Admin
07-21-2003, 05:51 PM
Everyone with a web site is enamored with building traffic - and rightfully so, as the way to sell product is get people to your site. The internet is a great medium but it has a lot of lurkers and few buyers so to sell products you need to work on percentages.
For example: "My average customer spends $100. I make a net profit (after all costs of goods and expenses) of 5%. I can get 2% of my visitors to buy from me."
In the above example my break even point for advertising is to spend $0.10 for each visitor to my site. Of course, I'd like to do better than break even so I may be willing to spend .08 per visitor and keep the extra profit - and - since I provide great service my customers always come back to order more so that's all bonus income....
What does this have to do with building traffic? Unless you haven't noticed Google is fast becoming the top search engine and in many of the seminars I've recently been to it is the only search engine anyone cares about anymore. The point in the above example is that google's paid adwords is one of the best ways to build traffic to your site. Unless you have top Google billing on all the key phrases you desire, there's no more profitable way to get folks to your site. Unlike other advertising you can clearly see exactly what each visitor costs you - in fact - you can decide ahead of time what you're willing to pay per visitor.
I've been getting a lot of questions from our free shop owners about building traffic and there are many ways - the best of them being word of mouth, URL on business cards, Vehicle placards w/the web address, local print ads, etc.
Once you've done all the above and are promoting your site in every way you can think of locally, your best bet in internet advertising is not paid banners or any of the other myriad ways. The best overall value is still Google's adwords.
For example: "My average customer spends $100. I make a net profit (after all costs of goods and expenses) of 5%. I can get 2% of my visitors to buy from me."
In the above example my break even point for advertising is to spend $0.10 for each visitor to my site. Of course, I'd like to do better than break even so I may be willing to spend .08 per visitor and keep the extra profit - and - since I provide great service my customers always come back to order more so that's all bonus income....
What does this have to do with building traffic? Unless you haven't noticed Google is fast becoming the top search engine and in many of the seminars I've recently been to it is the only search engine anyone cares about anymore. The point in the above example is that google's paid adwords is one of the best ways to build traffic to your site. Unless you have top Google billing on all the key phrases you desire, there's no more profitable way to get folks to your site. Unlike other advertising you can clearly see exactly what each visitor costs you - in fact - you can decide ahead of time what you're willing to pay per visitor.
I've been getting a lot of questions from our free shop owners about building traffic and there are many ways - the best of them being word of mouth, URL on business cards, Vehicle placards w/the web address, local print ads, etc.
Once you've done all the above and are promoting your site in every way you can think of locally, your best bet in internet advertising is not paid banners or any of the other myriad ways. The best overall value is still Google's adwords.