Increase website traffic and you will see an explosion in your profits, is a well worn phrase. But two questions need to be asked of this statement. One is `How do you increase website traffic` and two, `Just by having more website visitors, how do I know they will buy? After all not all website traffic is equal, is it?
Many people believe that a website visitor who`s clicked through to their website or blog will want the product or service they are promoting and can get very frustrated when that visitor along with countless others pass by the offer, only to see X,Y or Z in the same affiliate program getting more sign ups or sales.
This is in someway `excuses` people into thinking the program or service they`re offering is `no good` and move onto the next program with the same results.
This results in affiliates `program hopping`, to see better results for your efforts needs a different way of thinking when promoting. Unless you have some idea of where your website traffic is coming from you won`t know which form of advertising is actually working.
This is the first step in understanding which type of visitor converts into a sale or a sign up and which doesn`t. There are many forms of getting your link or message out there to the people who you want to target.
Something to understand about advertising is the way in which you can advertise to great effect. `Blindly advertising is fine, IF you are a major company and are branding your business. Here in the UK, two examples of this would be Boots, a well known pharmacy and W.H.Smith, well known for books, magazines and other forms of stationary. They both sell multiple products, but of a particular
type.
As a consumer you know if you want a pen, some writing paper and a dictionary, you`d go to W.H.Smiths, and of course anything to do with ailments skin products or health care you`d go to Boots.
Should you be interested in taking both of these on in the advertising media world and unless you have bags of money, you`d fail, miserably. That doesn`t mean you can`t cream of some of their profits if you were to be selling one product. But for this you`d need to be more selective in targeting your audience.
Let`s take for an example the magazines available for game console players. Here we can see there is a ready made audience, this can be seen from the facts that a publishing company is printing weekly or monthly, indicates they expect a repeat buyer and even have subscriptions to their publications.
We can establish the buyers of these magazines, one have an interest, two are likely to be young and three will spend money on their `hobby`. Now we have to break it down a little further.
There are four main gaming consoles. For arguments sake (and my own preference) we`ll take just one to be even more selective, Sonys PS3. The next choice you would face is whether to promote the console and its periphials (or just its periphials), the games or the different P2P websites that offer the downloads for these games and videos?
Once you have decided it is just a case of becoming an affiliate of one of these products. This is a simplistic way of choosing a product or service to promote, the next step would be to find the expected target audience.
Rather than broaden your horizons in this situation you`d do better to narrow down the haunts of your particular consumer.
And this brings us back to how to have `targeted website traffic` as opposed to `blind website traffic` who are not interested in your products or services no matter how well presented they may be. As for all manner of targeted website traffic the best place to go is to the search engines.
Tapping into the mindset of the perspective buyer by typing in a question that will bring back the results you can exploit.
Forums are a good way of understanding your perspective audience and their buying habits, so will be your first stop. Gaming websites are another source of advertising your products. With these two methods alone you know your websites visitors are going to be interested in what you have to offer, with the likelyhood of a sale that much more possible.
So while these two basic ideas of internet marketing won`t exactly increase website traffic, the visitors will be more highly responsive. To increase website traffic further would be to take out a pay per click advertising campaign.
This needn`t be as expensive as some would believe. There are more search engines that offer this type of service and at more reasonable rates than the top three.
Another way of increasing your websites visitor count is to look at offline marketing techniques. Just because your website is online doesn`t mean it can`t be promoted in any method possible. Cards in shop windows, adverts in the local paper, leaflets pushed through letterboxes or taking
out an advert in the magazine in question. Offline promotion can be just as effective if not more and sometimes cheaper than online.
Sometimes it isn`t always about increase website traffic but advertising more selectively to the right audience. Try a little lateral outside the box thinking rather than blinkered and you will see the increase in your website visitors, leave your links where they are appropriate, advertise offline in the many publications available and spread the word. Only then with time will you increase and gain more website traffic.
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