Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The truth about driving traffic

You know it and you have learned it well. Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Without traffic, there will be no leads. Without a list of leads, there will be no money on the table, because the old idiom always say “The money is in  the list”.

So, a lot of online entrepreneurs face a lot of struggle dealing with driving traffic to their websites. Some sites are designed with the fanciest web animations and buttons, but they only survive for one year before going out of business; some only uses a simple HTML form and no more than three paragraphs of sales letter, yet it delivers millions to its owner on auto-pilot simply because it manages to drive tons of traffic constantly.

So how in the world do you drive traffic constantly?

Some propose to use a paid traffic method like advertising using Google Adwords. While some like to say that it would be better to use the free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods for long term goals. So, which one do you take?

any method you take, paid or free, there is no short cut for endless and stable flow of traffic. Driving constant traffic is frustating. You will fail over and over again before you “get it”, whether using paid or free method.

The frustation using paid method is on the keyword research and targeting aspects. You will spent countless hours to test and re-test your campaign. Believe me, without proper guidance or eagerness, you will not be able to master the pay per click game.

How about free method, the SEO? This is also frustating. In order for your page to rank well, you need to look for backlinks, high quality and relevant ones, and if possible, a one-way back link.

Back a few years ago, social bookmarking sites like Digg was a gem in the one-way back link world for SEO lovers, but ever since get-rich-quick and adult-enhancement spammers exploited it, the sites put more and more strict spam filters.

Link exchanges are also a good option, but it is not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of hard work contacting webmasters asking them for link exchange. Most webmasters nowadays only want to link exchange with sites that are maintained consistently and have good Page Ranks.

So, do you still believe that driving traffic is a piece of cake?

Yes, I still believe that driving traffic is a piece of cake, if you use “out of the box” approach. One unique approach that you can use is by providing a free report in a PDF format containing links to your websites and product sales page.

“But, this is old school tricks!”  Yes, I know it is old school tricks but it still works, if you do it right. A lot of struggling internet marketers say “Ah, I know that…”, but they missed to “practice” their knowledge. No more of that now. Get off your seats and make a free report about your niche, and make it good, because after all, a good content is the most important.

After you make your free report, start distributing it. Use a newsletter and an autoresponder form. Contact webmasters and ask them whether they would like to share the report with their subscribers for free. Or better yet, lure them to sell your report for a profit just as long as they maintain your links in it. Now, can you imagine the effect of that report if one webmaster is willing to share it with 10,000 of his subscribers? Not to mention if those subscribers also share it with their networks and associates, the possibility is endless….

That is just an “out of the box” method that you can use.