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In internet marketing terminology, and generally in web terminology, “targeted traffic” is a term you will come across very frequently. Let’s try to understand what it means and how you put the idea of targeted traffic to use in building your own sales and online reputation.

What is Targeted Traffic?

Traffic is the number of visitors you get on your website. This applies to any kind of visitor, be it an existing customer, someone highly likely to buy your product, or somebody who stumbled on by accident and is actually least interested in being there. Just getting traffic on your site, therefore, isn’t much of an advantage. Targeted traffic, however, is a different story. This refers to those visitors that belong to your target market: people who are highly likely to buy from you and find value in your products or services. These are the sort of visitors you really want on you website, for these are the ones who actually cause sales to be made or your customer base to be increased.

How to Generate Targeted Traffic?

While online advertising would likely increase traffic to your website, this will not necessarily be targeted traffic; anyone can click on your ads, even accidentally, and this does not help your sales. Here are a few methods to ensure that the traffic you attract to your site is targeted:

• Affiliate Marketing with Related Websites:
Affiliate marketing is placing your ads on another website and then paying that website according to various arrangements, either per click, or per sale caused by the advertisement. If you place your ads on related websites, for instance if you are selling wedding dresses and place your ads on a wedding planner’s site, it is likely that your target customers will click on your ads. So the idea is to place ads in places that are already being visited by your target market.

• Search Engine Optimization:
The best way to ensure that you get targeted traffic on your website is optimizing your site for high search engine rankings. This will mean that when users search for businesses, products or services related to yours, they will see your website at or near the top of the page. Since the users are searching using keywords that also describe your business, they are obviously interested in what you have to offer. When they click on your website, it is targeted traffic that you have managed to attract.

• Ask Your Customers to Refer Others to Your Website:
You can use your existing customers to refer other interested buyers to your website. This can be done by sending an email to your customers that they can forward to friends. You can give them some kind of reward for referring a certain number of visitors, for instance a discount coupon.

If you are a website owner, one of your biggest headaches would be to drive traffic to your website. When you adopt new strategies and implement new plans to improve the flow and quality of traffic to your site, then it is naturally very important that you have some reliable method to gauge that change. It is important to know the number of visitors, how long they spend on your site, how long they spend on specific sections of your site, and where they click, and so on. For all this, and much more, traffic tools are available that can really make this job much easier. However, for the beginner, choosing a tool can be a daunting task indeed, owing to the profusion of tools out there. Here is a brief guide to the major types of traffic tools that can help you monitor your site traffic.

Traffic Tools

Major Types of Traffic Tools:

Blog Analysis Tools:
These are excellent if you wish you monitor the traffic to your blog and also see what people do when they visit. You can see the popular searches, top referrers, and popularity. Some of these software measure the popularity of your blog by counting the number of people who have marked it among their “favorites”. Here are some of the blog analysis software you can go for:

o MeasureMap
o Mint
o Technorati

Site Comparison:

These are the ideal traffic tools to use if you wish to compare the traffic on your site with other sites such as your competitors’. Here are some brands you can use:

o Compete
o Alexa
o Hitwise

Analytics Software Packages:

The best thing about analytics software packages is that they pack a great deal of functionality into one integrated package, and give you an exhaustive overview of exactly who visits your site, when, and for how long, and exactly what they do there. This can give you a great idea of specifically which areas of your site to improve. Here are some of the most reliable of these:

o Google Analytics (Free to use)
o Site Meter
o WebTrends

The selection of tools mentioned here is only the tip of the iceberg as far as traffic tools for monitoring are concerned; there are hundreds more that are available and you can choose one according to the specific requirements of your business.

For any website, and particularly for business websites, traffic generation is an immensely important issue. For business websites, especially for those that use only internet marketing for generating traffic, the right traffic generation strategies leads to more sales. So what is website traffic, and how do you increase it? Let’s try to understand website traffic generation in a little more detail.

What is Website Traffic Generation?

Website traffic generation or Website traffic, simply put, is the number of visitors that your website gets. The more the visitors to your website, the greater are your chances of making a sale or attracting a client. The issue, therefore, is to attract more and more visitors to your site, and further, to ensure that the visitors are actually interested in buying your product already, before they come to visit. Such potential customers are called “targeted traffic”.

How to Generate Website Traffic?

