Increase Your Website Traffic and Get Sales

No matter what you sell or are trying to promote online, you want visitors to your website -- traffic. And you want to turn that traffic into sales. To turn your website and other online activities into a powerful traffic and sales generating system, the simple fact is you need an aggressive website promotion program that is ongoing and relentless.

Website promotion is not brain surgery, but it must be done correctly. Here are six of the main components that should be emphasized in a good website promotion program:

1. Know Your Product, Define it Clearly
2. Use Powerful Copy in Your Website, and Sales Materials
3. Create an Aggressive Link Program
4. Write Articles and Submit Them Everywhere
5. Turn Site Visitors into Leads
6. Get Instant Traffic with PPC Advertising

**1. Know your product and define it clearly

Many of us have difficulty telling other people exactly what we do. Imagine you're at a party, a meeting, or on the golf course and you get asked the inevitable question, "So, what does your company do?" What happens? Do you stumble around trying to remember what you told the last guy who asked that question? Or do you have a clear, precise and memorable answer that you can recite back to them in one or two sentences.

It goes without saying that your clarity or confusion will be reflected in your website promotion. Make it one of your primary objectives to develop a clear explanation of your product or service, and your website promotion will fall nicely into place as a result.

**2. Promote your product with powerful copy

If you want your website to create sales, then the job of your most important pages is to get your primary selling message across quickly and
powerfully before your impatient visitors click on to another site.

For your people audience you must get to the point quickly and precisely, and with sufficient emphasis to impress your visitors that you know what you are talking about.

The search engines also demand a clear product definition and clear product descriptions. But in this case the result should be search engine optimized copy. This is because the search engines do not read between the lines. They look for clear indications of what your pages are about. And they make their decisions on the basis of "keywords".

If the task of "optimizing" your website seems too daunting, then look for a website promotion expert who can bundle this service with other promotional services.

**3. Create an aggressive link program

Getting links from "relevant" sites serves two important purposes. First, relevant links create an important source of direct traffic. A visitor to a related site will see the link to yours, click on it, and become your visitor. Some estimates put the percentage of internet traffic resulting from this kind of link as high as 21% of total traffic.

The other important purpose of your linking strategy is to impress the search engines. Links to and from other sites indicate other site owners in your area of interest consider your site worth looking at. That is why Google and the other major search engines give a much better ranking to sites with incoming links from relevant high traffic sites.

The bad news is a productive link building program takes quite a bit of time and effort, and will take up to six months or more to do properly.

The good news is there are website promotion professionals who will plan and execute a link building program for you as part of a package of promotion services. This makes it very economical. But it will still not happen overnight. Link building is an ongoing long term project.

**4. Write Articles in your field of expertise, and distribute them wherever you can

Publishing articles in online publications, directories and ezines is one of the most effective and least expensive kinds of website promotion. It is a perfect way to generate interest in your site, and create traffic.

Well written articles can be used to highlight various aspects of your products or services. At the same time you will establish yourself as an authority in your field. And the articles you write and publish today will continue to be available on the web for years to come.

Distributing articles is also an important way to create incoming links. Other websites and ezines publish your articles and in the process create links pointing back to your website. Why? Because when you write your article you make sure to embed a link or two pointing back to your site. Often this is done in what is called the "Resource Box" -- a short bio of the author that contains a low key pitch for your products or services.

But writing and distributing articles is not for everyone. It is a very time-consuming activity, and if you are not much of a writer it will cost some money to have someone write articles for you.

One interesting alternative is our own program in which we embed sponsor links in relevant articles. This is probably the easiest and least expensive way to get the benefits of article distribution without the pain and aggravation of actually having to write original articles.

**5. Turn visitors into leads

The online sales process starts with traffic - visitors to your site. But traffic is not enough. You want to turn some of these visitors into leads. A "lead" is a visitor who expresses an interest by contacting you. This puts them in "most-likely-to-buy" category, and gives you a clearly defined group of people you can target with more specific sales messages.

To capture leads you need a carefully planned strategy. You need to get beyond the usual "send us an email for more information" approach.

Simple online forms backed up with autoresponders are perfect for this task. Normally this involves offering some tip or free information course, or possibly a free piece of software.

In order to receive the free gift the website visitor must fill in a short form giving you their name and email address. Then the autoresponder automatically sends out a message containing or pointing to the free gift, along with a presentation of your product. You can also program the autoresponder to send out a series of messages so your promotional pitch is placed in front of them a number of times.

**6. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising for instant traffic

Pay-Per-Click advertising - especially Google Adwords - can be an amazingly powerful tool to reach your exact target market and generate pre-qualified, targeted leads almost instantly.

But this service is also becoming increasingly expensive. And when you make mistakes they can be very costly. There are ways of maximizing your Google Adwords results. These techniques can save you thousands of dollars, and greatly increase the effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns.

The best website promotion program is one that combines all six of these techniques into an organized program. If you are too busy getting your business started, or too busy servicing your clients, then your best bet is to look for a website promotion professional who can prepare and maintain a program for you.

About The Author-- Rick Hendershot publishes Linknet News | Link Aufbau - Pagerank-Optimierung durch Aufbau von Links | Web Reviews and Product Reviews and Promotions

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