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Hey, Nice Website! But Where Are Your Customers? A great website without customers is like a huge mall in the middle of a desert with no road leading to it. In order to sell you need customers, but how do you get the traffic to your website?

OK, so you have a nice website now but where are the customers? There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website, in this article we shall examine the paid methods of getting traffic. 1. Pay Per Click (PPC) Nothing new to anyone on the net. Every major search engine offers it in one form or the other. A great way to drive traffic to your site. But only if you know how to use it. You must select keywords that will drive traffic to your site but will not cause your CPC (cost per click) bill to skyrocket without converting prospects into sales. Your description must also complement your keyword so that it reinforces your products and services. The persons who click have interest in your goods but are still prospects. What goods are they interested in however. If my computer site should use a keyword phrase "Hardware" relating to computer hardware, I might be surprised to get a lot of clicks but no sales. Why, you might ask? Most likely the persons clicking on my link got there while searching for plumbing supplies at a hardware store. Funny you might think, but everyday, advertisers haphazardly choose keywords that have no bearing on their site. They now start to receive customers but have no conversions as these were not targeted visitors. By now the CPC bill is high and sales are still low to non-existent. So for my computer site, a better choice of keyword would be "computer hardware ", and if I wanted to narrow my target market more with specific searches, I would use "pc memory hardware". This would be sure to send me only targeted customers searching for pc memory products. My conversion rate will be higher out of this batch of qualified prospects. 2. Banner Ads Advertisers can sponsor text ads for varying periods on different search engines. These text ads run for any period you choose, locally, nationally or internationally) and give good exposure to a wide market, but is again dependent on keyword and description choices. 3.Buy Traffic - but make sure you know the difference between hits and visitors. There are sites that are wholly designated to selling web traffic. The rates vary but traffic can be bought from as little as $2.99 per thousand visitor. The type of traffic is dependent on where the traffic is from. Traffic is generated from expired domains and redirected traffic. Traffic can also be classified into geographic regions and by shopping preferences. The more targeted choices are more costly but give a better quality visitor. If your business is in the USA selling golf shoes, a US visitor who is a golfer is going to be a more qualified visitor than a golfer who lives in Sahara Desert and does not know what golf is. Some traffic sites send visitors based on auto generated views. This might boost the stats on your site but will not generate sales. You need to ensure that real people are viewing your site and not automated software. If you are going to pay for traffic then you need to get real traffic like from a search engines MSN, Yahoo and Google. Some websites will tell you they are sending visitors, when they mean hits. 1000 hits is not the same as 1000 visitors. Everytime a visitor comes to your site they generate hits. Every image that opens generates a hit. If one visitor click on your links 1000 times that qualifies as 1000 hits. So you can see the difference between the promise of 1000 hits vs 1000 visitors. 100 visitors just might, depending on your landing page, generate a 1000 hits. 4. Links Joining paid link exchanges is a great way to get incoming links to your site. This method until recently was a good enough method, but recent change to search engine optimization view on paid Link Exchanges means that less value is placed on incoming links and will hurt you in search engine rankings. It is still a fairly valuable tool as the other members with whom you link, the traffic from their sites now have a link to you. The drawback is when your link is so far down the page that customers to that site will never have easy access so ask for your link to be as high up on the page as possible. 5. Search Engines Not by any means last or the least effective method. The major search engines will drive most of your traffic to your web site. Higher ranking translates to appearing in the first 10 results which means more clicks. The higher up you rank and place the more your traffic from the search engine. With this method, optimization and submission of the site is paramount. A good SEO can tweak your site to make it search engine friendly including optimizing your meta tags such as Keywords, description and title. The pay per click search engines offer advertisers free tools to help you in this area and optimize your site and pay per click ads.