Hi and welcome to the DIY Web Traffic series presented by Steve Ovens.

In this series of articles we’re going to de-mystify website traffic and reveal how you can get more targeted customer traffic to your company’s website.

First, let’s look at why you might want to pay attention to the internet…

Think back to the last time you were trying to fix a problem, or research a product you wanted to buy.

Did you start flipping through the telephone directory? Or open the local newspaper and turn to the classifieds section? Perhaps you paid a visit to your local library or drove down to the shopping mall to browse for your answer?

Or are you in the majority of people (over 80%) who turn to the internet for solutions – either contacting a friend for advice (email / Facebook), or “Google-ing it”.

Put simply, the internet is increasingly where people – including your potential customers – are turning to find information and solutions. Wouldn’t you love to catch your potential customers in the act of searching for a solution and put your product or service in front of them? DIY Web Traffic shows you exactly how you can do this.

Overview

In the DIY Web Traffic series we will cover everything you need to get more targeted customer traffic to your website. Each article will have action steps for you to implement in your traffic campaign.

Figure 1 DIY Web Traffic overview

Traffic Sources

There are lots of ways you can get traffic to your website:

• Offline branding and advertising
• Paid (for example Google Adwords)
• Organic (sometimes called “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization”)
• Social media such as Twitter and Facebook
• Email (NOT spam!)
• Joint Venture partners

Offline Traffic

Your website should be an integral part of your company’s branding and offline marketing and you should mention your website every chance you get. Mention your website on your “touch-points” – anywhere your potential customers come into contact with your business and your team.

Is your website name featured on…?

• your business cards, letterhead and other stationary
• your brochures
• your shop-front
• your company car or truck fleet
• your staff uniforms or company T-shirt
• your “music on hold”
• your email signature
• your corporate PowerPoint template?
• other…?

Paid Traffic

The easiest way to get traffic is to pay for it through paid advertising platforms like Google Adwords. These systems show your ads to people who are searching on relevant keywords through a bidding system where you pay for “clicks” – which bring visitors to your site.

There are many paid traffic solutions besides Google Adwords, such as Yahoo, MSN, Facebook and others.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is any type of traffic that is not paid for directly – including people typing your website URL directly into their browser.

For DIY Web Traffic though, we’ll narrow our definition to mean traffic that comes from your website appearing in the natural “organic” search engine results. Higher-ranked results typically receive more visitors – in fact the top 3 results receive over 79% of search engine visitors!

Search Engine Optimization (or “SEO”) involves optimizing your website to improve your organic search result position. Although often referred to as “free” traffic (as you don’t pay directly for clicks) SEO does involve work, so there is certainly a cost in time or money.

Organic traffic also includes “referral” traffic from other sites. For example, you might post a video on YouTube and include a reference to your website in the video description. Someone who watches the video may be interested in finding out more about your company and follow the link in the description.

Social Traffic

One of the more recent phenomena online has been the emergence and incredible popularity of online social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. These systems give you a platform for instant social interaction with other people, including potential customers (as well as a phenomenal market research tool – more on this later!).

It is generally frowned upon to use social media sites to market directly to people – it’s like walking up to someone at a party and launching straight into a sales pitch. However, you can include information about your website in your public profile, and occasionally mention your site in online conversations. Refer people to an information page rather than directly to a sales page. The information page leads to a sales page, which is referred to as “doing the two-step”.

Email Traffic

Another source of website traffic is email – and I’m not talking about SPAM here! Legitimate email to your customers is a great source of traffic to your website.

Let’s say you are sending a regular email newsletter to your customer or prospect list. Rather than putting all the information content in the newsletter email, instead put the full content on your website and email your customers / prospects a “teaser” snippet that outlines the benefits to them of the information you have to share. And then make sure that the webpage you send them to includes a “call to action” – a special offer of some kind or a link to a related product or service.

Joint Venture Traffic

Is there another company out there (not a direct competitor) who already has your potential customers on their customer database?

Could you create a joint venture proposal to offer something of value to their customers (e.g. a free or discounted product) – in a way that would also be a “win” for them (a financial reward or simply making them look good to their customers for organizing the offer)?

For example, if you are a pool cleaning company, could you create a package that the local real estate agent could offer to new home buyers who buy homes with a pool?

A good joint venture partner can drive a massive amount of extremely well-targeted traffic to your website. Plus, their endorsement will generally help improve conversions.

Another form of joint venture arrangement is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you reward other people for helping to sell your products or services on a commission-only basis through an affiliate program. Amazon is generally credited with introducing this concept to the web and the Amazon Associates program is still the most popular affiliate program online. You’ve possibly seen websites with Amazon’s books listed on them.

In an affiliate program you can choose to reward people for leads or sales. An affiliate tracking system tracks sales or signups to the affiliate who made the referral, typically through a unique type of URL called “affiliate links” (e.g. an affiliate link for the Amazon Kindle would look like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015T963C?ie=UTF8&tag=bestdealshere-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0015T963C).

Each affiliate can apply one or more of the traffic strategies outlined above to bring traffic to your site through their individual affiliate link. Affiliate traffic can be massive and is effectively free – affiliates are responsible for their individual traffic strategies. You only pay on actual sales or signups made.

Your Action Steps Checklist

Here are the recommended actions from this article.

• Complete “Touch-points” audit
• (Plan in place to) add your website to any missing “touch point”
• Register company Facebook account at www.Facebook.com
• Register company Twitter account at www.twitter.com
• Create a list of potential JV partners
• Create a compelling JV offer

How many did you implement?

To find out how we can help you with your SEO, complete our survey now by going to http://itontaptraffic.com/

Coming Up Next…

DIY Web Traffic will examine each of these traffic techniques and how to implement them in detail.

In the next article, we look at the typical customer purchase cycle and what it means for the purpose of your website. This sets the foundation for your traffic campaign. Steve Ovens is a professional search engine marketing specialist. He enjoys helping companies implement online marketing strategies and can talk for hours about web traffic, search engine optimization and internet marketing!

To find out how we can help you with your SEO, complete our survey now by going to http://itontaptraffic.com/

Tags: do it yourself web traffic, increase web traffic, more web traffic, search engine optimisation, SEO, Steve Ovens, web traffic

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.