Driving Traffic To Your Website

There are a lot of companies out there that offer "traffic
packages", where they will offer you the chance to pay them a bunch
of money, and they will drive a ton of traffic to your website for
you.  Usually, the kind of traffic they will drive to your website will
be extremely low quality.  To make your marketing efforts
worthwhile, you want   t a r g e t e d  traffic to your website.  You
can use a lot of different tools to drive prospects to your
website, but the two easiest ways to do it is by driving organic
traffic or pay-per-click traffic.

Organic traffic is traffic that you DON'T have to pay for.  Organic
links are the links that come up in the middle of a page after you
have used a search engine.  The reason that the pages come up in a
certain order is because of the algorithms that the search engine
uses to determine the relationship between the keyword and the
content of the website.  Trying to utilize those algorithms and
gain higher listings is the art of Search Engine Optimization, or
SEO.  I don't mess with SEO.
 
Pay-per-click traffic is what I use to drive tons of prospects to
my websites.  These are the "sponsored links" that come up along
the side of the page after you perform a search.  In a nutshell,
here is how to use pay-per-click advertising:
 
1.  Open an account with Google or Yahoo (these two search engines
currently command the vast majority of the searches per month).

2.  DEVELOP KEYWORDS - keywords based on your product or service.
Keywords that people are using to try to find a similar solution
that YOUR product offers.  For example, if you are marketing a
skin-care product, target keywords such as "anti-aging", "plastic
surgery", "face-life", "remove stretch marks", etc.  You know that
people that are performing these types of searches are looking for
what you have to offer. 

3.  DEVELOP DIFFERENT AD-GROUPS - An ad group is the actual ad that
appears under the sponsored link.  It included a headline, some
short text, and your URL.  Match different keyword groups with
different ad groups. 

4.  MONITOR AND TWEAK - You want to shoot for a click-through rate
of at least 1.00% (preferably, much higher).  The click-through
rate is a function of the number of people that click on the ad (X)
versus the total number of people that see the ad (Y).  So to get a
1.00% click-thru rate, you need 1 out of every 100 people who see
your ad to click on it.

NOTICE:  Start cheap!  When you start experimenting, you want to
start DIRT CHEAP.  Don't pay any more than $0.20 per click starting
out, and watch your campaign like a hawk!
 
Now, this all assumes that you have a website with some decent copy
already set up.  REPLICATED WEB-SITES DON'T CUT IT.  If you drive
traffic to a replicated website, you will be spending more than you
will be making.  Drive prospects to a website that positions YOU AS
AN EXPERT IN YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE, with a call-to-action that has
them reaching out to you.