Targeted Traffic is a Must Have Factor for the Success of Your Online Business

by Robert Sherman

Targeted traffic is comprised of visitors to your website who are attracted to your niche and ready to pay money for your information, products, or services. These visitors are already qualified and have a comparatively high probability of seeing the significance of the products you offer and actually buying from you.

Everyone with a website is seeking targeted traffic. Why? It's simple. That's where the money is. All other traffic is of a lower quality since it is comprised of those who may only have a casual interest in your site's topic or niche. Targeted traffic is comprised of buyers. Other traffic consists of lookers.

While a few writers label targeted traffic a marketing strategy, it is not a marketing strategy. To be more precise, it is produced by a top marketing strategy. It often requires time, effort, and money to steer targeted traffic to your website.

The favorite way to get targeted traffic is to rank close to the top of the search results in the primary search engines for keyword phrases that are associated with your niche. Numerous optimization strategies exist for on page (like keyword density) and off page (like getting links from other sites) optimization. And, it is frequently difficult to reach the top for extremely competitive keyword phrases. All the other marketers are optimizing their pages and getting backlinks too. Nonetheless, once you reach the top, the actual traffic you get from being in the "top 10" comes to you at no cost. And, that's the most desired price for anything.

The quickest way to acquire targeted traffic is to make use of pay per click ads on the chief search engines. With pay per click ads you can pick the keyword phrases you want and steer traffic to an appropriate page on your website. The negative aspect of pay per click is that the cost to you for each click is often relatively high and you are competing with all the others in that niche. So, profits are often very slim.

An additional way to produce targeted traffic is to post ads on a number of networks. Of course Craigslist and Backpage are very popular places to post ads of all types. You can use your personal profile page on social networks like MySpace and Facebook to publicize yourself and your products. Twitter is increasingly popular as a place to gain followers and do promotion.

Because you're reading this article, you should understand that article marketing is a developing strategy for driving targeted traffic to your website. Articles steer traffic in two ways. First, the links in the resource box at the end of an article can encourage interested readers to visit your website. Second, the links in the resource box are picked up by search engines and help increase your ranking. And, as your articles get placed on additional sites you get an even bigger advantage from the viral nature of articles.

As you can tell, there are lots of techniques to steer targeted traffic to your site. This is the dilemma for numerous people who are new to Internet marketing. They squander a little time here, a little time there, and pretty soon nothing is functioning very well. So, they become depressed and in desperation pay for one "secret" after another to obtain their desired targeted traffic.

The best solution, and it's no secret, is to concentrate on one approach until it is working well.

So, what is the most desired strategy to start out with? I think article marketing is the right choice. You can begin writing articles immediately and circulate them to article directories. And, you can do this with no up front costs if you want. Your articles will begin attracting people to your site within a week. And, over the long haul, as they are chosen by website owners and ezine publishers, you will see continual growth in targeted traffic. And, that is the goal.