How To Get Fast Traffic to Your Website

Do you have a website? If so, you absolutely need traffic.

You may be asking: what do you mean by “traffic”. I’m glad you asked. Website traffic refers to people checking out your site. Consider the possibility of laying out the investment to build a website, and thousands of dollars later, you have nice-looking site that no one knows about and thereby not earning you money. You may as well put a McDonald’s smack-dab in the middle of Death Valley.

There are many ways to get traffic. If you need traffic fast, there are two basic methods you can use.

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 method works for at least two reasons. First, someone else has gone to the trouble of identifying people interested in a particular topic, saving you the time and expense of locating the same. Second, you are “borrowing” the credibility of the person who refers people to you. Think about this for a minute. When making a buying decision, whether for a film, restaurant, or clothing store, do you rely more upon traditional advertising or do you prefer to get recommendations from friends and trusted acquaintances? The answer for most is the latter.

Borrowing traffic usually will not cost you out of pocket cash, although normally you should be prepared to pay out of your proceeds.

The second basic fast-traffic method is to pay for advertising. You have many options available for paid advertising, and I’m going to recommend pay-per-click advertising. Google Adwords is the easiest venue to start with this method, although Yahoo and MSN have similar programs. With pay-per-click advertising, you are able to target specific keywords that people are searching for, and you can start in a matter of minutes.

This method, if performed properly, works for a number of reasons. Among the top reasons it works is you are causing your ads to be displayed based upon specific words used by searchers. Another reason it can be effective is that is trackable. Google, for example, has built-in analytics tools and you can use them free of charge. After a period of time, you will be able to tell which keywords generated the most “clicks”; i.e. visits to your website based upon your ad. With Google’s conversion tracking tool (also free) you can also determine which keywords lead to a buying decision.

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.

I had discussed just two techniques for website traffic generation. Other articles will give you even more options.