One of the most important factors to bear in mind when planning and building your web site is what sort of visitors you are really looking for.

The process should be;

1 - Find the Target market

then

2 - Get them to visit your site

If you don't proceed in this way then you might get great amounts of visitors to your site but they may not be 'quality' visitors... i.e. they may have stumbled upon your site whilst actually looking for something else.. something you do not offer.

So If you have a site that sells red leather jackets and you promote your site under the category of 'clothing' then you will probably get many visitors coming to your site all looking for some item of clothing.

If you fine tune your advertising from the start it is possible to pre-qualify the web site visitor a little so that you will only receive hits from those who are looking for 'red leather jackets'.

By doing this you will have MUCH LESS traffic... however, the traffic you do get will be looking for exactly what you are offering from the very start. This will increase your conversion rate immensely and you will make far more sales per visitor and therefore, if you are paying for your advertising will increase your Return On Investment (ROI)

What are the methods you can use to get traffic to your site?

Pay Per Click (PPC)
Search Engines
Google's Adwords and similar
Article submission
Blogs
Newsgroups or Forums
Classifieds (online)
Offline methods

PPC (Pay Per Click)

Most Search engines now have some sort of pay per click system. This is basically where you pay the search engine to appear at the top of the results page for your chosen keyword... the cost for this is based on performance so you pay a certain amount each time your site is visited. The actual cost of each click depends upon the popularity of that search term but normally starts at about $0.10 per click and for the average popular term can rise up to about $1 per click and for certain terms can rise up to asWilhelmm Barnard much as $20 or $30 per click.

Search engines

To get your site included in the major search engines can be the best form and at the same time the most difficult form of getting visitors to your site... it can be completely free of charge. If you do manage to get your site included then when you will probably find your page after typing in your chosen 'keyword' or 'search term' to be low down in the results. For popular keywords your new site will probably be found after thousands of other sites. Most people don't click on the web sites that are listed below the 4th or 5th positions so being ranked for example 845th for your search term is almost the same as being ranked 23rd as both will result in next to no traffic at all. The depressing truth is that you must appear in the top 3 or 4 positions to obtain any considerable amount of traffic.

To achieve high rankings for your particular search term is an art in itself... this art is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This art form has no rules, only guidelines. The search engines want to give accurate results and therefore don't tend to make public the details of how they rank the search results

Google Adwords

Adwords is the google answer to PPC where you pay for your listing based on the search term but instead of appearing at the top of the search results page your ad will appear in 2 different places. First, in a column of adverts down the right hand side of the search results and second they appear on participating web sites that have related content to your keywords. These sites will get a small percentage of your payment per click but will send you a large amount of traffic.

Using ADwords successfully is basically a numbers game. You need to know the percentage of sales you can make from your web site.. i.e., if you sell 2 of your products for every 100 visitors to your site then it is possible to calculate more or less how much you can afford to spent on ppc advertising.

For Example:

Say you sell handbags for $50 that you buy for $20 and for every 100 visitors to your site you normally sell 2 handbags.

Your profit margin for the two sales will be $60 ($30 profit per sale).

Divide the profit by the amount of visitors ($60 / 100 = $0.60) - this is the maximum amount you can spent on advertising to break even.

Obviously you need to do better than break even and make a profit therefore as a rule of thumb you can divide this amount by 2 ($0.30) to get you maximum bid per click to be able to advertise with ppc AND still make a profit.

If you would like more information on how to play the Adwords numbers game then I can highly recommend the book by Greg Helsin entitled Google Adwords 123 which can also be found at our web site http://net-business-online.com/adwords123.php

In part two of this article we talk about more marketing techniques for your web site and present some of the best marketing tools available.