The bulk of the traffic to your website will come from the major search engines, but there are several other low- and no-cost avenues to explore and, if used correctly and regularly, they can flood your site with traffic.
Investing In The Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
Search engine optimisation is a skilled exercise with no guarantee of sustained success for even the most competitive keywords. Equally, paid submissions cannot guarantee top positions for your web pages; they can only guarantee indexing in the search engine database. You may still come up in the hundredth page of search results.
These factors have made pay-per-click (PPC) search engines an important element of any website promotion campaign. Actually, these engines could also be called pay-for-position search engines. You could bid for the number one position in search results for the keyword you choose. If there are many bidders you would have to bid high (in pounds instead of pence for every single visitor to secure a top position). You then pay at the bid rate for every click-through to your website; hence, pay-per-click.
The best strategy for the PPC element of your campaign is to bid for a number of less competitive keywords that are important to you. This could be significantly less expensive than bidding for one high competition keyword. Finding bid prices for the keywords, submitting
bids for all these, and then tracking the results for each is a tedious exercise. However, there are tools to automate much of this tiresome work and with one of these you could focus on selecting the keywords to bid for and leave the rest to the tool.
Participating In Newsgroups, Forums, Mailing Lists
The second tactic is to participate in targeted forums and newsgroups. It’s free. You start visiting the forum regularly and then once you know your way around it you should start answering questions for people and becoming an all-round helpful individual. Give and it will be given back to you.
You will be able to build up relationships in these forums and build up your traffic at the same time without ever having to spend a penny. To find out more about how to participate in forums for maximum traffic, check out this free report:
www.bizpromo.com/free/networking.htmThe best places to find the actual forums and newsgroups are:
- Forums can be found at www.forumone.com;
- Newsgroups can be searched at http://groups.google.com/;
- Mailing Lists are found at www.liszt.com
Exchanging Links With Other Websites
Another no-cost marketing technique is to trade links with other websites. Now, I know from experience this can be a daunting task at first ... you trade 10 links and only get an ounce of traffic from it ... but what happens when you start having hundreds or thousands of
related sites linked to you? You get a flood of visitors, that’s what.
Where do you start? Start by getting out there and offering: offer to trade links with people who are in the same forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists as you. Go to some of the online databases that have links. Participate in banner exchanges and link exchanges. Nothing will happen unless you take the initiative and do something.
For top resources in this area, check out:
www.whitepalm.com/fourcornersAinkswapping.shtmlwww.netofficetoolbox.comWe’ll be covering the power of linking in greater detail in
Chapter 21.
Creating Articles For Newsletters And Magazines
There are thousands of newsletters and magazines out there just waiting for your articles. What is your area of expertise? Write about it or, if you don’t want to do the writing yourself, collect the information together in an organised manner and have someone else do it for you. Once you have your highly informative article ready to go, contact publishers of ezines and magazines and submit your piece. Think about the publicity you can get through this. It can bring thousands of people to your site with almost no cost at all.
For information on ezines, check out:
www.netofficetoolbox.comFor the Top Media Directory for Offline Publications, go to:
www.gebbieinc.comIn
Chapter 20 I’ll let you in on my own secrets on how to milk this no-cost method to attract thousands of targeted visitors to your website.