Building Site Traffic

Web site traffic is key to the success of any web marketing effort. Many small businesses build themselves a web site because they believe they have to. Most never check to see how much traffic or how many visitors the site draws. Many never know what effect the site has on sales.

Sites developed from this point of view rarely have a large impact on the growth of the business they support. For your website to have a revolutionary effect on the growth of your business it must attract, connect, and persuade a large number of visitors.

To have a positive effect, your web site must build traffic.

By a recent count there are over 300 million websites competing for the attention of the web surfer.

Once upon a time, all a business had to do was post a site to the web and the surfers would come. Those days are long gone. To be successful, your site will need a well integrated traffic building campaign.

A web site traffic building campaign may well include

• Search engine optimization
• Pay per click advertising
• Banner advertising
• Paid directory listings
• Affiliate programs
• Off-line marketing integration
• Direct mail campaigns
• Media advertising
• Link Swapping
• Web Rings
• Newsletters
• On-line communities
• On-line content and tools

The right campaign depends on your goals for your web site. If you merely want your site to support and accelerate existing relationships, your web site traffic campaign might simply be to add the web address (URL) to your business cards and literature.

However, if you want to reach new customers, grow your business and create a valuable on-line asset, you will need to consider a more aggressive web site traffic campaign. A successful net business CEO once told me that it takes $12 million dollars in marketing to raise a web site “above the noise”. Surely, some of the recent Internet successes, like match.com, have spent that and more to buy their market share.

Unfortunately, not everyone has $12 million to spend. The good news is that most of the items listed above can be accomplished for much less.

The keys to an effective web marketing campaign and building web site traffic are to:

1. Use all of the best channels to get the word out. From the list above choose the items which reach the market that you are after. Use channels which are appropriate to your message.
2. Prospect. For each channel within your web site traffic building campaign, identify a tiny subset of the market and develop a limited expense test campaign within that channel. For example, Pay per click advertising campaigns can be started for as little as $10 per month.
3. Measure your results. Your statistics programs will show you how visitors find your web site. With a little extra savvy you can also determine which of those visitors actually make a purchase. From here the math is easy to determine exactly what each new site visitor is worth to your bottom line.
4. Improve. Do more of what works. When you find marketing channels that cost less per new site visitor than that visitor is worth, obviously you will want to do more with that channel. You will need to continually (or at least periodically) measure the results from your marketing efforts as the value and efficacy of your work will change. For example, using aggressive search engine optimization, you may claw your way to the top of google.com’s listings. However, you are unlikely to stay there, particularly if you target competitive search terms.

A healthy web marketing and web site traffic building program requires care and diligence. The amount of resources that you devote should be driven by your goals for the web site. One thing is for sure, a web site left on its own to generate traffic will eventually fall silent.

E7Systems is experienced in the development of traffic building programs and has worked extensively in many web and off-line marketing channels. If you would like to discuss traffic building programs for your web marketing effort, please contact us.