Despite its popularity and its once record profit returns, pay per click advertising has lost something in returns. It is still, however, one of the best, fastest, and most effective methods of advertising on the web. According to Google’s record profit posting recently, lots of people see these ads and click on them. While it is true that pay per click advertising is only worth it if the sale gets from click to close, those businesses that do manage to close the sale have an excellent deal in their hands with pay per click. This means that customers are usually directed to their site for about five cents each, depending on the price of the key word. Pay per click advertising is even better than high search engine rankings because the ads can go up in just a few minutes while changing your web page content to improve your rankings, even with the help of a search engine oriented text company, can take weeks.

There are many different current companies that offer pay per click advertising. Google’s pay per click program is called AdWords. Google estimates that over eighty percent of internet users visit Google as a search engine. That results more customers seeing the ads than most businesses ever thought possible. Google allows you to create your own ads. They do, however, have a service that will design your ad for you if you choose. Yahoo is the other most popular pay per click program. Yahoo’s Overture works through partner sites like MSN and Alta Vista. Through these many sites, they claim to allow you to reach over ninety percent of internet users.

Choosing a company to sign up with can be difficult, but the most difficult part of pay per click advertising will be the planning and writing stages. To make the best pay per click ad campaign, you have to bid on key word phrases that work best for you, write the most effective ads, and have a strong, quality page when they click on your ad. The price of some key word phrases is extraordinarily high, so picking the right phrases immediately is your best bet. If you know how to catch the customer’s attention and offer them a perfect presentation, you will get the sale almost every time. If you don’t, you will lose some serious money with pay per click advertising.

Some people recommend using a search engine oriented professional to design your pay per click advertising campaign. However, the right campaign can be self-managed, with the right skills. You need some understanding of consumer psychology, excellent writing skills, and plenty of time to research what will work for you. Before you get ready to start your pay per click campaign, be sure to do some research into what is out there with regard to your product or services. When you get ready to write, you’ll want to notice that the best campaigns are legitimize by what their pages declare about them. Without that legitimacy, your ad will not only fail, it may be removed by your pay per click service. The search engine company you choose to work with may be able to help you find the right key words, but their suggestions can sometimes be ineffective. You can find the best key words by using several services and performing web research on a regular basis.

Pay per click advertising campaigns can be very effective if your ad is well written and if your target site helps to complete the sale with the customer. Without these elements, pay per click advertising is simply a waste of your valuable time and money. You would be better off with a traditional ad campaign.

To help you find campaigns that work, use Google Detective. This tool will not only identify successful campaigns, it will also show you how you can replicate that campaign in minutes. Try out the Google Detective free trial now.

The problem is, how exactly would people get to know that your website exists? Surely, they must first learn about its existence before they could visit it, right?

Well, it’s a fair assumption that 80% of the traffic that you’d be able to generate for your website would come from the search engines. Therefore, it is essential that you submit your website to as many search engines as possible. The process starts way before submission, of course, as you would have to optimize your web pages to constantly and efficiently win the attention of the search engine spiders.

Sounds like hard work? Well, this is something that you must do to assure a high volume of traffic for your website, dear friend. You have to employ certain tactics to get a better chance at online success.

But this is the realm of search engine optimization, or SEO as it is fondly called.

You could also try viral marketing and article marketing. The former would fetch for you an exponentially increasing traffic at a regular pace. The latter would result in a boost of users that would get to visit your web pages. Both strategies pursue the goal of exposing your website’s link to as many people as possible. Viral marketing would allow you to continuously spread your link through the use of a free product, which is usually an eBook or a special report, with words to encourage the recipients to distribute the same to their respective networks. Article marketing involves the submission of an article to the many article directories in the World Wide Web. Each article comes with a resource box that includes a link to your website.

Both strategies entail some work, specifically writing.

Are there easier ways to win traffic, you might ask? Well, there are some tactics that require little work yet provides substantial results. Let’s take a look at them.

