Get the Quickest Traffic to Your Website

If you’re a business owner with a website, you know that you need to get traffic to your website.

Website traffic is defined as real people actually visiting your website. You might spend thousands of dollars setting up the prettiest, easy-to-navigate site you can imagine, but with no visitors, you will not make money with that website. It would be similar to building a Macy’s -fully stocked and staffed- in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield.

Many methods exist for traffic generation. For getting traffic quickly, check out these two options.

The first basic fast-traffic method is to borrow the traffic. This may or may not work for your industry, but try and get creative and adapt it to your business because it can be very effective. What is done is to convince another website owner with a list of prospects and customers that would be interested in your product or service, and encourage them to recommend your products or services. In most cases, you will have to give them an affiliate or referral commission in order to encourage the referral.

This procedure gets results for these two reasons. First, the other website owner has already invested the time and money required to collect the names and contact information of interested individuals, sparing you from doing the same. Second, this method allows you to get “credit” for the credibility of the other website owner. Think about your own experience. Do you normally seek out self-serving, traditional advertisements, or do you rely more upon the advice of friends and trusted acquaintances when making a buying decision? The answer is obvious.

The “borrowing traffic” method can generally be performed without upfront cash, though you will have to pay a percentage of sales.

Next, consider paid advertising. Your options for paid advertising are many, and at the top of your list should be pay-per-click advertising. Google and their Adwords program is where you should begin, and before long, take a look at Yahoo and MSN. The largest benefit to pay-per-click advertising is it allows you to restrict who sees your ads; in this case, only those people who type specific words into the search engine will see the ad.

This method of advertising is attractive for numerous reasons. Chief of these is the ability to match the words people are searching for with your particular ad. Another great benefit is you can track many aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns.

This method does mean you will pay before making sales, although Google probably won’t charge your credit card until the end of the month. As a caution, in the beginning you will want to monitor your Adwords account often to make sure you are not spending more than you intended.

We have only covered two methods of generating traffic to your site. In future articles, we will cover many more.