There are a number of ways of generating traffic for your website. Here is an overview:

• Search Engine Optimization:
Optimizing your site for high search engine rankings is crucially important for attracting interested visitors. This way, when a user searches for products or services related to your business, your site comes up in the top few results, so there is a good chance that the user will visit your site. SEO is done by using keywords repeatedly in the text on your website, placing external links to your site, and tagging images with your keywords.

• Online Advertising :
If you advertise yourself online, using software such as Google Ads, the ads link to your website, so that becomes another way of increasing your website traffic. You can use pay-per-click schemes, in which you place your ad on a website and pay that website for the number of times your ad is clicked. There are other advertising arrangements too, such a cost per thousand impressions, under which you do not pay each time the ad is clicked. Some schemes even allow you to pay only if clicking the ad has resulted in an actual sale. This is a good website traffic generation technique.

• Email Marketing:
In this, you send emails to potential customers or to people who you think are likely to be interested in buying your product. They can forward the emails to friends, who can then visit your site for details. They themselves can visit your site if the email offer interests them. Hence your website traffic is increased.

• Writing Articles or Blog Posts:
This is a great way to get interested visitors to your site. Write helpful, informative articles in online article directories, or in various blogs. In author information, place a link to your website. People who find your articles interesting are likely to visit your website to find out more. Further, since other places will now be linking to your website, this will improve your search engine rankings, helping even more traffic flow your way.

The phrase “traffic management” in context of internet marketing is not at all uncommon. In fact, for beginners in the field who are attempting to popularize their websites, this concept is a highly relevant one. Essentially traffic management can be split into three somewhat overlapping areas:
•    Monitoring and analyzing the traffic on your website,
•    Generating more high quality traffic
•    “Capturing” the traffic to provide you with leads for email marketing
The first step then is to install a traffic monitoring tool on your website that would keep track of the number of visitors viewing your site, as well as finer details such as which pages they view and for how long they stay. Google Analytics is an example of such software. Many of these tools are free, but you may have to pay a company for giving you a meaningful analysis of the results.
Once you manage to track and analyze the traffic, you will identify the problem areas, such as not enough time spent per visitor in viewing your site, or, more commonly, not enough traffic. The key aspect of traffic management, therefore, is traffic generation, or preferably, targeted traffic generation. The difference is simply that targeted traffic comprises people who are actually interested in what you offer, and have found your website because they were looking for something like it. There are several ways of increasing your targeted traffic. For instance, you can get listed with online directories, so that people who are looking for a business like yours can obtain a link to your website. You can use search engine optimization techniques to ensure that your website shows up among the top few results when anyone types a search string related to your website into a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Finally, traffic management does not end with generating and analyzing traffic – a major concern for a website, and particularly in context of internet marketing, is to capture leads. Leads are the people who are likely to be interested in what you are offering and on whom you should focus your marketing efforts. The idea is to legally obtain the email addresses of visitors to your website who want to know more about you. There are several ways of doing this. For instance, you can offer a free subscription to a newsletter, for which the person will submit an email address, or offer a free e-book for download, requiring submission of a valid email address. You can simply place an opt-in form on every page of your site, which would ask visitors to leave their email addresses if they would be interested in promotional offers from you.
Traffic management may appear to be a hassle, but it is a worthy investment if you truly want your website to prove effective for boosting your sales, ROI, and general reputation of your business.

In the SEO world, traffic means the number of hits your webpage or blog is getting. This goes to show how many people are interested in what you have to offer. From business and marketing point of view, traffic is vital, that’s how marketers determine the success of a website. Simply put the more traffic to your website, the more the chances of success.

Strategies to increase traffic generation to your site

Here are few tips and tricks to help you generate more traffic to your site:
- Build a presence on Search Engines
- Submit your blog or site to search engines and aggregators like Technorati. Include popular keywords in your posts because what Yahoo or Google do is that when a user is looking for a particular phrase or keywords, it shows those sites in the search results that the most optimized for those keywords. – - – - -Increase your search engine ranking by optimizing your website’s presence and often checking your page rank.
- Stay active in the online world

There are a number of ways to influence your presence on online world positively, few are:
•    Leave useful comments
•    Include backlink in your signature
•    Make friends on online forums
•    Always response to comments
•    Engage your audience by being interactive

