What is targeted traffic?

Have you ever clicked on a link or an ad only to discover that the site you land on has nothing to do with what you thought it would? Have you ever been redirected to another website that offers something you aren’t interested in?

If so, your visit to those websites consisted of untargeted traffic because you simply weren’t interested in the item(s) being sold on those sites. You got there expecting one thing but found something different. Or even worse, maybe you got there without even knowing you were going there.

Receiving targeted traffic simply means receiving visitors who are pre-qualified because they clicked on an ad or link that accurately describes your site and/or what it has to offer. If someone clicks on your ad that explains how you sell high quality auto parts, the chances are very high that he/she is actually interested in auto parts, perhaps even looking to buy some!

But if someone clicks on your link that describes auto parts only to discover that your site actually sells golf balls, you not only have just received an untargeted (and probably upset) visitor who has no intention of buying your product, you have also wasted valuable bandwidth and possibly advertising fees!

How to get targeted traffic to your website

Obtaining targeted traffic is simple, but it isn’t easy. Here are a few great ways.

1. Exchange links with other websites that specialize in the same thing you offer. Many webmasters are reluctant to do this because they see it as linking to their competitors. Such an attitude is misguided and short-sighted.

Why? Suppose you have a link for your auto parts site on another auto parts site. Anyone who clicks that link is obviously interested in auto parts and is very likely to buy. Traffic simply cannot get more targeted than this!

But if you’re like many webmasters, you’re probably thinking “But I’ll be sending my precious visitors to a competitor’s website!”.

Yes, that’s true. But your competitor will also be sending his precious visitors to your website! It all balances out in the end.

In reality, it more than balances out because the THEMED inbound link to your website boosts your search engine rankings, which in itself brings you even more targeted traffic from the search engines!

In a nutshell, if done properly, exchanging links with your competitors will always results in a net increase in targeted website traffic and sales! Always!

2. Buy advertising space on high-traffic, relevant websites and ezines. If you sell auto parts, a great place to advertise would be on a site or in a newsletter that reviews autos/auto parts.

3. Build an effective pay-per-click advertising campaign for your main keywords. And be sure to use relevant synonyms to bring in the most targeted traffic possible.

4. Write articles that provide valuable information about the items you sell, then offer those articles to other webmasters for free to place on their site as long as they include your link in the article.
For example, if you sell auto parts you can write an article explaining how to properly pick out high quality auto parts and offer to let other auto parts sites to publish it along with your link.

5. Create an ebook about auto parts with your link on each page and give it away for free. You can even offer to let other webmasters give it away for free (as a bonus, for example)! These ebooks get passed down time and again, extending your website’s reach and boosting its targeted traffic to ever higher levels.

6. Buy Targeted Redirected Traffic from www.BuyExpiredDomainTraffic.com. This high quality targeted traffic is redirected from expired domains and not from popups/unders. Your website will be seen in full page view by real people interested in your product or service and it is the only site they see.

Conclusion:

Lots of targeted traffic is essential for the success of any commercial website. On the other hand, untargeted traffic is very expensive (in more ways than one) regardless of how cheap it is, and it does nothing for your bottom line.

If you’ll spend your valuable time building a great website and getting lots of targeted traffic to it, you’ll enjoy great success in your web-based enterprise!

Kevin Dube
http://www.BuyExpiredDomainTraffic.com

- Business Blogging. Start a blog for your business and update it on a regular basis. A business blog is an excellent tool to toot your own horn, let the world know about your new products, and tell your target customers why they should do business with you, rather than your competitor. A business blog is also a great tool for attracting potential customers to your blog and your web site.

- Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). SEO is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your web site since over 70% of people who are looking for products and services use search engines to locate them

- Article Writing and Publishing. This is another great way to drive traffic to your web site. When you write and publish your articles, other web site owners pick them up and publish them on their web sites, while giving you a link back to your web site.

