Traffic Generation-The Heartbeat Of Your Online Business

by rhaeny

Traffic generation should be at the top of your list of must do activities if you want to have a successful online business.

If you don't get traffic, you don't get visitors who turn into subscribers, who turn into buyers. But this is one of the hardest things to do, because there is so much information that can send you in so many different directions. I hope that by the end of this article I will add some clarification on this topic for you.

If you think about it, there are only a few possibilities of bringing a steady flow of long term traffic to your website. That is your goal isn't it? Long term traffic?

There is article marketing, backlinks, organic search engine traffic and Pay Per Click. Article marketing is advertising by writing articles that are keyword rich, not keyword stuffed, about a subject and then submitting them to article directories for exposure.

Article marketing includes using both paid and free advertising. Backlinks are simply links on other peoples site pointing back to your site. The more of these you have, the higher your site will climb in the rankings.

For example, say you like something I wrote about on my blog. You then write about it on your blog or website and include a link back to my article. There you have it. That's called a backlink.

You see backlinks all the time and probably just didn't realize what they were called nor understand that they hold a significant value to the website owner.

Organic search engine traffic is just a fancy way to say that the results of any search that is found on the left side of your screen is the natural or organic results of your keyword search. Anything on the right of the screen is paid advertisements that are keyword phrase driven.

Pay Per Click is pretty much what is says. You pay for advertising using a keyword phrase, and when a visitor clicks on your ad, you pay for that click in hopes that you will sell whatever you are promoting.

The industry average for PPC is 1 out of every 100 clicks will result in a sale. So you better make sure that the amount of money that it will cost you for a hundred clicks is far less than what you will make for a sale. The difference will be your profit so make that amount something you are comfortable with.

For example, if you choose a keyword that costs 10 cents per click and the product you are promoting will yield you a $30 sale, then you will have earned a $20 profit.

10 cents X 100 = $10.00

One Product Sale = $30.00

$30 - $10= $20.00 profit

The calculation of profit is easy, but PPC itself is a whole lot more involved than that, but I just wanted to give you a brief overview of how PPC works. Do not attempt PPC based on any discussion here or you will be sure to lose your pants.

Okay so let's move on to the methods of traffic generation that are more reliable for long term effects - article marketing, backlinks and organic traffic.

I want to concentrate the discussion on these because they can be free to do and can yield the most long term effect. I am eliminating PPC because when your campaign ends, so does any residual effect.

Backlinks are generally used to increase your page rank (PR). If they are built properly you will naturally increase your PR over a period time, which is what the search engines are looking for.

The gradual increase of good quality backlinks will build your site up to get organic search engine traffic. So these two methods heavily rely on each other.

A long time ago people used to create hundreds of backlinks which were not relevant at all to the theme of their website. This increased their PR drastically, but the search engines finally caught on and now if you try that tactic your site could get permanently banned.

Now nothing has change from what was needed back then versus what's needed now in regards to backlinks to raise your PR. The difference now is that you need to build highly relevant and high quality backlinks.

If your site is about building decks, then don't try to link to a site about gardening just because it has a high PR....remember the relevance and quality factor? However, if your site is about fishing, and you link to another site about fish bait; well this would be a very good backlink. Can you see how the relevance of your backlinks plays such an important role now?

If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. Why should the search engines give you a high PR just because you can paste a bunch of links on your site that probably have nothing to do with your subject matter? That's what is called a link farm.

But if you build these links the right way, the search engines will pay you dearly for it by giving you organic search engine traffic, which is THE best to have.

Also I did not forget about article marketing. You can use article marketing to help create those quality backlinks too. If you submit your articles to article directories, they will get published all over the internet.

Therefore when you write your articles and include that backlink to your site, you are killing three birds with one stone. You are helping fulfill the need of backlinks; you are gaining new subscribers and making sales.

And don't forget that the more articles you write, the more quality links you will build, and the long term residual income is bound to come.

About the Author

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