Holistic Internet Marketing

Exploring the strategies of bringing traffic to your website, are you looking for tons of traffic, or quality targeted traffic?

Most website owners, if not all would love to see tons of traffic pouring into their website, but one overlooked point is the quality of the traffic you are getting. There is obviously a point to trying to obtain this traffic. If you have a blog, you want to attract people who will find your blog useful, subscribe, and come back often. If you have a business website, you are probably looking to obtain leads, make sales, brand your company or some other end goal. Here are a few tips to get quality traffic vs. a large quantity of visitors.

Target the Right Audience

When you are trying to attract traffic, whether through back linking, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, or other forms of paid placement, consider how well you are targeting your strategy to the right people. It might not be to valuable to attract visitors to your site about Playstation3 games from, say a retirement community blog. It could, but chances are, this is not the right audience. Think about where your visitors are coming from, and try to adjust your efforts to bring in a more qualified audience by choosing sources that are closely related to your business, product, blog or service.

In order to help determine the quality of your traffic, utilize your website analytics and statistics, and determine what your visitors are doing once they get to your site. Here are a few things to look for when analyzing your website statistics:

1. Bounce Rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that exit your site from the page they entered on. If you have a high bounce rate, obviously your visitors are not compelled enough to venture any further into your site upon entry. Even with landing pages, where there is a call-to-action such as completing a form, or making a purchase, it is not considered a “bounce” if the desired goal is converted.
2. Average Time on Site - Look at the average time people spend on your site. This is a great indicator, as, if you have thousands of people spending 3 seconds on your page, they obviously aren’t interested in continuing further. This could be due to the fact that the source where the visitor came from was not targeted correctly, through the link or ad creative.
3. Conversion Rate - If you are measuring conversion rates for lead form submissions, sales, click-throughs, sign-ups, or other goals, (which you should be), if you have very low conversion rates, it id quite likely that your traffic is not of high quality.
4. Visitors by Source - When looking at your website analytics and statistics reports, most applications will allow you to drill down to compare statistics such as time on site, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. between your different sources of traffic. If you have horrible stats from one or more particular sources, it is probably a good idea to weed those out and concentrate on more viable sources.

When setting a goal to get a large quantity of traffic to your website, take a look at whether or not it is helping you to meet the goal of your website. Do this through analyzing your visitors’ behavior concerning bounce rate, average time on site, conversion rate, and visitors by source. If you do not currently have or are not utilizing your analytics program, this should be remedied very quickly, as you don’t know success unless you can measure it.

If you need a website statistics and analytics tool, try A. Reis Web Stats FREE for 30 Days.

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Tags: analytics, Getting Quality Website Traffic, Internet marketing, quality targeted traffic, quality web traffic, quality website traffic, Stats and Analytics, traffic, web analytics, web statistics, website, website statistics, website traffic

To gain traffic to your website through the search engines and blog readers, the ability to write great articles is essential. Although it may seem daunting to some, by following some simple guidelines and tips on writing articles, the task becomes easier than it seems.

Dave Foster wrote a great article on site-reference.com on with guidelines to follow for writing articles online, and there are a few tips that even the more experienced article writer may not have thought of, like doing your research for your articles at the library instead of online. With a scalable formula, your online writing should get better and better as well as easier to do each time. After all practice makes perfect.

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Pay-Per-Click campaigns are an immediate source of traffic to your Web site or blog, and can potentially be a crucial part of your marketing success. Before you jump in head first, though, I would like to provide a guide on how to go about starting a PPC program.

1. Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign
2. Determine your budget
3. Create a landing page
4. Choose a PPC network
5. Research keywords and key phrases
6. Create the ads you will use
7. Turn your ads on
8. Measure your success
9. Revisit, and make one change to your campaign
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9

Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign

This obvious, yet crucial step is necessary to determine the success of your campaign. Typically, the major objectives are:

1. To make a sale
2. To obtain a lead
3. To get a phone call or visit to your business
4. To brand your company, blog, Web site
5. To make money from your Web site through affiliate programs, etc.