• Increase your link popularity. Link popularity simply means the number of websites that contain links to yours. If you want to know what your website’s current link popularity is, just use the free tool at www.linkpopularity.com . Convincing other webmasters to display links to your web pages can either be very easy or very difficult. If you have befriended some webmasters throughout your online experience, this would be a cinch. Otherwise, expect to barter for such a spot on their websites, either in exchange for your goods or services, or by allowing them to display their links on your web pages as well.
• Buy spots. Most of the time, money does all the talking, and convincing. If you can’t talk them into allowing your links to be displayed on their websites, simply buy a spot on their web pages. Usually, you’d be given the spot for a month, with the option to renew the agreement every month thereafter.
• The previous two tips are about linking to other websites. Make sure that you choose popular websites. The purpose here is to garner visitors from highly visited sites to check out your web pages. If the other website generates less traffic than yours, your efforts would just be for naught.
• Try Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This would require some financial investment from you. Overture and Google AdWords are the most prominent PPC advertising programs today. You just have to pay the program for every visitor they manage to refer to your website. You don’t have to worry about going broke, as you could always set a daily limit of how much you want to spend.
• Try traffic exchange programs. There are free ones and there are paid ones. Free traffic exchange programs allow you to join a membership community. For every website you visit, you will earn a certain number of credits. You could use these credits to purchase traffic for your own site. Paid traffic exchange programs don’t require you to visit other websites, but you do have to bring out some cash to avail of their benefits.

The traffic strategy you employ should depend on the nature and the goals of your website. A careful study of the benefits and consequences of each tactic should be made before resorting to them. Make sure that they are a perfect match for what you want your website to achieve.

Without doubt, your website represents a great opportunity to promote your properties for sale or to rent, in addition to your business generally, to the whole wide world.

This is a real “no brainer” – you must regularly update content on your site and you need visitors. 

To optimize the number of visitors to your website, you need to promote your site with some, if not all of these strategies:-

1. Your web address should appear on all business stationery, promotional material including your newsletter and all advertising especially signage. 

It also makes good sense to refer to your website in your on hold and after business hours telephone messages.

2. You should ensure that you make mention of your web address in all press releases, editorials or articles you write. Any readers will then be able to check your agency out via your website.

Similarly, if you have the good fortune to be interviewed on radio, you should ask the interviewer to mention your web address or you should drop it into the interview yourself ñ with some subtlety, of course.

3. Incorporate your web and e-mail addresses in your e-mail signature message. This may satisfy the curiosity of your e-mail recipients and encourage them to check you out

You can also refer to specific properties or forthcoming auctions in your e-mail signature message ñ however that’s another story!

4. Include your web address in your ë30 second networking commercial’when you meet people and you have an opportunity to talk about your business. Then make sure that you give them a business card to reinforce the message.

5. The web address should be included with your logo and company name on any business t shirts. The visibility with t shirts is difficult to beat.

6. Similarly, staff name badges should incorporate the web address on the name badge. Again this represents excellent visibility.

7. When you are speaking in public, your speaker introduction should include reference to your web address and, wherever practicable, you should also refer to it in the course of your presentation. You can achieve this objective without being painfully obvious.

8. Some may believe that it’s crass, but there’s merit in including your web address in your motor vehicle signwriting. When you stuck in a long line of traffic, you never know who will see your message and record it for posterity or later use. Naturally, this could be a disadvantage if you’re caught speeding, parked where you shouldn’t be or involved in a road accident!

9. Establish reciprocal links with other websites that would appeal to your clients, referrers and prospective clients.

10. Publish a newsletter and regularly include details of new content, features and other changes to your web site.

You should allow visitors to sign up to receive an e-newsletter on your web site ñ you’re sure to be pleasantly surprised by their interest.

The ability of the web site visitor to register for an e-mail newsletter also allows you to collect information regarding visitors.

The vast majority of websites never get much of any traffic. Of course, this should come as no surprise. There are millions of different websites, even within a single topic, and there’s no way for the average internet browser to find one specific website without some help. And that’s what this article is about. What can you do as an online entrepreneur to identify yourself to the masses and help them find their way to your website? More importantly, what can you do to achieve that objective with little or no money?

That last sentence is the most important one so far. We all know the pay-per-click options exist and our hard earned money can quickly and easily drive traffic to your website. We all know it can be done at the click of a mouse. But how much will it cost? For those of us who have tried this type of advertising, it’s truly amazing how quickly you can run a tab paying for one click here and one click there. Well, as it turns out, there are some other options available that can drive just as much traffic and won’t cost you a penny.

The first strategy is encompassed by this article you’re reading. I wrote this article and posted it to the internet for free. Nobody’s paying me a penny. I took the time to write is all down because I know how to post it to thousands of different article directories quickly. And at the bottom of this article is a short bio with some brief information about me along with my website address. That means everyone who reads this article has the option of clicking through to my website directly. It’s called article marketing and it’s one of the best strategies for driving website traffic.

