How To Create Traffic From Article Marketing

December 23, 2009

So, your web site is up and running. You have developed a great product (or are selling somone else’s). You have a great sales page. All the links work, and it looks great on everyone’s screen. But you aren’t selling……anything! Why, ‘you ask’? Because no one knows you are there.

You must generate traffic…. that is, you must generate online visitors. They must visit your site before they will ever have the oppportunity to purchase from you.

There are many effective forms of traffic generation, but each of them must be managed correctly to be profitable. For example, if you are buying a low-cost volume type of traffic and your cost per visitor is less than a tenth of a cent, then you can have a very low conversion rate (percentage of visitors who purchase from you) and still generate a profit.

If, on the other hand, you are paying $3.00 per visitor that comes to your site, then, for example, on a $99.00 product, your breakeven point is 33 visitors. That is a 3% conversion rate (considered high online).

So, to be in profit, you would need to have a conversion rate of better than 3%.

Your highest quality traffic will be that of referred traffic. Referred traffic includes visitors that are referred by another site, or from a sales letter you may have sent them. It also includes visitors generated after reading an article you may have posted online. These are the most highly qualified leads, assuming the source of the referral accurately depicted the nature of your site.

The next highest quality traffic source is that of search engine referrals. For example, if your site ranks within the top 10 or 20 web sites for a particular search term, and the visitor clicks on your site after searching for a particular keyword or phrase in a search engine.

The next highest quality traffic source is that of targeted pay-per-click (PPC) traffic. With this traffic, you purchase click-thru’s from visitors who have searched or clicked on a particular search term that is relevant to your site and offering. This traffic differs from search engine referral traffic only in that is a result of a paid placement, whereas search engine referrals are generally not from paid placements.

Next, is that of ezine advertising. Ezines are niche online newsletters that are emailed to subscribers on a regular basis. The important thing here is to be sure to place your advertisement in an ezine that commands the type of reader who would normally be inclined to purchase or be interested in your product.

After these targeted sources of traffic, there are many untargeted sources of traffic. These include exit traffic, pop-up or pop-under traffic, and redirect traffic. Without going into details on the various sources of these forms of traffic, suffice it to say this is generally untargeted traffic. Because of that, it is generally both inexpensive and is associated with a very low response rate. Untargeted sources of traffic are generally better handled by using a ‘landing page’ that creates an initial interest in you or your product or web site, and directs the visitor to click through to your main page.

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