Targeted Traffic – How Hard Can It Be To Get Some?

targeted traffic

Many website owners believe that building the site is the hard part and having built it the targeted traffic will come.

Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as that, and the rush of visitors you expected to arrive fail to materialize.

Did you know that there are over 100,000 domains registered each day and there are over 133 million registered in total? Whilst not all of these domains will become websites it is still a heck of a lot of websites.

One thing that all websites have in common is the need for targeted traffic. Without any website visitors the idea behind the website becomes redundant. Whether your aim is to educate or to sell, if you have no visitors you have no success.

So, how hard is it to get targeted traffic to our sites?

Getting traffic to our site is easy enough if we have a huge budget to draw upon. We can create a PPC campaign and get targeted traffic within 15 minutes but it can prove costly and depending on your chosen keywords sometimes quite prohibitive to someone on a low budget.

You could buy 20,000 visitors for around $30 but how many of these are targeted to your offer remains to be seen. As part of a recent trial I purchased a small amount of traffic with a view to increase the amount if it worked out. When I checked my stats over 95% of the traffic came from the Philippines. I have nothing against anyone from the Philippines but I will let you draw your own conclusions from those results.

You could pay to have your banners displayed on another website whose visitors are in your targeted niche. Not all banner ads are made equally and with some you will be charged per impression and some by click through. Either way can work out expensive and you would do well to keep an eye on your conversion rates and to stop any unsuccessful ad campaigns.

Is it just me or are you as skeptical as I am about any form of advertising that you are charged for when someone clicks your ad?

Whilst ad swaps are primarily used to build your subscribers, if done correctly you can get the best of both worlds. Basically an ad swap is done with someone else who has a list of subscribers. You would send their offer to your list and they would send yours to theirs. You should be trying to get every visitor to your site to become your subscriber so the best way would be to send your ad swap visitors to a page that has an opt-in form on it.

By giving away something useful for free you will build up a good subscriber list and whilst they might not be a targeted visitor at this stage they could be a future customer of yours.

If you don’t have a sizeable list to barter with you can always purchase solo ads. With a solo ad you pay someone to send out to his or her list on your behalf. Unfortunately, in my opinion some of these list owners value their list higher than they should and with costs varying from $20 to $50+ for 100 clicks it can work out as expensive targeted traffic especially when the sites that offer this type of service have their own monthly fees to pay.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorite methods of getting targeted traffic for free. Unfortunately the downside of free targeted traffic is that you have to do more work than you do with paid methods and usually free methods need to be built steadily whilst paid methods are almost instantaneous.

One constant throughout these free methods is the creation of content of one description or another. At all times your content must be worth reading and preferably unique. You may be able to fool the search engines some of the time but if you are in this for the long term you must provide good content.

Posting in forums is a great way to get people to follow your link in your signature to your site. As you are posting in a forum related to your niche any visitors are highly targeted.

Guest posting on other blogs can get you massive exposure and targeted traffic if you offer quality content.

Blog commenting gets links as well as visitors who will check out your site if they think you have something interesting to say. If you post one line comments like ‘great post’ or ‘it’s just what I have been looking for’ you will not be accepted by the site owner so try to provide something useful.

There are Traffic Exchanges, Free Classified Ads, Article Writing, Press Releases and so on. In fact, there are many ways to get free targeted traffic to our sites but in my opinion the problem doesn’t lie with these methods, it is our application of them which causes us problems.

Most website owners will try some if not all of the free traffic methods when they first introduce their site to the world, but they don’t follow any system or plan.

Keeping a record of your traffic generation efforts and their success or not is the only way to approach things. If you know which methods work for you, you can increase that particular activity and drop the ones that don’t work.

This is a guest post by Dave Whitworth. He is the webmaster at two traffic generating sites. He has developed a system that keeps track of your traffic generating efforts at http://www.30daytrafficflow.com and he offers some free reports at http://www.traffics-cool.com/free/