The second strategy involves posting comments on popular industry forums. Once you register with a forum, you can post comments within any topic you can find a string for. Your profile usually allows you to create a signature and that signature can include your website address. Once again, you’ve leaving behind a direct link to your website every time you post a comment. And as such, I would post as many comments on industry forums as you possibly can ñ perhaps as many as 15 or 20 comments each day.

The third strategy is to post comments on popular blogs in your area of expertise of beginning a blog of your own. If you post comments on a blog for 10 consecutive days, I can almost guarantee you that someone is reading your posts. It just happens. People find stuff and you can quickly gain an audience by creating a blog. And of course, you can revert to posting comments on someone else’s blog. You can always leave behind a direct link to your site when you do so.

The forth strategy is to make your website easy to bookmark with any one of the many social bookmarking sites that have emerged during the past year or so. It’s the new craze and sites like StumbleUpon or Boing Boing or Digg can quickly drive traffic to your site if the content you’re providing is appreciated by others. Adding the appropriate buttons and links only encourages that process.

Driving internet traffic doesn’t have to be a mystery. It doesn’t need to be a secret. And there are lots of things you can do to get plenty of organic traffic landing on your website. In most cases, it doesn’t cost any money. It just takes time. And if you can allocate the time, you’ll be amazed at how quickly it will also start happening. Good luck!

Then the JV, oh that intimidating process of contacting the gurus to JV with you , then coupled with rejection letters. I guess you have experienced it if you have stayed online for some length of time.

So what do you do when in such a dilemma? Yet you need loads of traffic to make money online?

Remember, we are talking about targeted traffic. Laser targeted, highly motivated customers ready to whip out their wallets and input their credit cards. You are searching for El Dorado. You know it’s there. You’ve read that others have found it. There is a path and it starts here.

Below are five diverse methods that you start to use to drive targeted customers to your site with the knowledge you gain here.

1. Join the world and start a blog! Blogging is the craze of this internet generation. A blog is online diary that can be easily updated. Your readers can even leave comments or answer polls. By just setting one up you create another link into your site. People love blogs and love to read what others have to say. By creating a blog on a subject related to your website you already have targeted visitors who won’t hesitate to click onto your website if they want to learn more information.

Setting one up is extremely easy and most blog websites are free. I recommend trying out Blogger.com as it’s operated by Google. Also, by setting up a blog on Blogger.com you can almost guarantee you’ll be picked up by Google spiders quicker than if you manually submitted your website to them. Although there are great advantages to posting to a Blogger site you always want to have a blog hosted on your own site. Blogger will take down sites and sometimes for no apparent reason. You can lose all your data and traffic in seconds. Apart from blogger, I have personnally used wordpress successfully. The first time I opened up my word press blog, I made two sales that day. And these were highly priced items. The unfortunate thing is that I got this blog deleted or removed by word press for reasons I did not even know.

I cannot access it now. May be it is my computer. it was located at http://www.softerdreams.wordpress.com If it is still there, you can send me an email to tell me.

2- Have you seen the next thing to bloging? I do not know what to call it, but it is called a lense. You simply open up a lense,and post any message relating to your topic or business. Provided you update it every day, people will visit this lense even from places you never expected. At your lens, you only post little information about your product or website and then point the reader to your product webpage. In other words, a lens is just a starting point for surfers, not the finishing point. So your offer is the finishing point.

Lenses rank really highly in google, often #1 for non-competitive search terms, and tags help your lens come up for SPECIFIC search terms.

What you have to keep in mind is your probable visitor’s mind before he/she finds your lense. What might a person new to your subject search for? Might they type a QUESTION into google?

For example, someone might type: Vitamin booster? If you had this as a tag on your vitamin booster lens then you would probably come up quite high!

Do you have a lens about camera memory cards? Maybe this would be a good tag: what memory cards work with cameraX. Not everybody is going to search google for that, but those who do will probably find you.

So you have to think foward.Will anyone in your target audience type a QUESTION into google? What might they type? Think of some examples, and add them as tags!

You can start up your own lens at Squidoo in only five minutes and it is free. Plus check out my own make money online lens here (Feel free to contact me when you experience any dificult in setting up your lens

3. Make forums related to your niche, your daily destination. There are people talking about your niche on any number of forums and groups. Join several and provide accurate content rich answers to their questions. Be seen as a helper, someone who is truly interested in the topic and the people. Do not spam. Do not advertise but place your site in your signature line. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the number of good customers you’ll receive. If people are motivated enough to join a forum or group to discuss their issue then they most likely are motivated to find good information. The other advantage is that your will also gain a lot of knowledge from the experts in your niche. All the gurus in your niche usually hang out in forums. So if you need to rub shoulders with them, it is good you go there.