If you take the “I’ll just get traffic, and see what happens” approach, you do not have clearly defined or measurable goals. Some of the above objectives are easier to measure than others, but success in anything has some sort of relative measurement, So, determine what your goal is, and make future changes accordingly.

Determine Your Budget

This step is a bit like taking a trip to Vegas. Take as much as you can afford to lose. The first time you start a PPC campaign, you need to realize that just because you are paying for clicks does not guarantee anything. You must be able to afford to lose money for a short time, until you are able to measure, analyze, and adjust your campaign until you reach scalable metrics.

Create a Landing Page

This is yet another crucial step that you should not ignore. A landing page is the page that your visitors will reach when they click on your ad. The landing page should include a means to your end goal or objective. For instance, if your objective is to make a sale, your landing page should include the product(s) you wish to sell, a clear call-to-action, and a quick and easy way to make a purchase. If you want to acquire a lead, you must present a need or desire that will be fulfilled by the user submitting their information, and a form that is either on the page or maximum 1 click away, and is as simple as you can possibly make it. I will explain more about landing pages in a later post, as this is another topic that can be greatly expanded upon, but the poing of creating a landing page is to send your visitors directly to what they were looking for when they typed in a search term, and then clicked on your ad.

Choose a PPC network

There are many PPC networks to choose from, but to start, choosing one of major search engines is your best bet, as you will get the best measurement of success, more volume, and higher-quality clicks. If you haven’t already heard, the top 3 are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. You can typically find deals for signing up, like free credits.

Research Search Terms

Once you sign up with your provider, you will be able to use their built-in keyword tools to find keywords to add to your campaign. You want to choose the most relevant terms for your campaign, and determine how popular your search terms are. You can also do this without opening an account by using some of the free keyword research tools, such as Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool or Google’s free keyword tool. There are also many great programs out there like WordTracker and Web CEO. Use these tools by entering some of the key phrases in your landing page. For instance, this blog is about PPC campaigns, so I would type that in, and the tool will give you other suggestions, and an average number of searches you can expect. This helps to broaden your keyword base, but getting too broad will result in non-relevant clicks to your site, which have less potential to create conversions. Try different combinations of keywords and key phrases, and measure which ones give you the best conversions.

This is the conclusion of “How to Start a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Part 1″. Check back or better yet, subscribe to this blog for Part 2. In the meantime, start on these first steps, get your goals set, and do your research. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know your thoughts. Happy marketing!

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If you are a using blogging as part of your internet marketing strategy (and you are crazy if you are not), it is a good idea to sign up for the top Social Networking sites. By signing up for these, and submitting your blog, you can quickly spread the word about the topic you are posting, and will attract the search engines to you almost immediately. Enjoy!

1. Technorati
2. Digg
3. Reddit
4. StumbleUpon
5. Blog Catalog
6. Furl
7. Del.icio.us
8. Newsvine
9. Squidoo
10. LinkedIn

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Do you use these social media sites? Are there more that you use or that are your favorites? Let us know.

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If you are trying to learn more about Internet Marketing, is important to learn the key terms used in the Internet marketing Industry. This glossary will be updated and added to often, so be sure to bookmark it and check back for more!

Affiliate Marketing - A marketing tactic in which you pay a partner on a performance basis, who hosts a link or banner ad on their website to yours. There are several pay-for-performance models, but the most popular are pay-per-sale, and pay-per-lead.

Organic Lisitngs or Organic Results -Web site listings that appear in the search engines “naturally”, meaning the search engines found and indexed the pages by crawling through your code and content, not by a purchased ad campaign.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - An online marketing model in which the advertiser pays an ad server for each time the advertisers ad is clicked, bringing visitors to their website. The most popular PPC programs are through the search engine programs, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.