Coin attention grabbing titles
What you name your post actually matters, that’s the impression in fact. A title that is catchy, snappy, and grabs attention boosts traffic to your website. It also won’t hurt if you include 15 to 20 word summary about your post.
Tag and categorize
What increase search engine optimization significantly is tagging and categorizing your posts. Search engine algorithms look at tags and categories when performing a search. By categorizing and sub categorizing, it will also be easier for people to find what they are looking for.
Add value to your content
Give useful information; write posts that explain how things work or how something can be useful. Useful things usually get linked and hence more traffic. Adding value reaps on long term basis when it comes to generating traffic. Keep adding fresh content as updating your content will definitely boost your traffic generation.
Simplify
By simplifying your website and content, it will not only increase the traffic but also simplify maintaining your site or blog. It will be easier to manage and keep you away from complex issues. Also posts that are ‘hard to grasp’ usually make people lose their interest quickly.

There are few in the world of online marketing today who have not heard of the term “website traffic”. There are many, however, who do not fully understand the concept. Simply put, website traffic is simply a measure of the number of visitors to a website, and the number of pages they click on. Hence, it is easy to see that the ultimate aim of any website owner is to direct high quality traffic towards his website.

How to measure website traffic:

There are various tools (like Google Analytics) used for this, and many are free of cost. There are companies that will monitor your website and calculate the amount of traffic, as well as analyze the results to give you a clear picture of how popular your website is. If you analyze the results without the involvement of a company, the bright side is that you do not spend a dime; the downside is that you have to spend considerable time and need quite some experience for your analysis to be helpful. However, the cause is a worthy one for investment of both your time and money, so both options should be considered.

Why is it important to monitor website traffic?

The major reason is that analysis of traffic on your website enables you to see which areas are most effective and which need improvement. The number of times a specific page or link is clicked on, and the average time spent by surfers on different areas are all highly relevant bits of knowledge if you are looking to increase your website traffic.

Finally, what happens once you have analyzed your website’s traffic and identified problem areas?

Well, firstly you make the necessary improvements, for instance putting more captivating content on a particular page to increase the average time spent there by visitors. Secondly, in case you identify that traffic is lower than you want, take steps to increase it. This is done by ensuring that when someone types a search string into a search engine, your website comes up in the top few among the thousands of results that will be pulled up. Research and understand techniques like search engine optimization, which deal with modifying the contents of your webpage and including keywords to make it more likely to be pulled up in searches. The time and effort involved is considerable, but is worth it when you see the desired result. Increase your website traffic and increase your website profits.

If you were to list the key concepts involved in online marketing and e-commerce in order of importance, then the idea of targeted traffic would be very close to the top.

What is targeted traffic?

Very simply, it is the number of visitors to your website who are actually interested in what you have to offer. For instance, if you have a website for your furniture business in California, then visitors who find your site because they typed “furniture sales Irvine” into Google will be your targeted traffic. Targeted traffic analysis is a much more important area than simple website traffic analysis, because even if ten thousand visitors come to your site everyday, the only ones who matter would be those who are interested in what you are offering.
So your primary concern is to increase targeted traffic to your website, and that will automatically boost sales and revenue of whatever product or service you are offering. Here are a few tips to increase targeted traffic to your website:
•    First and foremost, focus on Search Engine Optimization techniques. These are ways to ensure that when a search string is typed into a search engine, your website shows up among the top few results. SEO is an entire field of study in itself and requires detailed study and research for proper understanding. Essentially these are techniques such as including and emphasizing keywords that users usually type into search engines.
•    Second step is to get listed in major directories and in the most popular search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo search. This automatically increases chances of your target visitors noticing and coming to your website.
•    Thirdly, increase the number of links to your site, for example by placing text links to your websites in other sites, or by agreeing to include other related websites’ links in your own in return for them including yours.  You can also write articles for other websites, and have them link to your website. This not only increases your chances of being visited, but also improves your search engine rankings.
•    A very powerful tool for increasing your targeted traffic is to have a blog. When you have something relevant to say in your blog, it gives people a reason to come back to your website. Also, the content can make you rank quite high with the search engines, and as your blog develops a following, more people will link to it and to your site.
There are a myriad of different ways to increase your targeted traffic, and all of them require that you put in time and effort. This may be a heavy investment, but is worth it if your website starts getting pulled up in top search engines and starts grabbing the attention of exactly the kind of visitors you want to see.

