Internet Marketing Business Strategies

by David Hurley

The biggest problem faced by many people who are new to Internet marketing is working out how to drive targeted website traffic to their websites. Without targeted traffic (i.e. visitors who might be interested in what you have to offer), your Internet marketing business is a dead duck.

Driving targeted traffic to your website should be your top priority. Traffic generation is something that can be easily outsourced if you are willing to pay. Setting up a Pay Per Click campaign is one way to do that. Another way would be to pay a reputable lead generation company to send targeted leads to your site.

If traffic generation is something that you do not wish to pay for, then you will have to invest some time and effort of your own. But the good news is that this is perfectly feasible. In fact, some successful Internet marketers have built their business entirely on free or low budget traffic generation techniques.

In this article I’ll review some of the tried and tested methods of generating targeted traffic which are both easy to do and free or cheap to implement.

Blogging

One of the first things you should do once your business website is up and running (or even before) is to start a blog. Blogging is a free, easy and effective way to build a presence for yourself on the Internet.

You can get a blog up and running at Blogger.com in minutes. Blogger.com is owned by Google so your Blogger blog will get a lot of attention from the Google spiders every time you update it. For many Internet marketers, however, the first choice for blogging is WordPress because of its rich array of plug-ins and also because you can set up a free WordPress blog on your own website.

Once your blog is set up, aim to post something every day, even if it is just a 50-100 word comment on something relevant to your area of business.

Article Marketing

One of the best ways to publicize your website is to write articles that give readers useful information about topics relating to your niche market.

When you write an article you can post it to your blog, or publish it directly on your website. Actually, a good technique is to publish your article on your website and post an intro or teaser about your article on your blog so as to draw traffic to your website.

Next, you can re-write your article submit it to various article directories. This is one of the best ways of driving targeted traffic to your website and also one of the cheapest because you can submit your articles free of charge to some of the best article directories on the Internet, such as:

• EzineArticles
• Evan Carmichael Authors
• ArticleCity
• Idea Marketers
• Go Articles
• LinkSnoop

When you post your article to article directories, include a short block of text at the foot of the article that introduces the reader to your business and include a link to your website.

The link back to your website is the most important part of the whole article! Ideally, the reader will click through to your site via this link after reading or skimming through your article. Every article should be written with this aim in mind.

If this process seems like a lot of work, you can always outsource some or all of the operations.

For example, if you promote to the “work from home” or “Internet marketing” niches, check out my limited membership PLR article writing service, which delivers members ten freshly written high-quality articles per month about working from home and Internet marketing.

On the article distribution side, if you subscribe to SubmitYourArticle.com you can automate the directory submission process and get your articles on hundreds of article directories each month.

Forums

Visit online forums that discuss topics related to your business. Register as a member of several of them and participate in the discussion threads. Remember that your reputation is on the line every time you post, and only post useful comments that contribute directly to the discussion. Offer good advice and seek to build up your reputation as an expert in your field.

Most forums allow you to promote your website via a link in your signature file. Each time you post a comment, your signature file will appear beneath it and direct forum members to visit your website. If your posts and your signature line are well written, you should see a regular flow of traffic arriving on your site from the forum.

For Internet marketers, some of the best Internet marketing forums include:

• EvanCarmichael.com
• Forums.DigitalPoint.com
• InternetMarketingForums.com

Traffic Exchanges

A traffic exchange is a site where you earn credits by browsing other members’ sites. The credits can then be “spent” on having a webpage from your site visited by other members. The more credits you earn, the more often your website will be viewed. This is a quick and popular method of generating traffic and it is also free at the basic level, with options to upgrade if you wish. Here are a few of the best traffic exchanges:

My Top 10 Traffic Exchanges

1. Soaring4Traffic
2. Hit 2 Hit
3. GladiatorHits
4. Hit Safari
5. Traffic-Splash
6. TrafficTaxis
7. LotsMoreHits
8. EasyHits4u
9. Dragon Surf
10. Traffic Showdown

If you join all the traffic exchanges you will be able to leverage your time much better. Use the “tabs” feature on your browser window and run several traffic exchanges simultaneously.

Also, each traffic exchange has a “downline builder“. You can enter your affiliate code for several other traffic exchanges on the downline builder. Whenever any of your referals sign up to those traffic exchanges they will be placed in your downline on those exchanges and you will receive TE credits.

Traffic exchange downline building is a great way to introduce new prospects to your business. If you sign up to Affiliate Funnel, you will be able to run multiple recruiting campaigns across twenty of the top performing or most popular traffic exchanges and promote five of your own business offers at the same time.

Click the link for more traffic exchange tips.

Build Backlinks

In order to get your website highly ranked in the search engines you will need to build a lot of good quality links back to your site. Article marketing and forum posting are two ways of doing that. Posting relevant comments on blogs is another way. NOTE, “relevant” is the key here. As with forum posting, so it is with blog commenting. ALWAYS contribute something positive to the discussion and your comment will be gladly accepted, your reputation enhanced and not damaged.

Make your links count as back links on Google by seeking out “do follow” blogs. You can find out about “do follow” blogs and listings of those blogs on http://www.dofollowblogs.com/. Don’t obsess about this, however. If you come across a blog that you like then leave a comment as part of the process of raising your profile on the Internet.

Another way to build back links to your website is to post your website details and URL to website directories. This can be a tedious process and you seldom know whether or not your registration was successful. However, it is an important part of raising the profile of your website, so in this case, I recommend that you save yourself time and effort on directory submissions by using a professional directory submission service.

Taken together, blogging, article marketing, forum posting, traffic exchanges and backlink building via “do-follow” blog comments and website directories offer the newbie Internet marketer on a shoestring budget the chance of building up a substantial amount of targeted traffic.

David Hurley
Free Business Websites

David Hurley uses the Prosperity Marketing System to earn multiple streams of income from home on the Internet. What about you?