Effective ways to drive traffic to your website fast – quick ideas for getting more traffic, ie. article marketing, advertisement, social networking, forums, etc.
There are all kinds of ways to get traffic to your site. Some methods are free while others you’ll need to pay for. The free methods take a lot longer but they are obviously less risky.
The main methods to get more traffic are search engine optimization, pay per click (PPC), joint ventures and co-registration.
But having said that, SEO and PPC are by far the two most popular and will be the ones discussed here.
SEO
This is where you try and get your site into the top ten in the search engines for a given keyword. If you aren’t in the top ten, you won’t get traffic.
Why is it so popular?
Because it’s completely free. But there are drawbacks. For one thing it tends to be extremely slow for many keywords it will take you months and possibly years to get ranked.
So it’s something you might want to consider doing AFTER you’ve gotten some cash flow going using PPC. A lot of people get drawn to SEO because it doesn’t cost money but they don’t consider the cost in time.
The reality is that you can make money much faster with PPC but the risks are a lot higher as well. Make sure you know what you’re doing before starting.
So how do you get into the top ten?
By maximizing your on-page and off-page optimization. On-page is what you do on your website itself to get it ranked and off-page is the links that are pointing to your site.
Which are more important?
Off-page are FAR MORE critical especially when you are dealing with a competitive keyword. Sometimes you can get ranked for an uncompetitive term with just on-page optimization.
But for anything with competition you will need to get at least some links to your site. How many you get is totally dependent on the competition level.
PPC
The key to making money here is testing. With SEO you can get away without testing so much because your profit margins are 100% but testing will make or break you with PPC.
What’s the best platform to use?
Google Adwords hands down. If you are just starting with the world of pay per click, this is the one I would recommend.
Why it’s superior
First, there’s FAR more traffic than Yahoo, MSN or the smaller PPC search engines get. Second, you can target specific web pages on the content network something that Yahoo or MSN don’t allow you to do.
When done right, the content network can be extremely profitable and possibly your biggest source of traffic.
In the end, both SEO and PPC have their benefits and drawbacks. SEO is low risk but slow, whereas PPC is high risk but offers fast profit potential. Which you decide on depends on which commodity you have more of – time or money.
