TRAFFIC SECRETS:
How to Attract
Serious Traffic
to Your Website.
Introduction
The most important aspect of any website is traffic.
Traffic is everything! A website without traffic is like a Mr.
Biggs or a Chicken Republic built right in the heart of
the desert. You see, if there are no people around to patronize the desertland
Fast Food outlet, it would simply fold up. So it is with websites. You
must have to get traffic to it no matter what.
Attracting traffic to your website is far from being a magic undertaking.
There are no ‘quick fixes’, you must do some basic serious work to attract
people to your website. In the ensuing pages, I am going to introduce you to
several guaranteed strategies which you can use to generate traffic to your
website as a Nigerian webmaster.
MODULE 1:
Online Strategies.
Chapter 1
Online Article Marketing
One of the cheapest ways to continually attract serious
traffic to your website is to begin writing lots of articles in the subject
area of your website, and then to distribute the articles online for free. If
your website deals on dating related topics, it wouldn’t be wise writing
free articles on football, video gaming or computer
programming. Your article must have to be related to your website’s
subject; else the traffic won’t be targeted and the traffic it would bring will
almost be useless. Untargeted traffic will not perform well on your website
(say you sell an eBook on dating, visitors coming directly from a football fans
website will hardly buy your eBook but traffic coming from a dating website
will make your eBook a bestseller!
In continuation, you must be asking: “how can I
possibly attract traffic to my website by writing free articles?” The
answer is simple, “by allowing people to reproduce your article if and only if
they would include a link to your website with it. Alternately, you would want
to submit your articles to article directories like www.eZineArticles.com , www.ArticleCity.com , www.ArticleJoint.com, etc.
When you submit your articles to these sites, search
engines will spider them and they will be visible of search results. In
conclusion, if you truly write a timely, hard-hitting and very useful article.
People will send it to others, invite others to come and view it or reproduce
in their publications or on their websites.
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Chapter 2
Online Advertising
When it comes down to it there are few strategies as
effective in traffic generation as good old advertising (paid advertising I
mean). It would give you the opportunity to have your ad show up in the most
relevant places. Provided your ad and sales message (where applicable) are
properly written, you cannot fail to turn a profit. Online advertising is instantaneous
in producing results. You will have people pouring into your website
the very minute your advert goes live. Nothing beats that! As a Nigerian
website owner, there are several effective places you can run advertisements
for your website and I am going to show you.
The first places you
will want to begin advertising your website is on Nigerian Newspaper websites.
Right now, they are the highest traffic pulling destinations on the Internet
for Nigerians. On the average most of these websites get more than 50,000 visitors
daily and their advert rates compared to offline newspaper adverts are very affordable.
Below is a list of some Nigerian Newspaper websites:
www.Vanguardngr.com
www.SunNewsOnline.com
www.Tribune.com.ng
www.PunchOnTheWeb.com
www.BusinessDayOnline.com
7 www.NationalMirrorNews.com
www.ngrGuardianNews.com
www.NewsWatchngr.com
www.ThisDayOnline.com
www.FinancialStandardNews.com
www.TheTideNews.com
The second place you
would want to advertise your website is with the Google AdWords program. Google
AdWords is a wonderful advertisement program maintained by Google.
It operates on a bidding system. When you advertise on AdWords, you are only
billed when someone clicks on your advert unlike in conventional media like
newspapers – where you pay for exposure. When you advertise on AdWords, your
ads show beside Google search results related to your advert. In
fact when you are creating an ad, you are prompted to assign keywords to it.
These keywords then trigger your ad as soon as they are typed. Have you noticed
those little text boxes displayed to the right of your search results on
Google? Below is a screenshot a Google search page:
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Furthermore, your ads also get to show up on the websites
of people running Google AdSense on their websites. Don’t worry, the ads are dynamic
here too, they are only displayed on web pages with content related your
advert. Here is a screenshot showing AdSense ads, must have seen sites with ads
like that, haven’t you? To sign-up for AdWords, visit http://adwords.google.com.
Finally, note that you’d require a credit or debit card in order to make
payments for your AdWords ads.
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Chapter 3
Email signatures
Another way to effectively market your website is through
the use of email signatures. A signature is a small note you can designate to
be assigned to all your outgoing email messages. In your signature, you can include small
descriptive information about your website and then put a link to leading to
it. You would be pleasantly surprised to find out the number of people who will
visit your website through this channel.
Here’s an example of a good email signature:
________________________________________
“Get Info on the Latest Business and Money-Making
Opportunities For
Nigerians:
kenuchgist.blogspot.com
kenuchgist.blogspot.com
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Chapter 4
Forum Signatures
An often overlooked traffic generation technique is
including your signature in your forum posts. If you belong to a discussion
forum like www.NairaLand.com and you regularly join in their discussions, then all your
posts can be advertisement sources for your business. Do not begin spamming any
forum with marketing messages as it would decrease your credibility and will
definitely get you banned. Just head down to your profile and then include the
appropriate details in your signature field.
