6 Ways to Pump Up Your Website Traffic
Author: Rick Hendershot, Small Biz Tips
No matter what you sell or are trying to promote online, you want traffic. And you want to turn that traffic into sales. To turn your website and other online activities into a powerful traffic and sales generating system, the simple fact is you need an aggressive website promotion program that is ongoing and relentless.

Website promotion is not brain surgery, but it must be done correctly. Here are six of the main components that should be emphasized in any good website promotion program:

1. Know Your Product, Describe it Clearly

2. Use Powerful Copy in Your Website, and Sales Materials

3. Create an Aggressive Link Program

4. Write Articles and Submit Them Everywhere

5. Turn Site Visitors into Leads

6. Get Instant Traffic with PPC Advertising

1. Know your product and describe it clearly

Many of us have difficulty telling other people exactly what we do. Imagine you're at a party, a meeting, or on the golf course and you get asked the inevitable question, "So, what does your company do?" What happens? Do you stumble around trying to remember what you told the last guy who asked that question? Or do you have a clear, precise and memorable answer that you can recite back to them in one or two sentences.

It goes without saying that your clarity or confusion will be reflected in your website promotion. Make it one of your primary objectives to develop a clear explanation of your product or service, and your website promotion will fall nicely into place as a result.

2. Promote your product with powerful copy

If you want your website to create sales, then the job of your most important pages is to get your primary selling message across quickly and powerfully before your impatient visitors click on to another site.

For your people audience you must get to the point quickly and precisely, and with sufficient emphasis to impress your visitors that you know what you are talking about.

The Search Engines also demand a clear product definition and clear product descriptions. But in this case the result should be Search Engine Optimized copy. This is because the Search Engines do not read between the lines. They look for clear indications of what your pages are about. And they make their decisions on the basis of "keywords".

If the task of "optimizing" your website seems too daunting, then look for a website promotion expert who can bundle this service with other promotional services. See "website promotion programs".

3. Create an aggressive link program

Trading links with "relevant" sites serves two important purposes. First, relevant links create an important source of direct traffic. A visitor to a related site will see the link to yours, click on it, and become your visitor. Some estimates put the percentage of internet traffic resulting from this kind of link as high as 21% of total traffic.

The other important purpose of your linking strategy is to impress the Search Engines. Links to and from other sites indicate other site owners in your area of interest consider your site worth looking at. That is why Google and most of the other major Search Engines give a much better ranking to sites with incoming links from relevant high traffic sites.

The bad news is a productive link exchange program takes quite a bit of time and effort, and will take up to six months or more to do properly.

The good news is there are website promotion professionals who will plan and execute a link exchange program for you as part of a package of promotion services. This makes it very economical. See href="http://www.small-business-online.com/products/website-promotion-program.shtml">"website promotion programs".

4. Write Articles in your field of expertise, and distribute them wherever you can

Publishing articles in online publications, directories and ezines is one of the most effective and least expensive kinds of website promotion. It is a perfect way to generate interest in your site, and create traffic.

Well written articles can be used to highlight various aspects of your products or services. At the same time you will establish yourself as an authority in your field. And the articles you write and publish today will continue to be available on the web for years to come.

Distributing articles is also an important way to create incoming links. Other websites and ezines publish your articles and in the process create links pointing back to your website.

5. Turn visitors into leads

The online sales process starts with traffic visitors to your site. But traffic is not enough. You want to turn some of these visitors into leads. A "lead" is a visitor who expresses an interest by contacting you. This puts them in "most-likely-to-buy" category, and gives you a clearly defined group of people you can target with more specific sales messages.

To capture leads you need a carefully planned strategy. You need to get beyond the usual "send us an email for more information" approach.

Simple online forms backed up with autoresponders are perfect for this task.

6. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising for instant traffic

Pay-Per-Click advertising especially Google Adwords can be an amazingly powerful tool to reach your exact target market and generate pre-qualified, targeted leads almost instantly.

But this service is also becoming increasingly expensive. And when you make mistakes they can be very costly. There are ways of maximizing your Google Adwords results. Ways you have probably not heard about. These techniques can save you thousands of dollars, and greatly increase the effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns.

The best website promotion program is one that combines all six of these techniques into an organized program. If you are too busy getting your business started, or too busy servicing your clients, then your best bet is to look for a website promotion professional who can prepare and maintain a program for you.

For more details about such a program see "website promotion programs".

About the Author

Rick Hendershot operates out of Conestogo, Ontario, Canada. He has been in online marketing and small business promotion for many years. He also publishes a number of websites and ezines, including Small Biz Tips and Trade Show Tips. He can be reached at rh@small-business-online.com