discuss them all in this report, but let's look at a few of the most popular (and effective).

4.2 - Pay Per Click - Pay per click, or PPC, advertising includes sources like Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter. You pay a certain amount for every person who clicks on your ad and visits your website. That amount can range from a few cents to several dollars, depending on the market and the keywords that you're targeting.

If you're not careful, PPC advertising can chew through a lot of money in a pretty short time so it's important that you approach it correctly.

Make sure you're not targeting really broad keywords that are going to get a ton of clicks but poorly targeted visitors.

Example: You probably wouldn't want to target the keyword "lose weight" because it would cost you a fortune and those visitors could be looking for any number of things when they arrive at your site.
You would be better off targeting the keyword phrase "how to lose 10 pounds in a month" (assuming your website can help solve that problem) because while the amount of traffic wouldn't be nearly as high, those people are looking for a very specific thing.

You should also set your daily budget to something you're comfortable with. That way, if your ads just don't convert for some reason, there's a limit to how much you can lose.

Once you find a keyword/ad combination that is profitable, you can start to expand on it. Being successful with PPC advertising requires a lot of testing and tracking.

4.3 - Banner Ads - People have been saying banner ads are dead for over 10 years, but the fact is they still work if you use them properly. If you just blast a bunch of banners with "punch the monkey" kind of stuff to as many websites as possible, chances are it's not going to be very profitable.

But if you pick the sites where you want to advertise based on how relevant they are to your target market and design your banners effectively, they can still product a lot of traffic for relatively little cost.

Like PPC advertising, start small and track your results. Once you find a banner and/or website that's working for you, start to expand those successful campaigns to other places.

4.4 - Paid Ezine Ads - Paid ezine ads are another "old school" traffic generation strategy that can still work very well. Basically, you're paying for an ad to another marketer's email list. This could be a small ad placed in a longer newsletter or it could be a "solo" ad that is nothing but your offer.

This is a great way to leverage someone else's list to get traffic to your own site (and hopefully onto your email list in the process).

The key here is to target your offer to the audience. Make sure you subscribe to that marketer's list yourself and read several of their emails to see what kind of tone they use, and what sort of offers they promote.

You want to tailor your ad to appeal to the people who receive that person's emails, so make sure you offer something of value and that what you're offering is going to be appealing to the people who get the email.

4.5 - Facebook - Facebook is a fairly new source of paid traffic, and is constantly changing as more and more people start to use it. But with hundreds of millions of users, and the ability to target very specific interests and demographics, you should definitely include it in your paid traffic strategy.

The key to using Facebook effectively is to remember that most people aren't there to be sold to - they're there to be social. Most Facebook users aren't doing business there, even though it might seem that way to us internet marketers, so if you hit them with a high-pressure pitch (paid or not) it's probably not going to go over so well.

Once again, it comes down to building relationships with people first so they know and trust you. Once you establish that trust, you can start to ease them over to your websites and other offers.

Conclusion - Hopefully this article has given you a bit better idea of some of the ways that you can generate traffic to your website, but also what you should be doing with that traffic once it gets there.

New traffic sources constantly come and go, but most of the strategies we've discussed here have stood the test of time. While it never hurts to test new strategies and add them to the mix of what you're doing, don't let yourself get caught up in the latest "shiny object" that promises unlimited traffic with little or no work.

Those kinds of promises are generally too good to be true, and even if they do work as advertised it's usually going to be short lived. Once all the people looking for a magic button start abusing the technique, it won't take long for it to stop working.

If you build your traffic generation strategy on a solid foundation, you'll be seeing more and more visitors coming to your website for years to come.

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