If you’re familiar with internet marketing, you’vep robably heard all the rage about facebook, myspace and other social media power-sites like stumbleupon and digg. They’re super popular but should they be? Consider these points before you solely rely on social networking sites to drive traffic to your website:
* Myspace and Facebook have a huge number of dead pages – So many users have “been there, done that” that they do not login to there accounts anymore. You would basically be marketing to the wall. * Myspace and Facebook has implemented numerous safety guards – They have made changes which are hypersensitive against spam, and they label any outgoing links as spam or potential phishing sites. This puts a scare into people using these services, and causes them to apprehensive to clicking any outgoing links to your site. * Social Networking is about dead – When these services were new, they were great. While you may find some amount of success with these sites, your effectiveness rate would be about 30% of what you would normally expect.
Unfortunately, that is the sad truth.
While Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a great way to promote your website, SEO takes a long time to take effect. It can take years for your site to achieve natural, organic results in the form of targeted traffic.
The quickest way to get into the traffic game is certainly through PPC. PPC is where you spend a certain amount of money to a company like Google or Yahoo in exchange for an individual visitor who is interested in your niche. This traffic is often extremely useful. You only have to pay you do get a visitor – very little guesswork is involved. The top PPC companies are:
Google Adwords Yahoo Search Marketing MSN Adcenter
There are other services such as Miva which is used often; and, incidentally, Facebook has an excellent PPC program, which seems to be highly targeted — it laser targets your potential visitors by age, interests, location, and much more. This ensures that the right audience is seeing your ads — maximizing exposure — and providing you with quality, fresh leads.
Rates vary from keyword to keyword, but some terms can be bought for as little as $0.05 cents a click. Pricing really depends on the search engine you advertise on and the amount of users the particular search engine has. It is also dependent on how many people are advertising in the same niche as you.
You pay the price of the ad only when someone actually clicks on your ad. The goal is to figure out how much your website makes per targeted visitor, and then purchase traffic at a rate slightly less than how much you make. You’ll instantly turn a profit. An ROI of anything is justified because the entire process is automatic.
Want quick traffic, but don’t want to use the search engines or social media? PPC is the only way to go, and is both instant AND automatic.
