How to Generate Traffic?

[alexandergreat7]

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Hi Guys,

Thank you for reading my post, I wanted to know if anyone has ideas of an inexpensive way to increase traffic to their webpage? There seems to be alot of very expensive methods out there including search engine optimisation or expensive solo ads, but these ideas dont really seem practical if you are just beginning to get your organisation off the ground with limited funds. Any suggestions would be most welcome

Cheers

Jace

[HarveyC]

Hi Alex,

PPC may seem expensive (after all, it's per click!), but if you target effectively and precisely, it can be really cost effective - especially since you can work out a rough conversion rate and basically, what cost per click will work for you and what won't.

SEO is more of a long run effort, and it's not necessarily expensive - although linkbuilding can be expensive if you don't have any good content (you don't seem to from your sig...), but it's worth the effort with Google these days.

Btw, please, please change your sig and promote a product you believe in!

[kevquinlan]

No offence but if SEO and Traffic generating is too expensive then surely in 27 months it wont matter? you will have earned $3 million anyway?

[shyguy0507]

SEO doesn't need to be expensive if you do it yourself, consider how much time you can afford to spend on optimising the site for SEO and learning about SEO

[ian-d]

SEO is actually very cost effective and doesn't need to cost as much as you'd think. We have done our SEO to date on a low budget (mainly because i didn't beleive it would help) and we have managed to successfully get a number of keywords/phrases to near the top of SE's. Cheapest and best value option is to get a good indian company to do some directory submissions for you, i think 500 costs about £50, if that! Whilst they might not be relevant content, it will help!

As for adwords (PPC), i don't know, still struggling to squeeze the most out of it, although the conversion rate is making it profitable...just not as much as we'd hope!

[alexandergreat7]

Cheers for all your help guys!

it's much appreciated, I have taken your advice and am now using Google Ad Words, I will monitor it for a couple weeks and see what conversion that gives me. As for SEO I will definitely invest in that once my business begins to take off. Has anyone tried any of those traffic sharing sites like trafficswarm? are they anygood?

Thanks again for all your help

[Alfie]

Hi, we have tried many different traffic generation idea's and schemes, but to be honest, the only ones that we've found to deliver any quality or either genuine SEO or PPC via the main search engines.

I'm sure there are other ways that we haven't yet tried, and maybe traffic swarm may actually be good, but my 2 pence worth is to focus on SEO and PPC and learn them inside out.

All the best,

Alf

[Brendon]

>> Cheapest and best value option is to get a good indian company to do some directory submissions for you,

I'd sound a note of caution there - it can work brilliantly, but I've seen some right horror stories where the "Indian link builders" approach has actually done considerable damage. It's a bit of a roll of the dice - if you do well, good on you, decent work at rock bottom prices, if not the results range from no effect to an outright ban; caveat emptor.

I'll freely admit to a bias here, but I'd always recommend going with an SEO based on word of mouth recommendation, or taking the time and trouble to learn to do it yourself

>> Has anyone tried any of those traffic sharing sites like trafficswarm?

Trafficswarm etc aren't SEO, they are traffic exchange sites. If you just need eyeballs, thay can work fine. If you need SE positions, you'll need to invest time, money or both. I'm afraid there's just no way around that these days.

In a non-competitive market, I'd say a blog is the cheapest way of going about things. The cost is non-zero, since you need to provide considerable value in terms of quality content, which has a fair time overhead attached to it, but the returns can be very satisfactory

[Stellar]

In a non-competitive market, I'd say a blog is the cheapest way of going about things. The cost is non-zero, since you need to provide considerable value in terms of quality content, which has a fair time overhead attached to it, but the returns can be very satisfactory
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But surely you still need to invest in SEO time with the blog so get enough traffic? eg, to get quality inbound links.

Although by the very nature of a blog, it is very SEO friendly in the first place.

[rejoice]

To begin, think about your product/service. What is it? What does it do? You must know what you are selling/providing and be able to define it accurately.

Also, you know who you are trying to sell to better than anyone, thus you need to think about your customers: what problems are they trying to solve? How might they go about looking for your product or service on a search engine? What point are they at in the purchasing cycle – are they searching for information or ready to buy? Put yourself in your customer's shoes.

At the same time, you must be creative and expansive in your choice of keywords and phrases. Let your mind wander. Spend some time brainstorming and develop your own list of keywords and key phrases.
Location! Location! Location!

For many businesses, especially service-based businesses, location is extremely important. People searching online will include names of cities in their keyword phrases. In fact, MediaMetrics, one of the leading online market research companies estimates that over 25% of all online searches are local! So for example, if you are a dentist in San Francisco then you want to add the name of all the local cities and/or neighborhoods you serve to all of your keywords, such as "san francisco dentist," "mission district dentist," "bay area dentist," etc.

After you establish your own list of key terms, solicit the advice of others. Ask your friends, colleagues, relatives - including people of different ages, professions and backgrounds - what words and terms they might use to search for your product or service, and add those to your list.

[Delia.griffin]

Hi,
Seo can be grt option no second thoughts abt it but let me tell you at at the same time Viral Marketing can really do wonders to your website if someone knows how to do it in a right way.
And at times results of Viral markeing can be better than Seo.And its not that expensive as compared to Seo.

Cheers,
Delia

[ian-d]

Brendon, i agree with you completely, Indian submissions can be a dicy affair but we went off strong recommendations and over 6 months later, has not caused any knock on affects, but i do know of things going wrong, you just need to be careful and make sure they are submitting to genuine directories, and not link farms etc. We successfully got 700 backlinks out off one submission, which has now raised to over 1300 with no further work. Whilst i'm very keen on SEO, i still find that once you've put in some initial effort, the links will build themselves and leave you with little SEO to do, apart from constant content checks, updates on site, plus blogging, advertising etc, but the basics and fundamentals of SEO can be left behind to a certain extent (just my opinion of course)

[rejoice]

Seth Godin, one of the Internet's top marketers, developed a simple formula for viral marketing. Here's Seth's formula, in his own words:

"For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received."

According to Seth

No one 'sends' an idea unless:

1. They understand it
2. They want it to spread
3. They believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
4. The effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits

No one 'gets' an idea unless:

1. The first impression demands further investigation
2. They already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
3. They trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time

This explains why online ideas spread so fast but why they're often shallow. Nietzsche is hard to understand and risky to spread, so it moves slowly among people willing to invest the time. Numa Numa, (a video of a teenage kid doing a funny song and dance routine that was downloaded over 1 million times in 2005) on the other hand, spread like a toxic waste spill because it was so transparent, reasonably funny and easy to share.

[Brendon]

>> Indian submissions can be a dicy affair but we went off strong recommendations

Oh, yes, when it works it works well. You were fortunate that you had someone who'd already done the road testing for you Might be an amusing exercise to ask the people who gave you that recommendation how many other terrible link building firms (Indian or otherwise) they trawled through to find the diamond in the rough...

>> i still find that once you've put in some initial effort, the links will build themselves and leave you with little SEO to do

Again, for relatively non-competitive terms, I'd agree. More by accident that design, I tend to play in fairly high competition areas at the moment, and it's usually necessary to push a bit harder than that

[ian-d]

Brendon, i'd be interested to know what other techniques you use in SEO, my market is fairly competitive for the major keywords but have held back on SEO recently, but should do more

PM me if you get chance thanks