- Newsletter Publishing. Keep in touch with your clients and potential clients by sending out a newsletter on a regular basis. Every time you send out a newsletter, don’t forget to invite the subscribers to visit your web site.

- Online Networking. Mention your web site address in your signature when networking online. Make sure that your web site is prominently displayed on the page, provided to you by every online networking service that you participate in, so that your fellow networkers can visit your web site.

- E-mail Signatures. Every time you send out an e-mail to one person, you have a chance to get an extra visitor for your web site. When you send an e-mail to a mailing list, you have a chance to spread the word to even more potential customers. All you need to do is to append a signature to every outgoing e-mail message. Make sure that the signature contains a powerful tagline that invites the readers to click on the link and visit your site

- Pay Per Click Search Engines. Here you can control exactly how many new visitors you want to get. There is a catch, though — you have to pay for every click to your web site. Make a budget and stick to it an make sure to monitor your account – those clicks add up fast.

- Affiliate Marketing. An affiliate program is another way to drive traffic to your web site. Your affiliates are your commissions-only sales people who make money when they sell your products. They drive traffic to your web site in exchange for commissions on sales.

Today I have discussed eight different ways of driving traffic to your web site. Which techniques are you not using yet? Take one of the techniques and incorporate it into your marketing plan. You will get a whole new pool of web site visitors coming to your web site.

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author who teaches business owners how to make more money online. Learn step by step techniques to drive more traffic to your web site and make more money online in Biana’s Complete Step by Step Online Marketing Course at http://avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zcourse

• Google’s PageRank: Google is probably the top search engine currently, and because of that, having a good ranking affects your traffic significantly. One main part of Google’s algorithms to determine the ranking of a site is by the amount of incoming links the site is receiving.
• They are how people find your site: Readers who click on the links will find your site, so naturally you will want as many incoming links as possible.

But how do you get those big and mighty sites to provide a link to someone like you? It is impossible right?

Wrong!

You just need to go about it differently. This is where article marketing comes in. The most valuable thing that you can offer the Internet community is your knowledge. And by offering useful snippets of it in the form of articles, you make yourself instantly very well-received.

Create articles that are purely informative and to-the-point. Remember that making it a long sales letter will not work. You will have to remove all links to order pages, affiliate sites, whatever. Do not even mention your company or your product/service in the main article body (but the author’s bio or resource box is perfectly fine).

Then, submit your articles to various sites of your choice. These can be directories, newsletters, or highly focused sites that are relevant to your articles’ content. Some sites do allow HTML links in your author’s bio or resource box, and that is probably the best. Those sites are usually of a really good PR – imagine getting free incoming links from a >PR6 site!

Remember to do this on a regular schedule. Due to the large number of other people submitting articles, you must make an effort to stand out from the crowd. It is best if you can create and submit an article every month, so that people will get to recognise and know you.

Once you develop a certain following, it becomes much easier to market your product or service!

Alvin Poh has been specialising in web development, content distribution, advertising and marketing strategies since 1995. His goal is to provide practical information based upon his years of experience to help webmasters, website designers, and self-employed people achieve their goals in today’s competitive Internet. At his site, you can learn how to make money online.

No one wants to be banned by the search engines, so this article will discuss how to find relevant sites with whom to exchange links, and how to keep track of them after you have exchanged the links. Even though there are software programs that will do most if not all of this for you, they have various flaws and inadequacies. If you are one of those people who prefer the personal touch, this article is for you!

The first thing to do is to type your key words or phrases into a search engine and see what comes up. The sites you see on the first few pages have made it to the top of the search engine rankings. Go to these sites and look around on the home page for the phrase “links exchange” or sometimes just “links.” Some sites now use “resources.” They will have instructions for how to place a link to their site on your site, and instructions on the information they need from you in order for them to place a link to your site on theirs. Some have a form for you to fill out; others want you to e-mail it to them. Have your information (your site Title, URL (your home page where you want them to point their link), Description, and the URL of your links page where you have placed their link, your name and e-mail address) saved in a document ready to cut and paste into both forms and e-mails. It will save you tons of time.

