Profit Gazette features ideas to increase web traffic using web site marketing and internet marketin
The Profit Gazette weekly edition of home based business ideas and articles on how to increase web traffic the right way. Offering web site marketing tips and internet marketing strategies that actually work.
- Last build:
- Language:
- Feed URL:
- http://www.profitgazette.com/archive/rssfeed.xml
RSS FEED IDEMS: Profit Gazette features ideas to increase web traffic using web site marketing and internet marketin
- Finding Targeted Website Traffic Using Keyword Combinations
Most people leave a fortune on the table when they build a new website because they make the mistake of only targeting the most generic, hard to rank well for keywords and then wonder why they don't have any traffic.
For maximum impact and long term traffic generation you need a combination of tightly focused, specific keywords and 'word combos' using the keywords that people are searching for right before they BUY a product as opposed to when they are researching the market for a product.
Let me explain...
Imagine you are thinking of buying a new golf club, let's say a driver, because you want to add extra length to your drives (all your mates can out-drive you by 20 yards or more and you want to make up for that using a little bit of the latest technology to help you out :-).
You start your research into the best drivers around by entering the keyword phrase golf drivers into your favorite search engine.
Your search query comes up with 150 million pages loosely related to the phrase golf drivers. That's just too many listings to look through to make a buying decision, but you start your research there anyway.
OK, Let's Trim That Number Down A Little...
You look through the first few listings (golf.com, golfdivers.com, etc.) and find out that many people are recommending the Big Berth driver and it has some great reviews from leading golf pros.
You look at the competition in the golf driver market and you decide that one of the big bertha range is probably the club for you.
Next, you do a search for big bertha divers and come up with 1.2 million pages of information to wade through.
You find three or four sites on the first couple of pages that look interesting so you do some more reading that confirms the Big Bertha is what you need.
Most of the sites you find are shopping sites with no real content, but a couple of them have useful articles related to Big Bertha drivers.
After reading and researching, you settle on the Big Bertha Titanium 454 driver.
Now you are ready to actually BUY your new golf club, so you enter the phrase buy big bertha titanium 454 driver into your search engine to find the best deal.
You now search for the best price and delivery conditions (hey you want it today now that it's so close :-) and buy the driver from the merchant of your choice.
Can you see the distinction between these keywords?
The keyword phrase golf drivers is a research keyword.
The keyword phrase big bertha divers defines the search further, but it still isn't specific enough for most people to make a buying decision. They are still often in 'research' mode at this stage.
The keyword phrase buy big bertha titanium 454 driver is a buying phrase.
These are the phrases you want to build your website's tier three or four pages around.
These are the 'money' pages where people will click through to your merchant or sales site after they have been PRE-sold on the benefits of buying the big bertha titanium 454 driver.
Your keywords for the pages in your golfing website's structure would be something like -
Tier two - golf drivers
Tier three - big bertha divers
Tier four - buy big bertha 454 driver or buy big bertha titanium 454 driver
You won't get many people arriving on the last two pages each month, but the visitors who do come will be ready to buy a big bertha titanium 454 driver!
And you'll be right there to recommend your merchant or sales page to them...and earn a commission :-)
But doesn't that mean you have to build lots of pages related to all of these products and services if you want your share of this free, highly targeted traffic? For example, there would be hundreds of different golf drivers on the market.
Well, yes, if you want to make the most money you will... By having pages related to all the different golf drivers available you will gradually rank well for some keywords, then more of them over time.
Then your good rankings for these easy-to-rank-for pages will start to see your harder-to-rank-well-for keyword focused pages ranking well too.
Put great PRE selling copy on your pages, a picture of the product on the page if possible that is also a hyperlink to the specific product on your merchant's website or order page, and you're set.
Then do it for all of the products in your merchant's range that you want to promote.
You also need to build pages for the important research keywords too as you will start to rank well for these over time, but your focused product related pages will bring in a steady stream of highly targeted, ready-to-buy visitors who have done their research and are ready to take action right now.
How sweet is that?
I hope this article helps you to increase your website's revenue and puts you on the way to becoming a super affiliate or selling a lot more of your own products and services.