Pay-Per-Sale - An online marketing model in which the advertiser pays the referring Web site for each sale that was sent from their site. The typical Pay-Per-Sale modal is usually done through Affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and LinkShare.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The practice of improving the friendliness of your Web site or web pages for the search engines in order to achieve higher search engine ranking positions (SERPs). SEO includes ensuring the coding, linking, structure, and content of your site are able to be spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) - An online marketing strategy that includes utilizing Blogs, Forums, Wikis, and Social Networking sites to drive popularity of your Webs ite, and in turn, more visitors through users interacting with your Web site, by bookmarking, adding comments, and forwarding to other community members.

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If you are trying to learn more about Internet Marketing, is important to learn the key terms used in the Internet marketing Industry. This glossary will be updated and added to often, so be sure to bookmark it and check back for more!

Affiliate Marketing - A marketing tactic in which you pay a partner on a performance basis, who hosts a link or banner ad on their website to yours. There are several pay-for-performance models, but the most popular are pay-per-sale, and pay-per-lead.

Organic Lisitngs or Organic Results -Web site listings that appear in the search engines “naturally”, meaning the search engines found and indexed the pages by crawling through your code and content, not by a purchased ad campaign.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - An online marketing model in which the advertiser pays an ad server for each time the advertisers ad is clicked, bringing visitors to their website. The most popular PPC programs are through the search engine programs, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.

Pay-Per-Sale - An online marketing model in which the advertiser pays the referring Web site for each sale that was sent from their site. The typical Pay-Per-Sale modal is usually done through Affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and LinkShare.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The practice of improving the friendliness of your Web site or web pages for the search engines in order to achieve higher search engine ranking positions (SERPs). SEO includes ensuring the coding, linking, structure, and content of your site are able to be spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) - An online marketing strategy that includes utilizing Blogs, Forums, Wikis, and Social Networking sites to drive popularity of your Webs ite, and in turn, more visitors through users interacting with your Web site, by bookmarking, adding comments, and forwarding to other community members.

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of achieving traffic to your website through search engines by methods including: Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Blogging, Affiliate programs, Email, and link-building, to name a few.

Search Engine Marketing can be broken down into paid and non-paid methods. A good mixture of both is ideal, as it may take some time to acquire traffic through natural or organic SEO.

Non-paid or SEO includes the following methods:

• Web site optimization
• Blogging
• Link Building
• Social Media Marketing
• Directory inclusions

Paid methods include:

• Pay-Per-Click
• Pay-for-Performance
• Affiliate Programs
• Targeted Ad Placement
• Paid Placement Inclusions

A good SEM plan involves a solid strategy and approach, as well as identifying the results you wish to achieve with your SEM campaign. Are you looking for traffic, leads, sales, branding….all of these and more? In order to measure how successful your SEM campaign is, you must first determine your goals, and have a way to measure them. This, in turn, gives you a benchmark in which to figure out what works, and what doesn’t.

If you are attempting SEM without using a professional company or individual, choose a couple of the free methods to begin with, and as your budget allows, give PPC a shot. This should be enough to give you a start, and be able to test these methods on your site without becoming completely overwhelmed.

If I were to choose 2 methods to begin with, I would start with SEO on your website, and one of the 3 PPC programs )Google, Yahoo or MSN). After getting your feet wet, and seeing the results, you can then progressively add methods. Once this gets to be more time consuming than your business can handle, I strongly recommend hiring a professional. This will give you more time to focus on your business, and a better chance at being successful.

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Holistic Internet Marketing is a resource for learning about the world of internet marketing, and how to effectively market your website online. This blog is meant for anyone from the individual who builds their personal web site, and wants to know how to attract visitors, to the business that want to sell products or services online, to the entrepreneur that has just come up with “the next best thing” and wants to market it via the web, and everything in between.

For professional internet marketing services for your business, please visit www.areisdesigns.com.

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