Always remember that the Golden Rule applies here. You want them to place a link to you on their site so you need to reciprocate. If you are uncomfortable with the content of their links page and would prefer not to be associated with that site, then just move on. There are plenty of others.

Some of the higher ranked sites will have non-content related restrictions about with whom they will exchange or will not links. They will only exchange with you if your site and/or links pages have achieved a certain Google PageRank. (To download the Google Toolbar click here.) Even if you do not have such a page rank yourself, you can request an exchange with such sites but do not be surprised if they decline or ignore you. If your site is new, be sure not to stop looking after the first page or two in the search engines. There are many wonderful sites not on the first few pages and most of them would be more than happy to exchange links with you.

Repeat this search frequently because nothing is static on search engines; you might get different results every day searching for the very same word or phrase!

Once you have exchanged links with a site check out the other sites on their links pages. Some sites have links pages loaded with other sites that would be a good match for you. Go ahead and offer to exchange links with them, also. Beware however that some sites may not have been very discerning in their choices of exchange partners. You, however, will be very discerning and will choose wisely the sites with whom you will exchange links! Be careful not to be too narrow, though. Remember that you want to exchange with sites that have content your visitors may find interesting and useful.

If you only exchange with clones or near clones of your site, nobody will be interested for very long. For instance, if your site is about a particular breed of dog, don’t limit your exchanges to other sites about that breed, or even other breeds. Try sites that deal in dog food, dog care in general, grooming products, training methods, dog accessories, shows and other events, etc.

Set your site up so that each category has its own page or set of pages, and alphabetize the links on each page by site title if your software does not do that automatically. What you want to avoid are sites that have nothing whatsoever to do with the main topic of your site. In our example of a site about a breed of dog, avoid exchanging links with sites offering bargain vacations on the other side of the globe, casinos, real estate, music, etc. You get the idea. Remember that people who visit your site are looking for dog related information, not that other stuff.

Now that you have accumulated several pages of links, you need to be able to keep track of them so that you don’t request exchanges from the same webmasters more than once. It would be embarrassing for them to respond to your request with “I exchanged with you 2 months ago” or something like that. So, what do you do if your software does not do it for you?

Set up a simple spread sheet. Don’t worry about setting it up to print out on neat pages, because you shouldn’t have to print it out. Make the columns as wide as you need to. You will need to set them up as follows: Title / Description / Category /URL / Reciprocal URL. You can add optional columns for webmaster name and e-mail if you want. Your categories in our hypothetical site would be food, training, accessories, etc. As you add a link to your site, add it to the bottom of your spreadsheet. You can then alphabetize your spreadsheet by whichever column you need. Not only will you know which sites you already have, but you can see at a glance where on your site you have put it! I have used this system extensively and it works extremely well.

One last thing. Please don’t ever refuse to exchange links with someone without a high enough page rank because they are new. Everyone was new once and started out with a page rank of “0″ including those who are now at the top of the list for their chosen key words and phrases. As people help you to get started when you are new, turn around and help others behind you as they get started.

In case you might be wondering how to tell the difference between a new site with a page rank of “0″ and a link farm with a page rank of “0″, the new site with have a cached page and the link farm will not. The link farm will have a bizillion links and the new site will have few if any. To find this information look for the icon on the Google Toolbar that looks like a blue circle with a lower case white “i” in the middle, located right next to the little green bar that shows you your current page rank. When you click on that icon you will see a drop down menu that includes both “cached snapshot page” (what your page looked like last time Google checked out your site) and “backward links” which shows how many links Google shows point to your site from other sites.

If when you click on one of those drop down menu choices you find that Google has no record of that site, it’s best to wait to exchange links until you find our why there is no record. If the site has been up for more than a few days, there should be at least a cached page. If there isn’t, the site may have been banned, and you should not associate with banned sites.

