Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Website

Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Website

Alas, we get down to the real grist of selling or operating any type of business online. You can offer the best product or service and have the best conceived and designed Website, but unless you go about the business of promoting it properly, all your efforts will come to naught.

Make no mistake about it, advertising is the lifeblood of any business. If you don't learn how to advertise your products and services both efficiently and effectively, you won't be in business long. While the Internet has lessened or eliminated many of the costs normally associated with starting and running a business, you'll never realize any significant profits if you don't grow your business through effective marketing.

Promotion is what you need to be spending 90% or more of your time doing if you have any hopes of developing a profitable online business. Doing paperwork, building web sites, answering email, and processing orders doesn't help grow your business - only advertising does. Having a terrific product and blockbuster web site will do you no good whatsoever if you don't "get the word out" about it.

Key questions you need to be asking yourself once you get your business set up are:

1. How are you going to get traffic to your site?
2. How are you going to convert that traffic into cash?

When you get right down to it, nothing else much matters. Fortunately, the Internet happens to be a great marketing tool. So great in fact that more and more offline businesses are seeing the light and not only taking their businesses online but taking their advertising online as well. In fact, e-advertising is expected to grow by 300% by before this year is out. Not so surprising since online advertising gets instant response and is:

inexpensive
quick to implement
easy to target
easily track-able
easily modified

This said, using the Internet to effectively promote your web business takes a bit of practice, along with a whole lot of know how, especially when you consider that to be successful your marketing efforts must be sustained over time. You must think long, rather than short-term, and strategically plan a total promotional campaign that addresses these questions:

1) What image or message do I want to promote?

2) What are the best media and advertising activities for reaching my potential customers?

3) How much time and money can I spend on the effort?

In essence, you want to promote your product in front of those people who will likely become your clients, pay your price, and enjoy your product's benefits.

What Exactly Are You Going to Promote?

The first thing you'll need to decide, even before you decide how you're going to promote your site, is what exactly you are going to promote?

Take whatever is unique about your business and use it to develop a positioning statement such as:

"I will be the cheapest source of this product/service."
"I will add more value to the customer relationship than my competitors."
"I will deliver my product/service faster than my competitors."

Formulate and focus on your Unique Selling Proposition or USP.

You need to figure out a way to stand out from the crowd - emphasize what makes you better - why your customers would benefit the most from doing business with your rather than with your competitors.

SIDEBAR: The best way to promote your business online, regardless of which tools or tactics you choose to use, is to reach out to people and try to help them, to communicate with them as individuals. The internet is a prime medium for developing a strong relationship with a large and loyal customer base, but you can only succeed in one-on-one marketing if you know what you're doing and you take it one step at a time.

The "Promotional Mix"

Generally speaking, there are four basic categories that comprise the "promotional mix" or your marketing strategy. You will be dividing your advertising budget into these categories:

1. Advertising

Advertising is any paid form of promotion. And payment doesn't have to be in cash - it could also include an exchange of other products or services. Essentially, any form of promotion that is costs you is considered as advertising (and keep in mind that advertising and public relations are entirely separate).

Activities include: Banners, classified ads, search engines, paid traffic generators (i.e."pop-ups"), direct e-mail (or "opt-in" bulk e-mail), e-zine ads, reciprocal links, offline advertising (e.g., tradeshows, TV and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, direct postal mail, etc) and so on.

2. Personal selling

Personal selling is the presentation of a product or service for the purpose of making a sale. Offline this usually involves an oral presentation by you personally or by other people that you employ. Online however, personal selling, using other people to promote your products or services in exchange for a fee, salary or commission, takes a whole new form. It is most often accomplished through an affiliate program or joint venture. This is a particularly effective technique as a third party will always sell you or your product more effectively than you can.

Activities include: Affiliate programs, joint ventures, referrals and testimonials and, although this might be stretching it a bit, reciprocal linking.

3. Publicity or Public relations

Public relations involve building good relations with the company's target market (or any other related public segment, such as the company's alliances, affiliates, suppliers, or subscribers) by obtaining favorable publicity. It is done in order to build a good "company image."

Activities include: Press releases, endorsements, discussion lists, newsgroup postings, newsletters, online forums and chats, published guest articles, news conferences, special events, seminars, appearances on talk shows etc.

4. Sales promotions

Sales promotions consist of short-term incentives to encourage the purchase of a product or service. These incentives could be in the form of prices (or discounts), as well as bonus items or other augmented services (e.g., free delivery, extended warranties, backend product specials, etc).

Activities include: Special offers, seasonal discounts, coupons, rebate/refund offers, time-sensitive pricing, lead generating "freebies," introductory offers, contests, split offers (that differ when presented to various segments of your marketing audience), memberships programs and so on.

In this tutorial we are going to focus primarily on some of the advertising methods of promotion - along with one publicity method, press releases. We've already covered everything to do with email in a previous tutorial, aptly entitled "Everything Email," so if you haven't been taking these courses in sequence and you want to learn about opt-in marketing, ezine publishing and newsgroups, I suggest you head on over to http://www.everything-email.com after you finish up here.

But for now, we're going to focus on some other forms of online advertising like exchanging links, classifieds, banners, press releases and pop-ups.

The search engines are such a vast and important topic that I have given them their own course at http://www.topping-the-lists.com. If you've already covered the essential advertising testing and tracking basics at http://planning-your-promotion.com, feel free to visit either of the above two sites to download our free e-books now. If not, I highly advise that you backtrack and read through our "Planning Your Promotion" tutorial first. It contains a lot of important tips and information that will help insure that you get the most bang for your advertising buck every time! You can easily access all our e-courses, websites and tutorials from our http://www.websuccessmastery.com site.

There's Traffic... and Then There's Traffic

Before we get into the specifics of advertising, we should make one thing perfectly clear. There's traffic... and then there's traffic.

Many beginning marketers fall prey to the fallacy that having lots of traffic is like money in the bank. When the truth is, having lots of traffic is only valuable if they are targeted visitors, who are actually interested in your product or service.

Otherwise, who really cares?

Having ten people arrive at your web site in a purchasing frame of mind is vastly better than having a million prospects just surfing on through... on their way to who knows where.

So be smart and keep focused on what really matters.

Along these lines you might find it helpful to use pro marketer Terry Dean's (Marketing Protege) way of organizing his site visitors. He actually separates them into four categories:

Visitors
Leads
Customers
Clients

Here's Terry's explanation -

"A visitor isn't worth all that much. A lead is what they become once they give me their email address. They become a customer when they purchase something. They become a "client" when they purchase multiple times.

"My goal is to create as many clients as possible. Those people are as good as money in the bank... because whenever you have something to offer, they immediately reach in and give you money. They've learned you provide value, so they purchase over and over again from you.

"The visitors are not valuable unless they choose to give me their email address and become a lead... or they make a purchase to become a customer.

"Note - Real leads who signed up for your opt-in list create money-on-demand. You can make money whenever you want to by mailing a large number of them, but they're nowhere near as good as your client list."

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