About the Author
Rocky Tapscott is the author a free 7 Part Mini Course "How To Build The Perfect Home Based Business Around Your Favorite Hobby, Pastime, Sport Or Skill" which uses 6 real life case studies to show how others have used a proven system to build profitable businesses around their favorite hobby.
Drop by http://www.hobbyandlifestyle.com/ecourse.html to grab your free copy.
Mon, 29 May 2006 15:53:16 GMT - Provide a Cool Tip Periodically To Encourage Repeat Visitors
This is another working strategy for getting repeat visitors and also adding fresh content at the same time. You see that regularly updating your website with fresh contents will get your site higher rank in major search engine, hence contents will attract traffic itself.
If you are a web surfer, ask a question for yourself what factors will bring you back to site? There are so many reason why people keep coming back to a site. One of them is to get new useful information on a certain topics. As an internet marketer I will enjoy to see an updated tip on how to market online, for an instance.
Now the next question is how to add cool tips in your site?
Have a section that offers cool tips that relate to your business, your products or services, or your target market. These tips can be from one sentence to one paragraph long. If visitors find your advice helpful, they will return repeatedly to see what interesting piece of information you have displayed that day.
If you cannot write your own tips or advice you can get it from other people tips founded in free reports and ebooks. Or you can grab it from public domain information like wikipedia. Of course the best tips are the ones that you implemented yourself in the past that you see the useful of the tips. However if you have a tip writing block then there some ways to unlock it easily.
Ask your visitors if they would be interested in receiving the tip via email or if they would like notification when the tip has been updated so they could then visit your web site. Encourage people to send the tip to a friend. You can also encourage others to use your tip on their web site as long as they provide a link back to your site as the source.
In order for you to encourage your visitors to send the tips in your web site, you will need to install a tell a friend scipt in your updated tips section which will become your useful viral marketing tool. In time if your tips are found really useful by the visitors and their friends, you will see a steady increasing traffics to your site. Which is the main purpose of giving the fresh tips regularly. Your visitors happy and you will be happy as well.
About the Author
Heri Rosyadi is an internet marketing expert with over 5 years of experience in internet marketing. Visit http://www.Mytrafficstrategies.ws and get a free copy of his eReport on "30 Amazing Advertising Tips" and subscribe to his online newsletter to receive his latest online promotion tips, methods and ideas.
Mon, 22 May 2006 01:44:58 GMT - Permission-Based Email Marketing Fundamentals
Communicating with your Clients and Prospects
Most people talk about different things with different people. With one friend the conversation might usually focus on relationships, while with another, perhaps talk turns more naturally to movies, books, sports or politics.You would be unlikely to appeal to your relationship-discussing friend if you were to engage in a monologue about your opinion of our current political leaders. However, if you started in with that same screed to your politics-loving friend, he or she would greet it with a smile that says "let the games begin!"
The same theory applies to communicating with your customers and prospects. "One of the most important things to keep in mind when developing your campaign is relevance, says Yael Penn, Principal of Imagine Creative Marketing. "If you send a message recipients are interested in receiving, you will get their attention and your campaign will be a success. However, if your message is not relevant to their interests or current needs, they will most likely ignore it, or even worse, unsubscribe from your database and you'll never be able to communicate with them again!"
Segmenting your Database
So now you may be thinking, "Not all of the people in my database have the same interests, what to do?" Before you send out a campaign, you should segment your database into several groups of people who share specific traits, whether it be age, gender, hobbies, job function, purchase history, etc. Take whatever information you already have about the people in your database and put it to good use. This exercise will also give you some insight as to the type of information you will want to gather moving forward to better segment your database in the future.Then, once you're satisfied with the way you've segmented your database you can create a message that will be relevant to each of those groups. "A lot of people make the mistake of creating email campaigns that appeal to themselves, rather than their target audience," says Penn. "The more you know about your customers, the more you can customize the message, look and feel to better speak to the people you are marketing to."
