Website Promotion On A Tight Budget! by Denny Karas
Nowadays, website promotion can be a daunting, time consuming and quite expensive affair. What can the average webmaster do to get targeted traffic to their site without having to go broke? Well, if the answer was so evident we would all be considered webmaster "Gurus"! Before you embark on any website promotion campaign you need to be clear on what you are selling or offering as a service.Start by having a clear vision of the type of visitor you wish to attract to your site because these visitors are your potential customers and you only get 1 chance to impress them. In the website promotion game quality traffic is the key to your success. Therefore, you need to stay away from autosurf and manual traffic exchanges. All you will do is waste your time by clicking or leaving your computer running in order to get visitors to your site who are completely worthless. Yes, you will notice that your stat counter will be on fire but how many of those visitors will be actualy interested in your website! Most probably a very small percentage. No need to get discouraged because there are ways of being able to attract targeted traffic to your site and staying on budget.Before you get out that credit card, let's understand a bit more where website traffic originates from. Close to 70% of all traffic worldwide comes from search engines, with the most popular being Google ( of course), Yahoo, Msn and many others. Therefore, you need to get search engine traffic to your site in order to have any sort of success online. That is the plain truth!!! You need to remember that an online business is just like any other business venture, if you don't advertise the right way you are destined to fail. Ok, how do we go about getting targeted search engine traffic to your site. Well, below we will look at the 2 most effective methods any webmaster can apply at the moment.1) PPC ( Pay per click) You begin by setting up an advertising campaign by briefly describing what your site is all about. There will be a link on this ad linking to your website. You will be asked to deposit money in order to get your campaign off the ground, in most cases by credit card. I suggest that you begin with $20.00. At the beginning you need to start slow and then when you get the hang of it you can start using a larger budget. Now comes the most important part. How to choose your keywords or keyword phrases in order to get the right visitor to your site. For example, if you're selling jewelry you don't want someone that is looking to buy an airline ticket stumbling on your site. By using the example before, you can use "cheap jewelry" or "cheap diamonds" as possible keywors.Basically, your keywords need to match the content of your site and that is the key to getting targeted traffic. To see which keyword phrases are popular I suggest you visit www.overture.com (Yahoo) and use their keyword search tool online. When you type in a keyword or keyword phrase you will be able to see how many searches were done the previous month. This will give you a better idea as to which keywords you should choose. Ok, you have your keywords what next? When you choose your keywords with the various PPC providers (displayed below), you will notice a bid amount attached to each keyword. The bid amount tells you how much you need spend per click in order to be in the top position for that specific keyword. You can bid a bit lower of course but you need to keep in mind that if your ad appears in the 1st page of the specific search, then you're likely to receive more traffic. You need to calculate your budget wisely in accordance to your keywords. Some keywords might cost $0.15 and others $2.00. Therefore, calculate how much each click will cost and choose wisely.Most PPC providers offer assistance throughout the advertising set-up process. Below I have compiled a list of a few PPC providers. I suggest you begin the lesser known of the group and when you feel more comfortable move up to the top ones. - adwords.google.com - overture.com - adcenter.microsoft.com (recommended and offer a sign up bonus) - mamma.com - clicksor. com - goclick.com (recommended and offer a sign up bonus) - adbrite.com2) Paid Inclusion The paid inclusion concept is similar to PPC, whereas you set up an advertising campaign and you choose the keywords to match your site content but with a twist. Instead of having to bid for keywords and paying a per click fee as mentioned above, you pay a flat fee for 1 keyword and you have your ad displayed for a few months or 1 whole year depending on how much you're willing to pay. Obviously, this is much more cost effective than PPC but you will receive less traffic because this type of service does not place your ad on the msot popular search engines like Google or Yahoo. However, it doesn't mean that you will not be receiving targeted traffic. Of course, you can choose to pay for more than 1 keyword and have your chances of getting more traffic increased. Normally, 1 keyword will cost anywhere from $12.00-$15.00 for 3 months and $30.00-$50.00 for 1 year. One thing is for sure this type of service helps those with a very tight budget. The most popular of the paid inclusion companies is www.exactseek.com and I highly recommend them as I've being using their services for a few years now.If all this seems very confusing you can always try using the services of SEO professionals. They can help you with your PPC and paid inclusion campaigns. They normally charge a small fee but at least you will have experts assisting you at all times. My recommendation is www.engineseeker.com.Best of luck to all!!
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