Recently a student asked me ‘What was the traffic generation strategy that we use for Business Academy Online’.

What a great question. Let’s take a look …

The traffic generation strategy for Business Academy Online is not set in stone, as i believe no marketing strategy should be. But the concept should always be the same. Whatever you use, TEST and MEASURE to see what works for you and your database. What works for you, may not work for someone else.

This diagram below is an overview of the internet marketing tools we use for generating traffic for Business Academy Online. Most are pretty self explanatory.

For business academy online this strategy provides our database with real value and content. This should be every businesses number one or at least number two objective. You need customers, and you need customers that need you. You can only do this by providing real content and useful information.

Don’t ever stop testing and measuring…. Hope this was helpful

With internet marketing growing at an exponential rate, and, in particular, email marketing gaining an ever growing following, email lead generation is one of the most relevant issues for online marketers today. Email leads are basically the potential customers who are to be targeted in the promotion of a product or service. When you use email marketing as your method of promotion, generation of email leads is your first concern. So how is that done?

While there are various ways of generating email leads, today we’ll just talk about hiring lead generation services. Generally, there are certain companies that specialize in email lead generation. They provide their customers (i.e. businesses like yours) with mailing lists, which are lists of addresses to which your promotional emails will be sent. These companies offer services such as ensuring that your email avoids the spam filters, and providing specialized leads – prospective customers who are likely to be interested in buying your product.
However, care has to be taken when choosing the company that will provide you with email leads. Here are a few pointers you should keep in mind when choosing a company from the hundreds of choices:
•    The methods of the company should be in accordance with any legal requirements in your country, and also should keep to ethical constraints. For instance, unsolicited emails should not be sent; promotional emails should be sent to those users only who have signed up to receive them. Sending unsolicited emails is not only unethical and irritating for the recipient; it is also bad for your business’s reputation and creates a spam-like impression.
•    Ensure that the email leads are qualified – this means that they should have verified contact information from the recipient, who has actually requested promotional emails. Try to choose a company that is reputed for providing valid and active email ID’s.
•    Before signing an agreement with a email lead generation company, ask to see their methods of research. View a copy of the forms they use to generate leads. These are the forms that prospective recipients have to fill out, to give their consent to be on the mailing list. See to it that the form asks for relevant information while being short enough that it is completely filled out by the respondent.
•    Ask to see the list of business that are getting the same lists of email leads as you are, so that you would know exactly who you are competing against, and you can devise your campaign accordingly.
The most important point, therefore, and one that cannot be stressed enough, is to avoid low cost, low quality lead generation services, that will provide you with unsolicited or even invalid email ID’s, for these will not only tarnish your business’s reputation, but might even get you blacklisted if caught by a spam reporting service. If you want any more information have a word with Nicci or Lee at lead generation specialists

Writing articles and submitting them to directories is one of the hottest and most successful sales lead generation techniques used today on the Internet. But the process of submission is tedious and time consuming. The number of directories is usually very high and hence takes lot of time to get the entire process done. This is where free directory submission software comes into the picture for most.

The software automates the process of submission and makes it possible to submit to as many directories as possible. You need to have maximum exposure and fully accessible for your potential customers.  The directories allow you to place html links and anchor texts so that you can provide a reference to your website and create a quality back link. Good free directory submission software allows easy back-linking and leaves no room for error.

The software should also be capable of locating the right category so that your article and your business are exposed to right target audience. The wrong category leads to wasted traffic i.e. it does not help in generating leads and sales.

Since the major aim is to do submission to an unlimited number of directories, choose  free directory submission software that allow at least 100 submissions to serve your purpose. The software should have important features like auto populating article title and remaining article fields so that your process is simplified to a great extent.

The speed of the software also needs due consideration. It should be fast and efficient leaving lots of time for you to concentrate on other important aspects of increasing sales. The interface should be simple and user friendly so that you can easily manipulate it and perform your desired functions.

There are many paid variants that also perform quite well. The free directory submission software may have some features missing but it can give you a good head start and you will be familiar with the basics at no cost. Later on, you can upgrade to a paid option. Keep in mind that your ultimate aim is to increase your visibility and sales so keep on following best practices and be consistent in your efforts to see the results.