Enhancing your existing database
When you went through the exercise of segmenting your database for the first time, you probably thought about what type of information would be helpful to have to better communicate with your customers and prospects. Make a list of the most important things (e.g., age, gender, magazines subscriptions, job function, industry, geo) and incorporate these questions into all of you opt-in forms and order forms. The fields should be the same across the board. That way, you consistently collect the relevant information from all new customers and prospects. If you are able to create drop down menus for these fields to standardize the way information is fed into your database, even better.Once you've incorporated everything into your opt-in and purchase forms, you might want to send out a survey to your existing database to gather this missing information. An enticing premium will increase your response rate. But remember, the premium should be enticing to your target audience, not yourself.
In addition, it is very important to keep good records of what people are buying, when and for how much. These sorts of buying patterns, combined with demographic data, will also prove very valuable for future marketing campaigns.
Communicating with your database on a regular basis
This is where the demographic information and the buying records are going to come in handy. Let's say you sell gloves, hats and scarves. Some of your customers have purchased red women's gloves but not the matching red hat and a red scarf. So you might send them an email with information on a special for the matching red hat and red scarf. However, you will probably want to send a different email to the women who purchased the grey gloves and a different email with an offer for men's accessories to the men in your database. "You should customize your permission-based email marketing efforts to appeal to specifics," says Dan Forootan, President of the StreamSend Email Marketing Service. "By doing this you can greatly increase both your sales and revenue.""Its important to communicate with your customers and prospects on a regular basis," adds Penn. "but you need to have a good reason for communicating with them, one that brings value in some way. If you're opt-out rate is high, it's a good indication that its time to rethink your messaging as well a how frequently you are communicating with your database.
Track your campaigns
Tracking the results of your campaigns will enable you to determine what's working and what's not. One easy way to do this is to incorporate a field in all your forms called "offer code". Assign a specific code to each email campaign you send out and be sure to give people an incentive to use the offer code when responding.After each campaign expires you should analyze the results, including how many people you sent the email to, how many emails were delivered, how many people clicked through and how many people opted-out (most email marketing systems will give you these stats). In addition, if you look at the number of people who responded using the campaign offer code, you will be able to calculate the campaign response rate.
Last but not least!
As you are gathering more and more information about your customers, you can use this information to "paint a picture" of your "ideal customer". These are the people who bring you the most profits and you definitely want more customers like these!Neil Anuskiewicz is the Marketing Manager of EZ Publishing. In addition to developing custom web applications, EZ PUblishing is the creator of the StreamSend Email Marketing permission-based service.
Mon, 01 May 2006 13:46:49 GMT - Making More Money with Affiliate Feeds
I love my RSS reader. I have a gazillion website, blog and news feeds set up in there, and I get the latest information from all of my favorite sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it with you. And RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect that rings when there are new feed entries to read. So wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I also get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to announce the new feed entries.
As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because of my RSS reader I was one of the first to cover adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that will help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was on it first, I popped up in the first five Google search results for this keyword for a while, which drove traffic to this site. So watch your RSS reader.
All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as auto update feature for websites and blogs. The first application was RSS feeds that automagically update your site with articles in your subject area from a free article site. The rationale is that this will give you fresh content that search engines will eat right up. They call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read some of these articles? There's a wide disparity in quality from one to another, and I would never allow articles to be put blindly on my web site without my approval. For crying out loud...you spend hours and hours of time getting your site to a certain level of quality to build a certain level of trust with your visitors, and then you're going to allow some hack to put his content on your site without your approval, just so maybe a search engine will come a few extra times? That's just stupid.
Need more content? Turn off the football game and write some.
Seriously...if you want to use articles as supplemental content, hand pick them. Just like famous Internet marketer Wille Crawford did on his blog when he picked my article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there). I have at least 20 - 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that I'm going to post on the site as soon as a I get a chance. That's the good news - the bad news is I went through 500 or so articles to get those.
Closer to home, affiliate merchants are starting to get into datafeeds, which are sort of like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access to merchant products using text files. The file contains a list of products, services, special offers, coupons or other information that you can display on your site. You then upload that information to your server and use some kind of tool or script to display the different items in that file. There are programs on CJ, LinkShare and Shareasale that have datafeeds.
While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it with the same jaundiced eye as the whole article thing - it all depends on your niche, the level of trust you want to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want to get.
