In this section we’re going to follow on from the subject of niche engagement and the relevant traffic strategies that go with it, and continue to show you more ways to build visitors to your website.
Solo Ads
A specific type of paid traffic is called a solo ad. This typically involves buying an ad that will go out to an email list that someone has built up in a certain niche. For example, someone may have built a 10,000 subscriber list in the internet marketing niche, and is offering to send an email (that you or the owner of the list creates) in return for a fixed fee.
Solo ads cost anywhere from $100 to $1000+ depending on the niche, the list size and the responsiveness of the list (many solo ads guarantee an amount of clicks).
Solo ads are an extremely easy way to build your list and make a massive amount of money…but only if your product is converting well.
Tracking stats and conversion rates can go into incredible detail which we don’t need to cover here, but there are ways to determine (to the exact cent) how much every visitor to your landing page is worth. For example, if you are selling a product at $37, and you make one sale from every 100 visitors that land on your page, you know you’re making $0.37 per visitor (or per click). That means that if you’re buying a solo ad that guarantees 1000 targeted clicks to your landing page, you have to pay less than $370 in order to make a profit.
You don’t necessarily need to drive the clicks from your solo ad to a product page. You can also create a squeeze page offering a free ebook, podcast or video in exchange for the visitors email address. You are likely to convert many more people into subscribers of your email list than you are cold selling them your product. Once you have them on your email list you can put them through a serious of follow-up emails promoting your product or affiliate links.
Buying solo ads can be very worth your while, but remember that you need to know your conversion rates (product or squeeze page) to determine whether it’s worth paying money for the ad. Also keep in mind that there are many scammers who claim to have big email lists with high guaranteed clicks who are there to take your money and never deliver. Do some research on the seller before you purchase a solo ad.
My favorite places for buying solo ads are Warrior Forum (Joint Venture section) and Digitalpoint
PPC – Paid Traffic
I want to mention the option of paid traffic – PPC (Pay Per Click). There are many sites that allow you to display text or banner ads on a cost per click or cost per impression basis. The most popular service used for these type of ads is Google Adwords.
I’m not going to give you advice on paid advertising other than to say if you have no experience with it, do not try it unless you can afford to lose some money. It takes skill and knowledge to be able to get profitable results from paid traffic, so I suggest not going down this route unless you are willing to put in the time to learn more about it and constantly tinker conversion rates.
That being said, if you have the money and you’re willing to learn how to use PPC and CPV to create profitable campaigns, you can very quickly build a huge email list that you could never achieved in the same amount of time through standard blogging.
I have a friend who built a list in the personal development niche of 30,000 people in his first year online, and through his email list he made close to $100,000 in that year. He was so successful because he spent the majority of his time tweaking campaigns and improving his conversion rate.
Article Marketing
Article marketing is one of the most common methods employed by marketers to drive traffic to their sites because it’s very simple and can even be outsourced for a small fee. Even though many article directories have been ‘slapped’ by Google and it’s not as easy to get a first page ranking with a single article anymore, article directories are still a useful medium to drive a lot of traffic to your blog.
The trick to getting a lot of traffic from article marketing is to target specific keywords and keyphrases with your article, making sure the article is of high-quality (just like your blog content) and then building links to that article to get high search engine rankings for your chosen keyword or keyphrase.
It is possible to get your articles outsourced for a price of $3-$50 per article. However, “if you pay peanuts you get monkeys” and with cheap articles you’ll likely get poor content. Personally I don’t want to associate myself with poor content but you could use these low-quality articles to build backlinks to your quality articles and increase their search engine rankings.
Some of the most popular article directories include Ezine Articles, GoArticles and ArticlesBase. You can find a list of more directories over on ViperChill
Contests
One thing that people love more than free stuff is free money.
You can run a contest on your blog where you give away cash prizes or Amazon gift vouchers in return for people commenting on your post, Tweeting it, Submitting a paragraph of wisdom, linking to you, and so on. It’s your contest so you make the rules.
It might cost you some money, but could get you a lot of exposure and traffic. If you’re creative and want to give this a try, the reward potential is high. Make it feel as if it’s really easy to enter and to win. This way, more people will enter your contest and hopefully get you the result you desire (more traffic and exposure).
Remember, every step your reader needs to take to complete your contest is a step that could make them refrain from doing so. Thus, the less steps involved, the higher the chances of a lot of people taking part
Get Involved
Last, but certainly not least on our list of traffic recommendations is to get involved. I don’t mean just commenting on blogs or guest posting for other sites, but be aware of what is happening in your niche. I recently started a podcast which has already grown my audience by a substantial amount. It’s something I never would have thought of had I never seen other people in my industry doing so well with it.
There are always opportunities for interviews, being mentioned in posts by other bloggers and making personal connections in the offline world that you can utilise online. Once you’re keeping yourself up to date on what’s going on and really trying to grow your site, stick to it. You’re not going to have 10,000 visitors overnight, but in time you can continue to plant little ‘traffic seeds’ which will slowly but surely grow your site over time.
I didn’t write a blog post for ViperChill in two months recently and the site still received thousands of visitors every day from search engines, sites that have linked to me, social networks and people coming to the blog directly.
Find what works for you, and keep at it. Use the results of action to decide which tactics are having the most positive effect on growing your audience.