Sandi Moses has been involved in internet marketing since
November, 2003. Visit her sites at
http://www.123iwork4me.com
http://www.123-home-based-business-works-4-me.com

With so many active surfers around, you would think Webmasters and site owners have an easy time attracting them. Actually, they face an uphill battle to bring visitors and, more importantly, consumers to their Web sites. And a Web site without traffic is like a store built in the middle of the desert. You could have the greatest products and most attractive Web design around, but they’re worthless if no one visits them.

There is one way, however, to turn your Web site into an oasis of business, a way to drive as much traffic to your site as your server can handle: a classified ad.

More on that later. First, all Web builders and site owners should know the basic and time-tested ways to attract traffic to their Web site. The key to all of these methods is to attract the right Web surfers. You want what experts call “targeted visitors,” or people who are actually interested in what you’re selling. To guarantee that this happens, you should follow this checklist of Web traffic golden rules:

Step 1: Optimize your Web pages. Webmasters in the know take the time to set their meta tags. These tags, or codes, are hidden keywords in the Web page that tell search engines like Google and Yahoo exactly what your site is all about. A meta tag, for instance, could be “designer handbags,” “sporting equipment,” or whatever else you happen to be selling. These keywords tell the search engine to direct all handbag or sports shoppers to your site.

Step 2: List your site with every search engine out there. For this step, you simply need to surf over to Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. Click onto their customer service page, where they allow Web builders and site owners to manually submit their site addresses.

Step 3. Spice up your site with interactive features. With articles, newsletters, offers, promotions, and discounts, you give your targeted visitors a reason to stay at your site once they find it. More importantly, you give them reasons to come back and tell their friends about the site. Word of mouth is one of the best, and cheapest, forms of advertising on the planet.

Step 4. Exchange banner ads with friends and with other companies that you do business with. Banner ads are those eye-catching designs at the top and bottom of Web pages. They’re like the billboards of the Internet superhighway. But with these online billboards, a simple click transports the Web surfer directly to your Web site.

Step 5. Exchange Web links with friends and business associates. This, Webmasters and site owners, could be the most important way to drive Web traffic to your site. All of the major search engines rank sites by measuring how many links come to and leave from your Web site.

So links are a way to measure how worthwhile and how legitimate your site is. The better this measurement, the better chance your site will have to show up well in Web surfers’ searches. In other words, these links could be the difference between your site being listed on page 20 of a Google search results, or on page 1.

Building better Web links and search engine resultsthat’s where classified sites come into play. Some of the most savvy classified sites on the market now offer Web links in their ads. These links lead right to your business’ home page.

Not only are these links convenient one-click ways for more customers to reach your site. They also boost your search engine rankings.

Of course, for business owners, classified sites have so many other benefits, too.

• Unparalleled exposure. Classified sites are like online malls. Not only will you get exposure from shoppers coming specifically to find your goods. You get “spill over” attention from shoppers who came for another item but then start browsing through all of the other ads in the classified “mall.”
• A new arsenal of Web sites. Having online classified ads is like setting up multiple new Web sites across the Internet. Unlike your own original site, these classified ads come with low-cost IT support, security, and advertising.
• Incredible growth opportunities. Businesses and individuals selling on online classified sites pull in more than $1.95 billion a year, according to the statistics firm Kelsey Group. That figure does not even include money from eBay.
• Money for nothing. As valuable as classified sites are, many of the best ones charge very little or absolutely nothing to set up your ads.

Add up all of these numbers250 million active Web surfers in the world, $1.95 billion in classified sales, and $0 costand your Web business is sure to come out in the positive.

Donald Lee is the public relations manager for Buysellcommunity.com. Buysellcommunity provides free classified listing services for individuals and businesses to market their products and services online. For global and localized classifieds, please visit

www.buysellcommunity.com – Free Buy & Sell Classifieds