Building Web SiteTraffic
AUTHOR: Ralf Bich
Site: http://www.ubersafelist.com/

A term that I’ve picked up, from working the search engines where you have to pay to for traffic, is “traffic campaign”. It's a phrase, because it encompasses more than just ‘submitting’. Many webmasters find when they start out that they submit sites and then BANG! They hit a wall.

The traffic does not start to flow.

If you build it, they will not come...
If you build it AND submit it, they still might not come!

So let’s think about planning a traffic campaign for your site here.

Where do you start?

What do you do?

There are really 3 stages, whether you’re new, or have been doing this a while.

1. Plan

2. Submit

3. Analysis

Lets break down the steps:

1. Planning. Decide where you will be submitting is a big one. Pictures, music downloads, or a product promotion site. If the site generates a large amount of traffic, but do you have the funds to handle the bandwidth bill? Do you have a budget for paying your way into Yahoo, Inktomi, and other payment-based submission search engines? Paying your way in can be very effective, and QUICK – but it’s also expensive.

You’ll also have to think about WHERE your potential clients go to find information or what sites they visit – and then get your site(s) listed there. When it comes to search engines, you will need to research into the types of phrases they will most likely use to find those kinds of sites. How much traffic/sales do you NEED to make a profit, and are you going to build a lot of small sites, or opt for one large one? How do I want to layout my site/navigation? (This will be covered in other articles).

Pre-planning goes a long way to create a site which will generate income for your campaign.

2. Submission. I hope that I haven’t put you off with the first step, because it’s now time to start competing with the other sites out there! It’s time to try to get listed. ‘Submitting’ includes becoming a traffic detective and finding relevant places to add your site. While boards and articles will give you some pointers, the only real way you’ll find out which website listings will send you traffic is if you SUBMIT. Don’t be afraid to test out a search engines, link lists, safelists, surf programs or any other traffic generating system you find along the way. Some webmasters like to stick to one source of traffic, and do very well with it. They might do this because they don’t want to conform to the rules of a certain traffic generation method. Then we have people who think that “all traffic has it’s uses”, that there’s no such thing as ‘junk traffic’. These are all things that you need to think about, and make decisions on. Where you submit will dictate the types of sites and pages you will need to build. There’s a LOT of different ways to generate traffic, but they all amount to the same thing: a link to your page from someone elses. Get organized with both the URLs you need to submit, the way you’ll be adding links back (mirroring?), and HOW you are going to submit. There are tools out there that will help to this end.

3. Analysis.
Most webmasters usually either:

• Don’t measure the success they are having.
• Measure it but don’t recognize areas that are successful.
• Submit once, get poor results and think “nothing works”.
• Aim for high numbers rather than productivity.

Traffic, traffic, TRAFFIC... You’ll read more about that one word in the next few months than you have about ANYTHING else in your entire life. But let’s not lose track of the goal here. Is the goal to get huge amounts of numbers on our counters? No – who’s gonna pay you for that? The goal here is to get checks coming in through the front doors of your home (or however else you choose to have it sent). The point? HUGE amounts of traffic are not as important as making what traffic you have work for you.

Target your surfers carefully with exactly what they are looking for.

Use surfer traps or some other system to HANDLE traffic, and squeeze every last cent from it.

Get stats in place before you start submitting. Without traffic, there can BE no sales – so you will need to measure what’s coming in, and where it’s coming from. Don’t get TOO tied up in stats, but research where your traffic came from, and which places are dead in the water. Analyze your traffic campaigns seriously, and then come back and do it all over again. Will you get it right first time? Definitely not. But with serious persistence, experimentation, and going by YOUR results – you’ll definitely move towards that first sale. The rest are just a case of repetition and keeping up with the changes.