An additional problem to this is ensuring that the traffic generated is “quality” traffic and many clients fail to distinguish between general, incentivized and quality traffic, although I believe each have their own uses.

Quality traffic is essentially visitors that are interested in your product or service and there is a chance they will purchase, sign up or refer it on to a friend or colleague. General traffic could of traffic from countries that you don’t offer your services to, and incentivized traffics comes from people clicking on links or adverts in order to complete some kind of offer and this type is generally frowned upon.

Visitors arriving to your website as a result of incentivized traffic usually don’t want your product but are just there to meet the minimum requirements in order to achieve the incentive they’ve been offered. An example of this may be a website which has a section stating “Help keep our site free by click on one of our sponsors”. The visitor is only click the ad in order to keep the services on the referring site free and results in your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign paying out for a useless click… another $0.10 down the drain and each $0.10 will soon add up and cost you considerable money… none of this is any good for you!

Incentivized traffic usually occurs (but is not limited to) PPC advertising where the visitor of referring site will receive some sort of commission for sending you the visitors. They don’t care if the visitor genuinely wants your product or not; just that they will be paid for sending you the visitor which will result in your advertising campaign basically pouring money down the drain!

In my opinion it would be better to get 100 quality visitors and month and get maybe half a dozen sales from that rather than 10,000 incentivized or irrelevant visitors a month and no sales at all.

I don’t condone incentivizing traffic and I take the opinion that this activity is essential a scam run by an online version of a con man and I can bet you each one will have their own way of trying to justify their actions. Although this may seem like extreme opinion the goal of a con man is to cheat you into parting with your money and isn’t incentivized traffic basically that!

However, I do believe that general traffic does have it place. Traffic originating from outside your target audience i.e. traffic from the US when the product is based in a UK market may not result in sales but it will help with your search engine ranking which in turn will increase the visitors from your target audience. Search engines not only take into consideration the contents of your websites, but also how many sites link back to your website and the higher quality the site the better. Although a link to your site from a personal website would count, it would be much more beneficial to get a link back from higher profile websites that attracts visitors from far and wide.

There as several methods you can try to increase the traffic to your website and to increase the chances of success I would advise employing several methods rather than just trying one. The methods you try will depend on the type of site you are running and the budget you have available.

Banner Exchange Programmes
Banner Exchange Programmes require you to place a piece of code on your website which will show banner advertisements for other sites. Usually you have very limited control over the type of adverts that are shown on your website or which site your advert is shown on. For example if you sign up to a US banner exchange programme and you’re UK based company then you’re advert is going to be shown to the wrong audience. For that reason I would suggest that you sign up to exchange programmes that are geared towards your target audience… a UK exchange programme if you’re a UK based company.

Another downside is that most work on a ratio basis, something like 4:3 so for every 4 adverts shown on your website your advert is shown 3 times and could be on any of the websites in the system. As most people who are trying banner exchange programmes are trying to get websites up and running this often means they don’t have enough visitors to make the best use of banner exchange programmes and are therefore wasting valuable space on their pages. I believe only sites with a reasonable visitor count can use banner exchange programmes effectively and therefore, as with many things in life, it is the people who are already better off that are benefiting and the little guy loses out.

If you wish to consider using banner exchange program please check out the sites listed below. Many offer high return ratio or initial credits which may help you to get your campaign kick started.

UK Banner Exchange – The UK’s Largest Advertising Exchange

Link Exchange Programmes
Link exchange programmes are very similar to banner exchange programmes except you are adding a hyperlink to your website rather than a banner. These are generally shown all the time on the other website (as is the link that you place on your website) but your link is often mixed in against lots of other links… often others that are maybe trying for the same audience you are which dilute the traffic getting through to your site.

