Traffic? Try This
by: Gerry Johnson
Have you just built a new site? Is it the jazziest, classiest site on the net? Do all your visitors love it? All five of them?
You are not alone. I think just about everyone has the same problem starting out on the net whatever their site is about, whether business or otherwise. So you buy traffic. You get huge traffic all right, but no sales. The traffic is not targeted. It is usually generated by a pop-up or pop-under. The people who see your advertisement are not looking for it and many close the pop-up immediately without even seeing your site. And that's if the pop-up blockers don't block them.
Banner ads have traditionally been a very good way of getting the message across. But they are losing their effectiveness now. I think the reason this is happening is because people are seeing so many of them that they no longer notice them. It's a bit like walking through a crowd and not seeing the faces you pass. Have you ever passed a friend in the street?
It can be very discouraging to see the reports from these traffic generators saying that you had 10,000 or 20,000 hits or whatever it is and you sold nothing or very little.
Would it not be a better idea to show your site to people who are looking for a site that has what you are offering?
You can do this by using a pay per click (PPC) directory. The directory will list your site by the keywords that you choose, and only charge you when someone clicks on the link to your site. That means that the person that visits is looking for your site. As you can imagine, the conversion rate in far higher than the examples above.
The PPC traffic will be generated regardless of page rank or how long your site is on the net or whether it is indexed in the 'Big Three' search engines.
When looking at traffic generation systems it is sensible to compare prices and shop around. It would be useful to have this information at hand when you do:
1. How many visitors you have to your site, daily, weekly or monthly. And, where they come from, i.e. search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), paid traffic generation, links on other sites etc.
2. Current traffic campaign costs.
3. Your conversion rate. i.e. what percentage of your visitors buy from you.
4. Your average sale amount.
5. Customer acquisition cost. i.e. how much it costs you to sell each item.
6. How much you are willing to spend to make a sale.
Run some test PPC campaigns before you go into it in a big way. You can compare your figures before and after to see if it has been worthwhile. I am confident that you will see a very significant improvement.
A pay PPC directory is better than the usual PPC systems that you see in that your position in the search results depends only on your bid for the keyword you choose.
Let's say you are selling beekeeping equipment. You would bid on the word beekeeping. You may even bid on others like beehive and honey etc. If there are no other bidders for that word in that directory then you get the word for the minimum bid, which may be as low as $0.05. This means that you would top the search results for the word beekeeping, almost guaranteeing a visit from that searcher. Even if there is another bidder for that word he will be higher on the page until but unless there are several bidders you will still be on the front page of the results. Now would you get quality targeted visitors anywhere else for such a low cost?
If nobody clicks on your listing then it has cost you nothing but the few minutes it took to sign up. But if you do get clicks then it will be up to you and your site to convert them into buyers. Don’t forget that even at the best of times you will only sell to a small percentage of your visitors, but if you have a quality site they may come back and buy at a later date or tell their friends about it.
Using the smaller, less well known search engines and directories is a good idea when starting out because the clicks are usually cheaper but they usually get less traffic also.
You are unlikely to be in the lucky position of having the marketplace to yourself. So, check out your competitors. See what they are doing. Are they paying for pop-up traffic or PPC?
About The Author
Gerry Johnson is an administrator at Directory Ireland. An Irish Directory with Global Links. Directory Ireland is a PPC web directory that gives you $10 credit when you sign up so you can try us without cost. You can also place our search box on your web page and get paid for searches. There are no guarantees but, No Gain No Payin'. Yeah, it's a lousy pun. But then that's not what I do for a living. Traffic is.
http://directoryireland.eu