If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate program, you might try a product feed. If you want to put up an occasional coupon or special offer, you can probably do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo jumbo.
We are starting to see products that convert merchant datafeeds to RSS, allowing you to auto-display products from affiiliate programs. Again, if you can maintain relevance across the entire affiliate line, it's a good idea. If not, you're not going to get conversion anyway, so you're wasting your time. Personally I want everything including the advertising, to have relevance to my visitors.
There's always a shortcut - in this case you're shortcutting the time and effort involved in finding relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some sites.
If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some resources:
1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I think they're plugging their own tool.
2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh...they also have a tool.
One last thing - while I was out looking for links and information, this is what someone said about using datafeeds:
Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot and never have to think about the blog again after I spend a few hours setting it up!
How do you think that blog is doing?
About the Author
Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com - A resource for Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.
AffiliateBlog is his latest venture, and was started as a resource to help site owners and bloggers get more revenue from their sites.
Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:57:31 GMT - Affiliate Marketing in E-Zines
Affiliate marketing is all about promoting the product. But it is not cold or hard selling. The affiliate lures the Internet user to visit his website by offering information and even free online courses. The visitor of the affiliate's website will find the free information and will even enroll in the free online course. And while reading the informative articles, the visitor will slowly be convinced of the value of certain products.
And when the visitor realizes the value of certain products, he will most likely click the banner that links to the website of the merchant who manufactures the product or who officially sells the product. The affiliate does not do the direct selling. The affiliate simply sets the mind of the visitor, who is the target client, so that this visitor will be easier to convince to proceed to the purchase or order form of the merchant's website.
Thus, for an affiliate marketing business to be successful, the promotional strategies carried out by the affiliate should also be successful. One that will contribute to the success of such promotion is the utilization of e-zines.
An e-zine is basically a newsletter which is emailed to the subscribers of the e-zine. This newsletter contains the types of information that the subscriber has already expressed a willingness to read about. And when an ad is placed together with such information, the subscriber will be made aware of the presence of the products promoted by the affiliate.
There are two types of e-zine ads that an affiliate can pay for. The first type is similar to a banner ad. It contains a couple of sentences composed of well-chosen words that will entice the reader to visit the website of the affiliate. An affiliate can easily write such an e-zine ad since he already has promotional materials for the products.
The second type of e-zine ad is called the solo ad. In such e-zine ad type, the newsletter being mailed to the subscriber contains only the advertisement of the affiliate and nothing more. Usually, such a solo ad is mailed separately from the regular newsletter. For example, if the newsletter is sent every Tuesday of the week, the solo ad is sent on a Thursday or a Friday.
There is no limit to the number of words placed in a solo ad. But the affiliate must keep in mind that such a solo ad is sent through email. Therefore, the solo ad should not be too long that reading it will take up so much time that the subscriber is not willing to sacrifice. The usually suggested number of words is 500.
With e-zine ads, the opportunities of earning more increase. And the affiliate moves closer towards that goal of affiliate marketing success.
About the Author
Peter Garant's affiliate marketing site offers unique website articles to webmasters who wants to maximize traffic and revenue on their affiliate sites.
Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:13:32 GMT - 5 Website Promotion Myths
Myth #1 - "It's easy, just put up a website and you're set for success"
Many perceive the sheer numbers of people online equates to enough of them coming to your site and making it consistently profitable. It doesn't quite work that way because if your site is out of sight, out of mind, then nobody knows it even exists.
Remember, when you search for something online, you go to a search engine, type in your phrase and you get pages of results. This is exactly what your customers do! Not only do you need to register on search engines, you need to be prominently registered - aiming for top ranking or at the least, second page results. Anything less will considerably diminish your chances of being found.
Now if you don't even register on the search engine radar, how will your customers find you?
Myth #2 - "Anybody can do it"
Very few people can do it right.
Attempting website promotion services on your own is disastrous. It is extremely time consuming and will greatly frustrate and disappoint if not done correctly. A lot is involved - the entire website promotion process is composed of several components that must fit together in a synchronised way in order for it to work properly.
