Thursday, December 18, 2008

Forward Thinking Tactics For Online Marketing

By Stewart Woyo

For weeks you've slaved over your new website. You spent time organizing the text, cropping amazing photography, building the perfect graphics and finally it's time for you new website to go live. A website this good will have traffic beyond your greatest expectations, just as soon as you submit it to the search engines, right? But, after a few days go buy you just aren't getting the traffic you expected. So you submit it to hundreds of directories. That should do the trick. A few weeks pass and still very few viewers are finding your site. Maybe just submitting your site to search engines and directories just isn't enough? It's not. What you need is a well planed strategy to promote you site.

Web site promotion methods are as varied as the online sites they promote. Each of them, used properly, can increase traffic to your site dramatically. In the interests of keeping this article short and sweet, I'll give you five to get you started.

1) Incentives are a great way to increase web traffic. Offer something for free, either a sample or a report. If you are advertising a product for sale, try giving away a free sample to anyone who visits the site. Offering a free report or free sample is another way for you to send some decent traffic to your website. This tactic is called "moving the free line". It is when you give the customer something for free, and in return, you incite an action from them, such as visiting your site.

2) Sometimes you just get what you pay for. "Pay per click" marketing is a fast and easy way to drive traffic to your site if you have a budget for online advertising. Almost all of the major search engines offer pay per click services that will send customers that need and want your product or services directly to your website. One of the highlights to this approach is that you often only pay for the "clicks" that land a surfer on your site.

3) Networking can be an extremely cost efficient way to drive lots of traffic to your site. Other marketers within your target market can partner with you, to open the door to a tremendous amount of free traffic. Build these relationships as much as possible. If the partnership is set up properly, it can be both a short term traffic winner and a long term profit bringer. Be sure to return the favor though, and add their links to your site to swap traffic. Make use of one another's email lists, and broadcast news and bargains to this wide pool of ideal targets. Many different types of partnerships are possible, so try and spend some time focusing solely on establishing these kinds of relationships. In my opinion, networking is the most effective method on this list for building lasting web traffic.

4) Having a steady flow of content and articles is another good way to increase traffic. If you can write and syndicate a few hundred articles, readers will be accessing your site from all over the world in a matter of days. Eventually you will reach critical mass, which is essentially when you have so many unique visitors that you couldn't stall web traffic if you tried.

5) Marketing is often a visual concept, so online video creation and syndication is a powerful tool in your arsenal. Online video generated traffic is considered the most responsive traffic. Invest your time into making as many online videos as you can. These videos should be syndicated and submitted to more than a dozen of the web 2.0 video sites populating the internet. Not only will this method generate traffic from the viewers in the online video community, but it provides free search engine traffic as well due to the videos being ranked high in the search engines. - 16003

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