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With increasing competition for visitors, a number of options are available for increasing traffic to your web site, but they come a cost. Is it worth it? Site Exit TrafficA popular ploy to encourage "eyeballs" (visitors) is to purchase site exit traffic. In this strategy, you pay a web site to redirect traffic to you when a visitor leaves their site. This usually occurs with a pop-up window. Is it effective? I guess the best way to answer this is with another question. How do you feel when you leave a site and 20 pop-up windows litter your screen? While utilizing this strategy may increase page views according to your server logs, I don't think that you'll make many friends or encourage sales - unless the exits are occurring on very relevant sites and only one window is being generated by the referring site. This option is usually charged "per view" i.e, every time someone exits the site involved, you are charged. I can think of better ways to spend your advertising budget. Traffic RedirectsYet another strategy that marketing agencies may convince you to try is buying redirects from defunct sites, or from domain names owned by them. The domain names they own are usually generic terms, words that web surfers may type into their browser address bar in the hope that they will find something of relevance - or the names belong to sites that still have search engine rankings or links from other sites. Some clever individuals and companies have made a great deal of money through this scheme. They buy thousands of domain names, preferably those that have existing traffic and redirect those visitors to their customers. Unless the domain name that traffic is redirected from is specific to your line of business, it will probably be "low quality" (visitors not interested in your product) and once again serve only to annoy internet surfers. Again, this promotion method will "appear" to be successful as your site will gain thousands of hits. But unless the product you are offering has broad appeal, the money you spend may not be justified. Pay per click and search enginesStill one of the best and most ethical ways of purchasing web site traffic is utilizing pay-per-click options offered by many major search engines. It can be very expensive; so you will need to do your math first in order to justify it. Most of these search engines require you to bid on key words or phrases that users type in. The highest bid gets the highest ranking on the search results and the advertiser pays the amount bid every time someone clicks on their link. In this option, you will want to be listed in the first page of results in order to be noticed.
If you do intend to utilize a pay-per-click option for gaining traffic, you'll first need to work out your current visitors/sales ratio. If on average one out of one hundred visitors to your site makes a purchase then bidding 5 cents for a position on a paid search engine placement will cost you an estimated $5.00 per sale. If your profit margin is $10 per sale, then it's viable. If it's $4, then it's very risky. These figures are only a "guesstimate", but you get the idea. Which PPC engine should I try?For higher profit margin items, try the industry leader, Overture.com. Overture listings appear on MSN, Yahoo, InfoSpace, AltaVista, plus many other partner sites. There is a minimum spend of $20 per month and a minimum bid of 10c per click. Overture.com are also currently offering a $10 credit when you open an account. If your products are mainly low profit margin items,
consider utilizing Ah-Ha.com.
There's no minimum monthly spend and you can get targeted traffic for as
little as 1c per click. I've trialled the service and found it to be quite
successful and their customer support to be friendly and efficient. PPC - A beginners guide Michael Bloch Click here to view article index
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