Driving Traffic
There are many ways to get traffic to your landing page or authoritative website (I'll talk more about each of these in the next section). You will want to explore many of these methods to determine which methods give you the highest return on investment. The key here is driving traffic that will actually buy your product or service. We don't want tire kickers here; we want prospects that are generally interested in buying your product or service. In order to effectively determine which methods are most effective, measurement systems need to be in place at every step along the way. Google does a great job of providing all the numbers you need. Google Adwords provides up to the minute numbers for your pay-per-click search campaigns. Google Analytics is a very comprehensive analytics package that provides a wealth of information about your website or landing page traffic.
I'm not going to go in-depth into all the ways to get traffic to your landing page or website. There are numerous resources available that will teach you how to use each of these methods. Some of my recommendations are included, but these are only a small subset of the resources that are available. Here are some of the methods that you need to explore to drive traffic to your authoritative website or landing page.
- Search Engines
- Organic SEO - Your site content can be optimized to maximize your listings in the organic search results.
- Pay-per-click - This is paid search traffic. There are two main types here: search results and content. Search results are when your advertisement appears when a user type in a keyword phrase into a search engine. Content advertisements are text, image, or video advertisements that appear on other websites that are relevant to the product or service that you are promoting.
- Social Media - Social media for some is becoming the primary way of driving traffic to their website. Networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are fast becoming the primary method of communication for some people. Recent trends indicate that Social Media will continue to be major method of communication.
- BLOGs - There are two areas to explore in the world of Blogs. The first being writing your own Blog as a lead generator for your website or landing page. This is explored further in the Authoritative Website section. The second area is being active in other peoples Blogs. By responding to blog posts that are relevant to your business you are interacting with other people that potentially could be interested in your product or service.
- Article Marketing - Writing articles promote you as an expert in your field and drive traffic to your landing page or authoritative website. This type of traffic is generally high quality traffic because the user has already spent the time to read your article and are still interested in finding out more by visiting your website.
- E-mail Marketing - E-mail marketing is cost effective way to communicate with the users (or members) of your website.
There are many other off-line and on-line methods for driving traffic to your landing page or website. As technology changes, there will be new methods coming out rapidly. I encourage you to join an Internet marketing group or subscribe to some of the newsletters that I have listed on the right to stay up to date.
Social Media Marketing
I've been reading a lot about Social Media and how to use it effectively to market a product or service. I always think of Social Media as sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, but when you really look at it, there is much more to Social Media then just those sites. My definition of Social Media involves an on-line conversation or interaction between people that have a mutual interest. It is about sharing information or expertise with people to help them make informed choices.
There are two sides of Social Media. One involves existing sites where people interact. By looking at relevant sites in your industry you will find many opportunities to get into discussions with people that are interested in your product or service. LinkedIn is a great example of this. LinkedIn not only provides the opportunity to advertise your products or services on their site, but they also have groups that you can join to intact with other LinkedIn members. Last I looked, there are over 177,000 groups in LinkedIn. You can also start your own group within LinkedIn. Most news websites now give the opportunity for user comments. This is a great way to get into discussions with others about topics related to your business. If you do it correctly, your expertise in your industry will shine and people will seek you out for your advice. By becoming the "expert", your credibility will soar. Your sales will follow, because credibility is no longer a buying objection.
Social Media Training
Twitter - The best Twitter information site around. Click on the link below for more information.
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