*Important though * Remember you also have to give the impression of an expert in your niche when answering questions. So you should not openly ask questions. Be the contributor. But if you need so of your questions answered, what I usually do is identify the epert and PM him /her. That way, your inefficiencies are not known by the public.

3.Bum Market to get targeted traffic. Well, bum marketing is a very wide topic that has recently taken trend. It so wide that I cannot discuss it in this volume. But briefly, bum marketing is article marketing to earn money. What you do is to do research on keywords, I recommend keyword elite. Then you identify the key words with little competition (not above 15000) but some good searches performed on it in a recent month. Then you go to click bank, choose a product related to that topic, write and article about it. Then in your resource box on the article, you include a link to that product. You then submit your article to three recommended article directories which google loves so much. These article directories are Ezinearticles.com, Goartcles.com and searchwarp.com

With a few weeks, your article will show up on google for a term related to your topic. But you have to make sure that the title of the article contains the keyword or key phrase you are targeting. That is the only SEO you will need with bum marketing. Bum marketing gets traffic to your website simply by riding on the back of the already established higly trafficed sites. Watch out for my next ezine where I will completely disect bum marketing.

4. Viral marketing has a mystique about it. The first site that accidentally took real advantage of this method was Interview With God. The owner of the site published a public domain poem on the net just a couple of months before 9/11. His site was ?discovered’ by many people who took solace from the poetry and began sending the site to all of their friends. The rest was history. The essence of viral marketing is sharing information with people you know. There are several avenues open to you and even more if you use your imagination. You can take advantage of social networking sites and social bookmarking sites where you can share your information with all of your new ?friends’. Tell a friend scripts on your site can encourage your current visitors to tell their friends. You’ll find that people will tell their friends if your site is funny, touching or if you offer incentive. Another technique is to offer free information through ebooks with links back to your site.

5-Article marketing. This is different from the bum marketing method I have talked about above. With bum marketing, you are basically tarketing low competitive keyword. But here I mean geting traffic for even those highly competitive keywords such as mine which is Make money only and internet marketing. Article marketing has been a topic of conversation for several years now. People seem to attempt this particular avenue and get discouraged easily. Although this type of marketing will economically generate targeted customers it is a time consuming job. The best technique to use is to post at least three to four articles per week to two or three of the top article directories. It’s not necessary to post to 300 directories, just the ones with high page ranks like ezinearticles.com. These article postings do three things. You have back links from a site with a high page rank; you have access to publishers and your content will be found on organic searches based on the keywords and phrases you enter when you post to the directory.

6. Do you have expert knowledge on a particular subject that relates to your website and business? You not only can share that knowledge in groups and forums but also by using answer sites through Yahoo Answers or eHow.com. In these arenas people post questions and others post answers. People who read the answers rate them. Your site gets traffic when people perceive that you are giving high quality answers.

MySpace.com Traffic

7. Using MySpace.com to advertise your website has become a new way to increase your traffic. This site is mainly a “people meeting” site but you can list your website and create friendships with thousands of people in a very short time.

You simply need to mention your website URL when you send a message to the community bulletin board. This can create a tremendous flood of traffic to your website as there are over 35,000,000 subscribers to MySpace.com.

You have the knowledge to drive traffic to your site. This may not be the flood of traffic that dreams are made of but they are targeted customers, the most important kind of traffic. As your skill using these techniques improves so will the number of buying customers visiting your site. And isn’t that the point? By spending a little time and using some creativity, promoting your website doesn’t have to drain your bank account. Take some time to check out these opportunities and you’ll find yourself with a steady stream of website traffic in no time.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many companies willing to take your money in order to try and increase the traffic to your site. If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, that may be just what you’re looking for. If you do have the time to learn, the best way to go is to generate traffic to your site for much, much less or even free.

One of the current trends in generating traffic to websites is with a blog. Most successful business sites have a blog and it is becoming a necessity for successful online businesses. In some cases business even hire writers to generate unique content for the blog. The blog can show clients a small taste of what your company has to offer so keep it interesting.

Search engine optimization is another way to get free traffic to your site. You will need to know how they work so you might have to study up. If you are willing to do some experimenting, you may not need to hire an expert. Optimize your site so the search engines can easily see what is there. Add fresh and interesting content so the web community finds value in your site. This should generate links to your site and to get additional links, get listed in quality web directories.

