How to Traffic Build Like the Experts

Posted on December 1st, 2007 by Larry Pages Online

You have your web site up and running. You even have established a decent conversion rate. For every 100 visitors, you make a couple of sales. The problem is, you only have 100 visitors per week, or worse yet, per month. If only you had more traffic, all your web site problems would be gone. You would sell product, and you would have enough visitors to test different aspects of your business. Pretty hard to test anything quickly with only 100 visitors per week!

So how do you build traffic like the experts?

1) You must think like an expert. You must have a trial and error mindset. This means you must try many sources of traffic and see what works for your website. Each website will naturally convert a certain type of traffic better than another website. For example, if you are sending pay-per-click traffic to your website, you would handle that traffic differently than if you were sending your website banner ad traffic. But the only way to know what works for you is trial and error.

2) You must track and test like the experts. You must track every traffic source you have. For example, if you have a 2% conversion rate overall on 6 different forms of traffic, that may be a very deceiving statistic. You might actually be converting 8% of your traffic from one source and practically none from all the others. One easy way to test this is to create duplicate pages, all with the same content, but with a different page name for each traffic source. Then you can track the effectiveness of each traffic source.

What types of traffic sources do the experts use, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

1) Classified ezine advertising. Advantage: You control when the ad goes out, and can test the effectiveness of each ad by running each ad to a different web page. Disadvantage: some ezines will be totally unproductive, while others will be highly productive, so you have to test many different ezines before determining which will be best for your website.

2) Pay-per-click advertising. Advantage: You can quickly generate lots of visitors for testing purposes. Disadvantage: You can easily spend more than you have budgeted, and if your keywords are not effectively targeted, your conversion rate will be low.

3) Article submission and marketing: Advantage: Very inexpensive traffic source, and also a very highly targeted and responsive source. Disadvantage: Can take time to build up traffic. Once you submit an article, it takes time for the directory to publish it, and for the search engines to begin to place it in the search engine results, and for other websites to pick up your article.

These are probably the most effective and most used sources of traffic for the experts. The bottom line is, with adequate testing and adaptation, an expert can make just about any traffic source create a profit; the key is in altering your overall campaign to most effectively target your traffic sources’ needs and quirks.

Sean Mize is a successful offline and online entrepreneur and marketer, and is the author of “15 Steps to Internet Success“. To receive a free copy, simply follow this link:

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