Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Generating traffic is a pretty straight forward process. I’ve never actually struggled to generate traffic, but it still took me a while to figure out in the beginning. Ever since the start of my online career, I spent my time searching for free ways to generate traffic. I soon realized that if I wanted to get the ball rolling I needed to invest some money. As here’s the truth…
Free marketing strategies like blogging, article marketing, and SEO can take A LOT of time. If you’re eager to start driving traffic and seeing results this week, free marketing just isn’t going to cut it. I can tell you for a fact, if you’re a one-man company or marketer, it’s going to take you at least 60 days of hard work before you see any real results. That is if you’re using solely free traffic generation strategies.
Then another 30-60 days before you start seeing explosive traffic. Anyway, I have experimented with paid marketing as when I start a new venture; I like to see immediate results. So here’s a list of 7 ways to generate traffic with a bit of money:
1. Adwords
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and they rake in billions of dollars each year from Adwords. Adwords allows small business owners, large companies, and little marketers to drive targeted traffic by displaying their websites on the side of Google’s search results. Above all paid traffic, Adwords is the most reliable source. It’s probably the most efficient way of generating rapid, yet targeted traffic to your website. The only problem is that it can get quite expensive. I think pay per click rocks and is the go-to strategy for those who have the money. Saying that, I also think why pay when you can outsource the SEO and receive the exact same traffic for free.
2. Google’s Content Network
While most people use Adwords to receive search engine traffic, there’s something called the content network. The content network allows you to display your ads on thousands of relevant websites outside of Google. The traffic isn’t as targeted as the traffic you get from Google’s search network, but is substantially less money. You can pay per click, but it works out to be much cheaper when you pay per 1000 impressions. In your Adwords account, you’ll find something called “Site-Specific Adwords”, that’s it.
3. Facebook PPC
Similar to Google Adwords, you can use Facebook pay per click to drive an enormous amount of traffic straight to your website. I don’t personally use Facebook PPC, but I have once or twice and the results were great. It’s very similar to Adwords, but far more targeted. You can use Facebook groups, pages, and interests to target a very specific group of people. Facebook pay per click is great for super fast and laser-targeted traffic, but it comes at a price.
4. Banner Ads
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You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
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The majority of well-established websites sell banner ads. Banners in the sidebar, within blog posts, and all over the place. For some reason, bloggers and large website owners seem to think banner advertising is a great way to make money. In my opinion, it sucks. As in reality, the advertiser paying to advertise on a website will only continue to do so if the ad is profitable. So therefore the website owner could make far more money by promoting his/her own stuff.
It’s stable money for the webmaster, and cheap targeted traffic for advertisers. There isn’t any 1 website I use to find banner ad opportunities, I just browse around. Pull up a list of the top 100 blogs/websites in your niche and check them out. I can almost guarantee you’ll find a ton of them offering banner advertising for very cheap prices. What’s important is buying banner ads on highly targeted websites/blogs and of course having an attractive banner.
Click through to page 2 to read the last 3 ways of generating traffic with a bit of money!
John Doe, October 4 2011, 14:30
Great tips! I’ve been using Adwords for a while and it’s really effective.
Jane Smith, October 4 2011, 15:45
Thanks for the insights. What do you think about using Instagram ads? (spam link removed)
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Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
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Banner ads are called ‘stable money for the webmaster’ in one sentence and ‘the website owner could make far more promoting his own stuff’ in the next — so which is it?
Steelmanning the contradiction Ivy caught: maybe the honest reading is that banner ads are a stopgap for a site owner without a product of their own yet, and the moment you build one, that inventory is better spent on it. Not really a contradiction so much as two stages of the same website that the post has collapsed into one paragraph without saying so.
Fair catch, Ivy — I think what’s being missed is that those are two different site owners being described in the same paragraph. Someone with existing traffic and nothing of their own yet is better off selling the banner space. Someone with their own offer and enough traffic to fill it is better off keeping the slot for themselves. The post just doesn’t say that part out loud.