If you want free traffic to your website you need to have a good site with relevant and unique content. Your site should be easy to use and navigate while providing unique content for visitors. If your site is not attractive to visitors, no one is going to visit more than once. Provide a good site with good content and a good product. Generate links to your site for visitors to find you, your traffic will climb and with it the success of your website.

Some links to your site will come naturally if your site has good content. Most businesses augment those natural links with well placed links in quality directories. Quality directories market to bring traffic to their sites. That traffic can easily search the categories to find the exact business they are looking for and follow the link to your site. Marketing online is about giving potential clients as many paths to your website as possible so they can find you.

Articles

Submit articles to article directories. In my estimation, this is the best way to get traffic to your website. Just point the link to your website, and that means long term traffic. People will find your site via your articles. A few great directories are http://goarticles.com, http://ezinearticles.com, http://ideamarketers.com, and http://articlecity.com.

Blogs

Set up a blog. Its very easy to do. Link it to your site. Google comes by often to index your postings to the blog. Keep your blog updated. Your content feeds the search engines. Be sure to put your keywords in the fresh content.

It will help you rank higher in the search engines. Your site will benefit from your blog also. This is another free option. Get them at http://blogger.com and http://wordpress.com.

Forums

Post in forums. This will give you the opportunity to place your links in the signature line. You’ll get traffic from the forum members. Post catchy signatures in forums, they attract the members better. Then they’ll pay you a site visit.

Joint Ventures

Online marketers are always looking for new products to sell. Most have large mailing lists with buying customers. They’ll email their list for a cut of the selling price.

This works really well with info products. The Joint Venture option will boost your sales and your mailing list very quickly. You’ll have to have an exceptional product though.

Linking

What is the internet but a vast linking paradise? Hop on board. Contact website owners. Ask them for a reciprocal link from their website to yours. Be sure to select your link partner in your special category. You’ll find Arelis is very helpful with this process.

Newsletter

The internet may be a big place, but people like to be kept in the loop. Your own free newsletter would help tremendously. Focus your newsletter tightly towards your topic. It should be published preferably at weekly intervals.

Ezines

Email those e-zine owners. (Careful, they’re a fussy bunch). Make sure their ezine has your target readers. Buy some advertisements from them. Test them out first though. Check that ROI, return on investment! Does the incoming take care of the outgoing?

Always try to get reduced rates. There are literally thousands of ezines out there. My bet is that very soon the cost of ezine ads will be next to nothing. Those fussy ezine owners will be chasing us then.

In our pursuit for targeted website traffic, ezines is the first time that cost has been mentioned. Newbies, these options are very often the best way to go when starting out. It can get very expensive marketing your website. Patience! Have patience! Things will come together.

The thing to remember when trying to build traffic is to build a name. Make a site that is memorable and branded, not just a site that tells you to buy something. Affiliates getting a high traffic flow have branded themselves and established trust in their sales area. This may be by having their picture on the site and writing a lot of content for it in a personal way. This can also be through targeted information sent to potential clients.

So just spam people with your information? Not in a million years. Spamming, in addition to being illegal, is annoying and will do the opposite of establishing trust. You need to build a legitimate list as soon as possible that will accept your targeted marketing. These are people that you know are interested in your information, or in the product, or both. These are the ideal people to market to. Many affiliates send out informational newsletters, information reports, ebooks, or any other type of regular contact they can think of that will convey information the customer wants and keep reminding them about the products.

Setting up a auto responder is the fastest and easiest way of keeping track of all of it and getting the information out to the customers. And if you can send them items that will keep their attention and establish your trustworthiness, they will likely come back to your site again as customers. Repeat customers are the cream of the crop, so once you have them, don’t let them go.

Blogs are hot right now. You don’t have to discuss Paris Hilton in your blog (unless you want to), but you should keep some type of blog that will keep people interested enough to keep returning to read it. The content is up to you, but sites without a blog are quickly dying out. Starting up a blog is easy and is usually free as well. You can review the products you are selling, talk about the industry that the products pertain to, or you can talk about Paris Hilton if you really need to. But get the blog out there and get people hooked on it. Some people are now keeping several blogs going at once to promote different items or different categories of items.

One of the best ways in the beginning for capitalizing on the free power of search engines is to make sure your site is search engine optimized. Get the appropriate keywords and keyword density on every page of your site, and let the search engines help get you traffic. Everyone uses search engines, so let that work for you to bring you interested searchers that may very well become customers.