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Chapter 5
Viral eBook Marketing
This strategy simply deserves an award for its existence.
In the long term, it is one of the most profitable and highly effective traffic
generation strategies in available. Lots of people have done it, lots are doing
it and lots are still going to do it. The question will you be among them? It
has never been less effective and never will be.
Here, just as discussed in the article writing strategy,
you provide people with valuable information but in this case you package your
free Information as an eBook that people can easily distribute to their
friends. I am talking from example here. I just helped a single guy distribute thousands
of thousands of his free eBook. I didn’t do so because it I loved the guy or
his eBook. I only did so in order to help myself. The guy wrote a 50 page eBook
titled “The Beginner’s Guide To Investing in The Nigerian Stock Market”
You see, because I found this eBook very valuable, I had to include it as a
bonus material with one of my eBook. Would you believe that some people just
bought my eBook because they were more interested in the free eBook? Interestingly
my eBook sold thousands of copies and I happily distributed someone else’s
eBook and resultantly drove thousands of traffic to his website.
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I want you to understand that I alone distributed
that much. Yes, I agree that most people don’t have their own eBooks for sale
which will make them add your free eBook as a bonus. But lots of people can
easily share it with 10 – 20 of their friends who are Interested in stocks. Furthermore,
I wouldn’t need to tell you that you’d include links in the eBook leading to
your website. If you don’t, how would you benefit from distributing your free
eBook?
Finally, you must make sure that your eBook has some real
value to your prospective readers. Believe me, if it doesn’t, no one will
distribute it.
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Chapter 6
Using an Autoresponder
This is unarguably one of the most important aspects of
your Internet efforts. Autoresponders with all the potential they have are
greatly underutilized. Most savvy Internet Marketers will tell you, ‘The
Money is in the List!’ Autoresponders are so important that it would be
very fair if I charged you N100,000 to teach you about them! Let me
explain what an Autoresponder does to you. Let’s say you have a website where
you sell an eBook. Naturally, you’d spend money and energy in generating
traffic to it. With an Autoresponder you can capture the contact details of the
visitors you have succeeded in attracting to your website and keep the details
for life.
With your own autoresponder list, you can automatically
send follow-up marketing or advertisement messages to all your list members
with the click of a button. You can even set the messages to be automatically delivered
to them at given intervals up to two and half years in advance!
Furthermore, when you get a new product or service to
offer you can easily pass the message to your list members without spending a
dime on new advertising. Now, it’s very important you know that studies has
shown that more than 65% of people will need to see your offer more than
once before making a purchase. Your autoresponder is the perfect vehicle to
help you accomplish this. Two of the best Autoresponders in the market are GetResponse
(www.GetResponse.com and Aweber (www.Aweber.com). I personally use GetResponse and have never experienced
any problem them.
GetResponse charges you about $19 monthly until
your list reaches 10,000 subscribers. After this point, they charge
about $4 more for each 5,000 set of subscribers. They also have a free version,
but they will run adverts in your messages and you will not get the full
features and adequate support. I will encourage you to incorporate an
autoresponder in your marketing efforts from day one. I learnt this important
lesson the very hard way. In fact building an autoresponder list is now so
important to me that I now basically build a list first, and then create
products and services to market to it afterwards.
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MODULE 2:
Offline Strategies
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Chapter 7
Offline Article Marketing
Just as in online article writing treated earlier, you can
promote your website through your articles offline. You can write sample
articles in your area of expertise and then send it to several newspaper and
magazine publishers requesting that they make you a guest writer. Now if you
promise to regularly supply them with free juicy articles. They would
gladly allow you to display your website link, email address or phone number
immediately below your article or even at its top.
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Chapter 8
Offline Advertisements
Because your business is Online doesn’t mean it cannot
benefit from offline advertising. Ideal places to advertise include newspapers
and magazines, then TV if you can afford it. I would not advice on radio
adverts simply because the listener might have difficulties getting the exact
spelling of your website address. Newspaper adverts are not as expensive as you
think, with about N4,500 you can have your classified ad appear in a 1 X
1 column on SUN for example. The same for other newspapers too. Classified
Adverts (1 X 1) column ads are about the most effective avenues of advertising
your website. If your advert is well written that is. With as little as N4,500
you can expose you business to thousands of people.
A common mistake you should strongly avoid is trying to
sell your product in the classified ad. The space is simply insufficient for
something like that. You’d need closer to a full page in a national newspaper
and it should cost you more N300,000! What you should do is make your ad as
concise as possible, and tell people to visit your website or send an email to
your autoresponder for further information. It’s called a two step ordering
process and since you have
unlimited space in your email and website, you can now
thoroughly educate your visitor on your product before asking for a financial commitment.
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Chapter 9
Business Cards & Office Stationary
If you are in the habit of distributing your business
cards to people, then this could be a good source of traffic for your website.
Besides displaying your phone numbers and email address, you can also input
your website address.
How about your office stationery? Do you include your
website address on it? If you do, you will be pleasantly surprised at the
results.
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