5 Promotion Tips for Targeted Traffic

Search Engine Optimisation is a very effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website - achieving top Google rankings for high volume keywords can add several zeroes to your annual turnover. While SEO is therefore arguably your most important marketing strategy, it is by no means your only one and you should not focus exclusively on it. For a start, your SEO efforts will take time and you should use other ways to drive traffic while you wait for your natural search traffic to flow. Secondly, any traffic you can drive via alternate promotion methods will help with your link building efforts, which will enchange your SEO campaign. So today, we will focus on other promotional methods you can use, with am emphasis on targeted traffic.

How to Drive Targeted Traffic to your Website

Give Something Away for Free

People love freebies. I have a friend who has amassed an unbelievable amount of junk over the years, simply because a company was giving away a free sample. Even though they will never use it, people will snap up any freebie going simply because it is free.

With that in mind, have a think about your niche and what your visitors might be interested in. If your site is about blogging, try coming up with a free tool which they can use on their websites.

If you are an ecommerce site, why not give away a free product for the first 20 customers who signup for a special offer. The possibilities are endless but be creative - create something of value and you will get interest.

Another good way to do it would be to run a competition. This would have the additional benefit of generating an email list of subscribers who you can use to promote your products to in future.

Website Advertising

If you have an advertising budget, you can get an initial burst of traffic by placing banners on websites which are related to your niche. You could also pay them to write a review of your website, which is arguably a more effective method of getting customers onto your site, rather than simply from an advertising banner.

If you can’t afford to pay for advertising, you could swap it. You could write a review about the other site in exchange for a review about your site. The other benefit of a website review is they can link to you via your chosen anchor text which boosts your SEO efforts.

Extra content on your website will give you more credibility while having your articles on other websites will lend your company a position of authority.

Viral Marketing

Sometimes the best ways to advertise a website are free!  Viral marketing refers to a promotion technique which is spread around the internet by people. In the same way someone with flu symptons can pass on the flu to another person, spreading it around the world, interesting content is passed around the internet by users keen to share it with their friends or be the source who has “discovered” cool new content.

An effective viral marketing campaign can generate millions of unique visitors, turning a small unknown company into one known all over the world virtually overnight.

The key is to create unique content, which can come in many forms such as an article, a picture, a video or a news story. There is no rule for how to create a viral marketing campaign - if it was easy there would be many, many more millionaires. However, themes which generally work well as exclusive news, humour or controversy.

For example, if you were the first to report the launch of a new technology product such as the Playstation 4, you’d find that once someone found your article it would spread around the internet like wildfire. Similarly, controversial articles which “attack” leading figures or companies, or funny pictures or videos are also very successful viral marketing tools.

Post on Relevant Forum

A time consuming, but effective way of driving traffic to your site is to find forums which are relevant to your niche and build a reputation as an expert by offering useful help and advice. “Spamming” forums with links to your site will get you nowhere, but if you take the time to build a reputation, people will start to respect your opinion and check out your site for more information.

You should include a link to your site in your signature, then reply to threads offering useful advice to people. You could direct them to relevant articles on your site for additional reading, as long as it’s done in a spam free way.

Domain Names

One last thing to remember when you’re trying to spread information about your company is the effectiveness of a memorable domain name.  You want to pick a domain name that is easy to remember, easy to spell, and that relates to what you’re selling.  When people easily find your website you’ll want to make sure that your home page content is dynamic so they keep returning.