I thought I’d get away from tool and training reviews this evening, and give a little advice about getting BUYERS. Getting traffic is great, but if it is UNTARGETED traffic, they’re not going to buy what you are offering. That means you don’t make any money.
SEO
If you have a website or blog, attention to SEO is a MUST! Not only will it generate “organic” traffic (traffic from search engines), but if you are using proper keywords, that traffic will be targeted. You won’t just get visitors: you’ll get visitors who are actually interested in what you have to offer.
Google Analytics gives a snaphot of your site’s SEO performance, but for indepth analysis, you need to invest in tools. The SEO tools reviewed on this site will perform that type of analysis, and give you insight on what your competitors are doing, so you can get ahead of them.
Advertising For Buyers
There are 2 types of advertising: free, and paid.
Free Advertising
If you are promoting your own website, do a search for “free website promotion”, and “free website advertisements” on your favorite search engine. You’ll get a decent list of sites who will run an ad for you. Most of them require you to post an ad from them on your site, but most of these are small text ads that really won’t do any harm to your overall design.
If you are promoting a product, or promoting a program to build your downline, search for “free advertising online”. There are a few out there.
Another option is traffic exchanges, where you surf other people’s ads to earn credits for your ads to run. Some marketers I’ve spoken with say they’ve had good results with these, but personally, I can’t recommend this method. I’ve used them for many products and programs in the past, and yes, I saw a spike in traffic when the ad was running, but it never produced buyers, and very rarely did it produce a signup to a downline. The people surfing sites on exchanges are doing it so their own ad will run; they’re clicking the ads away as quickly as possible (and yes, that’s me anytime I decide to use a traffic exchange). The traffic spike is coming from the 20 seconds per person your ad is displayed. Overall, I find these a HUGE waste of time that I could be using to produce BUYERS!
There are also free advertising programs. I use HitLeap, and Viral Traffic Dominator. Both will run my ads 24/7, and give me hit statistics. The free version of HitLeap will only rotate 3 URL’s; The free version of Viral Traffic Dominator will run unlimited URL’s, and runs banner and text ads at the same time. HitLeap doesn’t categorize the ads, but Viral Traffic Dominator does.
Paid Advertising
There are many websites that will run a paid advertisement for you. One type I would avoid is PTC sites, unless you are trying to build a downline on another PTC. The people on PTC’s are trying to make easy money. They’re not looking to buy anything, or sign up for anything (except possibly another PTC). With PTC’s you will again see a traffic spike, but again no buyers.
With either type of advertising, be sure to run it on a site which allows you to categorize the ad. By placing an ad in it’s proper category, you ensure people who are interested in that category view it. If they’re already interested, there is a much greater chance they will be interested in your offer, and BUY!
If you already have an email list on an autoresponder, you already have a promotion tool. However, I recommend keeping separate lists, for separate categories. Don’t blast your weight control list with dog training emails.
Also, don’t email your personal email contacts; they will get pissed off! If I have a friend interested in affiliate marketing (replace that with your own product), I encourage them to visit my site, and sign up to my mailing list.
I currently work 4 safelists (where you send marketing emails to others who are sending marketing emails). On the safelists, I’ve discovered 3 groups of people: people who have a product they produced, affiliate marketers promoting products, and affiliate marketers promoting a system to build a downline. If you’re promoting anything in those categories, or affiliate tools and training (as I am), safelists are a pretty good place to get your marketing emails out. I have had signups and buyers in the past from safelists; not a ton, but enough to make them worthwhile.
I do intend to post about listbuilding later, so stay tuned!
Social Media
With social media, we again have the issue of targeted vs. untargeted. Don’t just blast an ad out. Join groups that have topics matching your product/program. Try to friend/follow people who would be interested in your product or program.
I won’t get too deep into social media marketing; it’s a huge topic. People write entire books on it! I will give one tip for those of you who have a website: create a fan page on Facebook. It’s a cheaper way to advertise your site than their paid ads.
If you advertise on this site, you will be broadcast to 30 social media sites when you post your ad, then at random times while your ad is active! Just register as a site user, then go to the Classified Ads section to enter your ad!
Hopefully these tips will help you. I wish you success!
Viral Traffic Dominator