In addition to this the site you are exchanging your link with often require you to have their link displayed quite prominently on your site and some even request that it be displayed on the homepage and ALL of them require you to place this link on your site before they will even consider your requested. As a result I would be very careful to monitor the sites that are supposed to be exchanging links with you to ensure that your link is actually displayed. If the link to your site is not live within say a week or 2 at most I would consider removing the link as you would essentially be providing them with free advertising. You may wish to contact the company prior to removing the link to see if you can resolve the matter first.

I’ve seen too many instances where someone has put up a link on their website using a link exchange and has forgotten about it and isn’t actually receiving a link back. This link then remains on their website for months, even years without further thought and is using up space on their website which could be used for a link exchange which actually provides them with new and genuine visitors.

Link Market – Free Link Exchange, Link Swap & Link Trade Directory

Autoclick
This is a type of incentivized traffic. Although there is no financial incentive someone using an autoclick system clocks up credits which can be used to show their site to other users of the autoclick system. This is not that great as the autoclick system can be minimised, hidden behind other applications, or left running when the user is not at the computer so although your website is getting traffic there is no-one actually there to view your site. I don’t know about you but I don’t find that very useful!

Google Adwords
One of the best advertising mediums I’ve used is Google Adwords. Although you have a financial investment as this is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) system you can quickly build up quality traffic and often offset the cost by using Google Adsense (this will be discussed in a future article). It seems to be true what they say… “you have to spend money to make money” but as with any expense I would ensure you have thought it through thoroughly and stick to your limits.

The keywords you select are not set in stone so feel free to play around a bit. Pick some keywords that you feel suit your site and its contents and set up Google Adwords to use these and then after a few weeks, a month or so review them… see what works, bin what doesn’t and add in some new ones to replace the ones you’ve binned. As the keywords usage and number of sites bidding on the same keywords continuously changes I would suggest to keep repeating this process to ensure you have the best click through rate (CTR) possible for your site.

You can even get a free Google Adwords voucher from various websites which will allow you to try out the service for free. One site I know that offers you these vouchers is UK2. Just take out a hosting account with UK2 and you can get your free voucher to test drive Google Adwords and see what I can do for you!

UK2 – Get a free Google Adwords voucher when you take out one of their hosting packages!

Site Listing
Get your site listed in every directory you can think of… and then some! The more sites that you can get to link back to your site the better for your search engine rankings. This can include a variety of sites including search engines, directories listings and business portals… many of these offer free listings which will give you a simple listing, although you can consider their paid listings if you are interested in their premium services. Some of places I submit my sites to are listed below:-

Google Site Submission – Submit your site to Google
DMOZ – Open Directory Project
Hot Frog – Your UK Business Directory

Signatures
If you haven’t already then add a signature to your email messages which includes your company website and possibly a small phrase or slogan describing what services you offer. If you do that then every email you send is potential advertising. The same can be applied to forums and newsgroups but please pay attention to the rules and regulations of the forums & newsgroups as they may not allow signatures and your posts may be edited, removed or even you account suspended if you continue to violate their rules.

Networking & Offline Marketing
If you’ve done any sort of research into this you will probably have heard someone (or many people) mention networking. Word of mouth can be a powerful advertising medium and a recommendation in this manner can often receive far more weight than finding a listing in Google or some business directory.

Make the most of your stationary!… even if you are an online business only and don’t normally use business stationary. Every letter is a chance to advertise who you are so instead of printing a letter on a blank piece of paper why not print it on a page with your company letterhead, web address etc… it doesn’t matter if it’s a professionally designed letterhead or one created using clipart from Microsoft Word… it’s the fact that you’re advertising your company that matters!

If you’re paying for an item on eBay with a cheque then add a letter with your letterhead in along with the cheque, or a compliment slip, or simply just a business card… even if you buy from the same person multiple times you should always include a business card so that they become familiar with your company name and services and the more likely they will remember you when they do require your product or services.

Conclusions
These are all meant as helpful pointers and hopefully will help you to make an informed decision about how you wish to go about advertising your website. I hope you have found this article useful and I would appreciate any comments you may have. You can leave me your comments via our contact us page.