Right, now you have your website up and running. You may even have gone out and hired an excellent web designer, to script a perfect home page and other satellite pages, that will really draw in the visitors and inspire them to buy your products. You have a wonderful catalog, full of great products, all with detailed descriptions. You have a section specially dedicated to the products which you provide, along with testimonials from past customers.

You have installed counters and other methods of recording all your very important stats. You have carefully selected one of the best web hosting services and added extra scripts, like a blog.

You have the best online shopping cart service available and the most popular payment processors, so that you customers can buy from you, without hassles and get immediate download delivery. That’s all great! But now, where are the customers?

Well! This is the old classic case of which comes first – the egg or the chicken. You know that the money is in the list and you know that you must mail your list and drive them to your website, to buy the products. Oh, you don’t have a list. Your list comes from the visitors to your website, when they subscribe and give you their details. So, this is a typical catch 22 situation.

Driving traffic to your website is a much discussed and much misunderstood venture. Without it, you won’t be able to build a list. There are a million theories out there, all claiming to drive tons of new visitors to your site daily. There are services that “guarantee” that they will increase your traffic flow, by a huge percentage, if you just pay them their small fee, over the next few years. There are so-called experts, who claim they will place your pages on all the best search engines, on the internet. They claim that with this kind of blanket exposure, your traffic numbers will explode within days. You will register massive traffic and innumerable hits.

Beware! All that will happen is that you part with your money and still lack the kind of traffic that will create a targeted list. You don’t just want any old traffic, you want targeted traffic. The kind that are really interested in what you have and will give up their details and could very possibly be converted into customers. Any fool can send hundreds of disinterested visitors to your site, if there is some incentive. Take for example the traffic exchange programs, where you are rewarded by visiting so many of the other members’ sites. You only need to click the link, stay 30 seconds and then on to the next site. What good is that?

In reality, the only certain method of drawing productive traffic to your website, is through targeted marketing. The important word to notice here is “productive.” You can draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site every year, by hosting a giveaway of some kind. This is for people who search the Internet for freebies. You will have people clicking a link to your site like crazy, but these people are not there to buy anything from you … quite the opposite. They are empty clicks. They are looking for free stuff. There is nothing productive about this kind of traffic. People looking for free stuff, will never make you any kind of money, not from sales, so what is the point of attracting them to your site? Nothing. It is sales that you’re looking for, right?

So target your marketing, to the people who really want to buy what you have to offer. How?  You may ask. Start by trying the following basic steps :

1. Hire an experienced copywriter, or try copying from some other good sales page. The copy on your site, makes all the difference to the sales you get from the internet. The most important factors to your targeted marketing group, are the keywords found in your title and the meta tags in the website’s code. This is what they are searching for. An experienced copywriter will know how to use the most effective keywords and place them strategically into your site’s copy, to register high rankings and multiple searches. If you cannot afford a copywriter, do some research and talk to your web designer about how best to insert your meta tags.

2. You can join the “pay per click” search engines. Obviously, Google.com is one of these, but you will find that most of the most popular keywords are already taken. If you can think of some original phrases, that people use, to search for your products, or services, you can post your advert next to the text that comes up, when people search for that phrase. Every time someone clicks on the ad, you can hopefully persuade them to go to your site. You would then have to pay Google.com a nominal fee, for each click.

3. Another way, is to submit articles to free e-zine sites. This is especially helpful if you are a service provider, or a merchant. You can write, or hire someone to write, an article for you on any area of expertise. Give some free tips, offer your experience, and be accessible in your text. Then, at the bottom of the article, you attach a resource box, with a little about you and a link to your website. In effect, this is clever advertising of your site. Every time someone publishes your article in their e-zine, or newsletter, the readers will see your web address at the bottom. You can post these all over the ‘net, for free. The search engines will find reference to your site and each link builds credibility and improves ranking.

4. Many sites offer link swopping. See how many other websites are prepared to host your link, in return for you doing the same for them. Again, this works well with the search engines. You can also place ads on as many free classified sites as possible. This serves two purposes. You stand a fair chance of some people coming to see what you are offering and again you are effectively posting your links all over the internet. The search engines crawl all the sites regularly and the more times they register your url, the more credits you score with them. There are several sites who specialise in exchanging links.

5. What you can also try, is to offer a very attractive package, one that is hard to resist. Cut your losses to start with and get the most traffic possible, then ask them for their addresses and give them some incentive for telling their friends to come to the site. There are many “concessions” and “memberships” offered, in return for the names of ten friends. As long as they perceive they are getting value, their loyalties are very shallow. They will readily furnish you with the addresses of all their friends, in order to get something out of you.

These are just a few of the many ways to ensure you get “productive” traffic, to build a targeted list. Strangely, the majority of the best ways are actually free services, so hold on to your money. Empty clicks are just that … empty… and your bank account will stay empty, too!

Have you been dreaming of owning your own profitable e-mail list, with tens of thousands of subscribers? Wouldn’t it be great if you could e-mail people about a product and get paid for every purchase that someone makes? Well take a look at this:
http://dersalsites.com/ls

Derek Robson is a South African Internet marketer, with a vision of empowering all fellow South Africans and other non U.S folk, to have equal opportunity and success on the internet, by finding solutions to the many obstacles facing them. He is a syndicated article writer. He and his wife Sally, have started a string of sites, resources, courses and articles, as part of Dersalsites. For daily postings and articles, on Internet marketing, South African online business, list building, affiliate marketing, article marketing, blogging, seo, the law of attraction, rugby and other general topics, visit Derek at: http://dersalsites.com/southafricanbusiness/ 

Bookmark to: