subject: Always Test The New Sources Of Traffic [print this page] Anyone who has an online business will know the importance of a consistent flow of visitors to their website. Without traffic, your website will not be seen by anyone and will not result in any sales.
When it comes to free traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is the main strategy to tackle. You want to get your site ranked on the first page of the search results for terms that you are targeting. Having a good ranking for a select few highly searched terms can bring you loads of free traffic but technically, the traffic is not free. You have to put a lot of effort into link building, optimizing your site, etc. This takes time and as the saying goes, time is money.
For this article, we will focus instead on paid sources of traffic. This is the fastest way you can generate a lot of traffic to test your sales page for conversions. The most effective paid traffic is that generated through pay-per-click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. These three platforms get the lion's share of PPC traffic so you should focus on them. Master them and you will be on your way to creating streams of traffic on demand.
It is important, however, to be constantly testing new sources of paid traffic. Social media advertising is another option to advertise your business. MySpace and Facebook have recently launched their own self-service advertising platform. With the ability to target a certain demographic that corresponds to your business, you may see some high conversion numbers. There are a large number of social media and social networking sites that you can test.
Media buying through banner networks is another option. Most of these companies have easy-to-use platforms where you can easily upload your banner to create an ad campaign. Then you can specify your ad budget and also target the categories of sites you want your ad to appear on. Alternatively, you can also approach individual site owners to advertise on their sites. Think of sites that your prospective customers tend to visit, such as forums or blogs.
As you branch out to other traffic sources, be sure to keep track of the results of your tests. After a period of testing, gather all the data and analyze them to make a decision whether the traffic is profitable. If it is not, drop it and move on to the next traffic source.
Another thing you can do is to set aside a portion of your profits for the purpose of testing. This is akin to reinvesting your profits to grow your business. Having a disciplined approach to continuously increase the traffic to your site will reap massive benefits in the long run.