Let's take just three of the many aspects of website promotion to illustrate this myth:
1. Keyword research
2. Copywriting
3. SEO MarketingThese form the backbone of any website promotion strategy, but how will you devise effective techniques for each of these when this area is not your company's expertise? Where will your company begin to research for keywords? Are they the correct ones? At what optimum density levels should they be used?
Your copywriting is crucial as is your SEO marketing. Who will write compelling and effective content to capture search engines, rankings and sales?
These are just three of the many components. All it takes is just one aspect to be done incorrectly and it can retard the whole process.
Myth #3 - "Presentation Is Everything"
In website promotion services, this couldn't be further from the truth. Content is what makes or breaks a site's effectiveness. If you put up a site with nothing except amazing graphics and flash, you have zero chance of selling anything. But if you put up a site with nothing but sales-pulling copy and rich content, you have every chance of securing business.
Presentation is part of the process; it's not the process itself. There's a fine balance that must be struck between visual appeal and effective copy. Professionals know how to integrate the two at just the right levels.
Myth #4 - "Sending Your URL to Thousands of Search Engines Is A Good Way To Get Business"
It's actually a good way to have your site banned or de-listed from search engines. Any company that offers to blast your site to thousands of search engines is a company worth putting on your blacklist. Unfortunately many businesses register thinking this technique works. All you are doing is spamming the search engines and they don't like it at all.
The best way to get business is having a results proven company put together a well planned website promotion campaign using the best experts available.
Myth #5 - "Website promotion is fast and yields quick results"
Whilst some aspects of website promotion are relatively quick, most of it is an extended process that takes time to research, develop, test and implement. It's not about getting a quick sale. Building trust and credibility with your customers takes time and often results in longer term relationships. Results are always contingent on the quality of the website promotion program. Naturally, profitable programs will yield much higher results over the same time period as mediocre programs.
The Author has put together a resource website strictly to educate potential and current business owners about website promotion. You can visit it at http://www.1web-site-promotion.com.
Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:31:06 GMT - How To Bounce Back From An Ezine Disaster
Publishing an email newsletter or ezine regularly is a lot of work. And if you think that you'll never make a mistake, think again. Even experienced publishers can make mistakes because of technology or human error. It's all too easy to press the wrong button and have a disastrous "oops moment."
When the mouse is quicker than the brain or you pull a really bonehead maneuver, here are five simple tips for making amends to your readership:
1. Apologize. A little old fashioned groveling never hurts anything but your pride. In today's spam-phobic world, just a few irate readers can cause an entire ISP ban your newsletter or land your ezine on one of the many spam-blocking lists. So before anyone can accuse you of doing something wrong, beat them to the punch. Suck up your pride and send an "I'm sorry" email to your entire list. Make it humble, human, and heartfelt.
2. Hurry! Alert your entire mailing list about the mistake as soon as you can. This advice is especially important if you're struggling with a crisis, like a hacked list server that's cramming inboxes with multiple repeat messages. Showing readers and advertisers that you're paying attention and really working on the problem reestablishes their confidence in you (and keeps them on your list).
3. Get Personal. Customize the subject line of your apology so it demands attention. For example, an informative subject line like "Apology For Mistake In MyEzine" works better than "Read Immediately" (which sounds like spam).
4. Explain. Tell your readers and advertisers the reasons "why" the mistake happened. Whether it was human error, a bug in your mailing software, or bad luck, give your readers a few details. Just make sure you don't over do it trying to explain really technical problems or ramble on about your personal stress level.
5. Bribe. If your ezine blooper is threatening to send readers and advertisers packing, offer enticing perks to make up for the mistake. Maybe a free report, a coupon, some nice templates, or software can save your list and your reputation. Just make sure the freebie is good quality and original that people can't just pick up anywhere.
An ezine publishing mistake can threaten your list. So remember that prevention is the best medicine. Be sure to test every single mailing. Also invest in a quality list server and secure hosting, and always monitor everything that's automated.
Just in case, you also might want to use the tips above to develop your own ezine "disaster plan checklist." That way, when the Ezine Gods get cranky, you'll be one step ahead of them!
