Copyright 2005 Richard GradyEvery single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to
Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!)
The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to make their existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to one of most common questions I am asked and subject of this newsletter:
'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'
Of course, there are a number of different answers to this question and what I would do myself is probably very different to what a completely new Internet entrepreneur would do. The reason I say this is that first thing I do when launching a new site is make use of my existing website traffic by advertising new site on my other established sites. In addition, I have luxury of a large mailing list which I can use to drive traffic to new site.
I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't have these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I when I first started), so let's look at things from beginning. Day one of your first website.....
It is a fact that quickest and probably most effective way of bringing targeted traffic to your website is by paying for it. Now before you rush off and sink $50 into one of those '50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T, this isn't what I mean. Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money. Even if you get traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some software script visiting your site and pretending to be a visitor), it will not be targeted and therefore there is a very low chance that traffic will generate sales. When I talk about buying traffic, I mean by using pay- per-click services offered by most of big search engines.
You probably already know sort of thing I mean - for example, Google Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will display a list of adverts down right-hand side of page and these are all paid adverts. Every time you click on one of them, advertiser pays Google a fixed amount which could be anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive keyword is).
Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which keywords your advert is shown for and this allows you to target your advertising perfectly. Other big names in pay-per-click market include Overture, Espotting and Findwhat.
Now, before you all start emailing me and saying that you already knew about PPC let me just say that I am well aware that people know about it. The problem (as I see it), is that people aren't using this type of service because of fact that they don't want to spend any money on advertising. That's all well and good but fact is that Internet is getting more and more competitive each day and chances of you building a successful website business from scratch without investing any money are tiny to say least.
