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AdSense Training Course - Getting web traffic

Web site traffic - getting the first time visitor

You are going to have to promote your website to people who you know are likely to be interested in the contents of your site.

There are 10 standard strategies and chief amongst them all is search engine optimisation. This is the process of making sure your website appears high in the search engines when people search using keywords related to your site's topic.

Get your site high on search engines (by building excellent content - that's what search engines look for) and you will get a lot of web traffic, free.

Long term this is the best method although it takes time for a new site to get noticed.

People searching on a search engine are actively looking for stuff which means they are more likely to become active visitors, visitors who return and click - if they like what they find.

Additional techniques are described briefly below. We'll be covering them in more detail later on because knowing how to generate website traffic is a key marketing skill.

1. Advertise your site offline using postcards, printed ads, signs on your car etc. BUT GIVE PEOPLE A GOOD REASON to visit in your ad.
    
2. Advertise your site online with AdWords and other pay per click systems such as Overture - but watch you don't spend more than you earn.
    
3. Promote your site in an ezine about your subject matter (but make your writing interesting) and send it to your regular customers or visitors.
    
4. Enter comments into discussion forums and include a short link to your site. I did this for FactsAboutAdSense.com in a brand-marketing forum and started getting visits almost immediately - for zero cost.
    
5. Use PR techniques to get your site mentioned in the Press.
    
6. Include your web address in your email signature ALWAYS. Again, this won't cost you anything but will increase the visit rate - and it can work very well if you do more than just put your web address on it - give them a reason to visit. ("Get paid by Google. Visit FactsAboutAdSense.com
   to learn how.")
    
7. Publish an ebook about your subject and give it away but include links to your website in it.
    
8. Create a product that you can sell and promote it using an affiliate program. That will get lots of people to advertise your site for you. This is one aspect of affiliate marketing. 

We'll be covering these techniques in a lot more detail later on but remember that most successful internet marketers use lots of different techniques to generate web traffic. We'll also look at ways of measuring the amount of traffic your website is getting.

Keeping the relationship going with your web traffic

 Having got someone on your website, do they engage with it? You really want to build up a relationship with your visitors so that they keep coming back. I tend to think about this process as follows:

You need to give people

a REASON, and

a REMINDER,

to RETURN

How do you do this?

The reason

You need to deliver some value. Make your site genuinely useful and informative about your theme, product or service.

The reminder

You can't remind people to visit unless you know who they are. So you need to get their contact details in return for permission to keep in touch and an effective way to do this is to give something away like a tip sheet, a guide, insider knowledge and so on. But, again, make sure it is useful and has value.

Now use this contact information to remind people about your site. The easiest way to do this is by email, but it is good to vary the media sometimes and use snail mail too (so make sure you get address details too.) If you use email, you are probably going to need to automate the process, otherwise you'll spend all day at your PC, and the best way to do this is to use an autoresponder.

What an autoresponder does is send out emails automatically when it receives new contact details but good ones do much more than this. I use one to distribute this AdSense Insider course and I have programmed it to send out links to these lessons automatically in the right sequence.

Your autoresponder should be easy to use, and provide you with detailed testing and reporting capabilities as well as, crucially, a facility that makes it easy for people to opt-out from your mailing list. You must do this to avoid being accused of spamming.

This is yet another reason why content is king. Keep providing information, information, information otherwise they'll sign off - for good.

Your visitors' behaviour

How do people behave when they visit your site?

First time visitors make an extremely quick judgment about your site, in fact you typically have just 10 seconds or so to make a positive impression. So you have to explain immediately why people should stay. Don't worry about not catching everyone because you only want targeted visitors anyway. The low interest types are not going to help drive up your AdSense revenues.

A great way to do this is to put your number one benefit statement into the headline on your home page.

The dreaded Corporate Yawn-fest

What doesn't work is a corporate yawn-fest on a web site that starts off with something like "We pride ourselves in providing you, the customer, with excellence in everything we do..."

See what I mean. Apart from anything else, why would you believe them?

Now IF you get someone to stay on your site, they typically have a little look round first before delving more deeply into what you're offering. Only if they continue to be interested are you likely to get their attention enough to get their contact details. And you may well not get them first time, which is why your site must also give them a reason to return unprompted.

And the reason is Content - again.

But when they do come back, they'll really have a good look around and start to engage in the site. And that is when you'll start to make money from them.

Tomorrow we are going to look at the format and styles of AdSense ads - Google offers a surprising degree of control over ad placement and appearance.

We'll also review the process of placing the AdSense code into your website site.

William Charlwood
 

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