About the Author
Susan Daffron is the President of Logical Expressions, Inc. (http://www.logicalexpressions.com) and is the author of more than 70 national magazine articles, 200 newspaper articles, two books, and online training courses. With hundreds of online articles to her credit, she regularly publishes ezines on computer tips and other topics.
Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:25:00 GMT - Advertising Splash or Squeeze Pages vs. Websites
When you start out a home based business it's a common mistake to start off advertising your website. If you have a website with lots of things for sale on it you'll probably just end up confusing your potential customer. They may or may not be able to determine what it is that's for sale. Here are a few reasons why it's better to advertise a Splash Page/Squeeze Page vs. a Website.
1. If you're using Google Adwords to drive people to your site then you'll want to get sales for your advertising dollar. If you're paying for people to come to your website and they are confused about what it is that's for sale, chances are that they will click on through. If a splash/squeeze page is used then you can capture names, email addresses and a whole lot more useful information. By using the splash page/squeeze page you will at least get some information in which you can use for a sale down the road. Having a newsletter sign up on the splash page/squeeze Page will accomplish this.
2. If your using Traffic Exchanges for your advertising then you'll want to make sure that your surfing is all for not. Using a Splash/Squeeze Page to capture leads for your business is what people are doing more and more now. The splash/squeeze Page forces the surfer to put in info by using a method like: "If you join now I'll give you this free.....", or "Join up now before it's too late". By using this method the seller accomplishes two things; they obtain info on the potential customer and give away probably some sort of viral e-book/software etc... This method of advertising is becoming more and more popular. Why? Because it produces results.
3. Joining Ad forums/groups is another yet not as effective way to advertise yet the same thing applies here as well. By using a well thought out ad and using a splash page/squeeze page to obtain information you will accomplish some results. If you just advertise your website, again people will tend not to take your offer up because they get confused about what's for sale.
By using a splash/squeeze page you will obtain very important information on your potential customer which will give you an opportunity to repeatedly give you chances to sell what ever it is you're selling. The whole idea of Internet Marketing is to have buyers for your products and to be able to have repeat customers is what the splash page/squeeze page is all about. If you just advertise your website then you risk the customer clicking through and not ever seeing them again.
About the Author
To find the Best Home Based Business Ideas and Opportunities Visit: http://www.siriusfreehomebiz.com/blog
Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:28:31 GMT - Content, Links, Relevance and Page Rank
SEO experts are constantly telling us about the importance of good quality content and good quality back links from web sites with relevant content. They also tell us that reciprocal links and page rank are of decreasing importance. They then instruct us as to how to go about getting good links by personally contacting other web sites and proposing a reciprocal link! Confusing! As is much of the advice given to prospective site designers.
Personal experience with our own web site has shown that the following is correct and works;
- Content is the key. Lots of it, with constant up dates to it, and it should be well written and informative not just a sales pitch.
- The more pages you can create the better. Upwards of 100 pages will highlight your site as an important one. Sites with only a few pages rarely appear on the first page of search engine results.
- As the site ages its importance will increase. Those who got in early generally outperform the later sites. Google also have an ageing process for links. As these links approach six months old they become of more importance.
- Reciprocal links once gone through the ageing process are still being counted, even with Google's updated algorithm.
- Article writing and publishing will produce huge numbers of backlinks. You should be looking to produce upwards of 30 articles and aim for around 250.
- Attaching a weblog to your site which is updated daily will increase the rate at which the search engines visit your site and at the same time adds valuable content and links.
- Page Rank has still some importance in determining your position in the rankings because it is based on the links and the content of your site. However the page rank as given by the Google Toolbar is not necessarily accurate. A more accurate page rank can be gauged from using the detail supplied by the Google Sitemap statistics. Consequently generate a sitemap and submit it to Google.
The most important piece of advice is to design your site for the visitor and not the search engines. Have as much information within the content as possible and keep the graphics to a minimum.
About the Author
David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a cleaning services company which operates throughout the UK.
Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:23:45 GMT - Expired Domain Traffic - To Buy Or Not To Buy?
It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.
I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.
On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.
Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.
Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?
Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.
About the Author
Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.
Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:43:22 GMT
