Paying For Your Traffic – The Pros and Cons


Does your brand of luck bring traffic?

You’ve probably heard – and will likely continue to hear – many stories about businesses achieving great success from their internet activities. The troubling thing is, there may be tenfold or even a hundredfold of stories that are contradictory to their amazing success. This trend of ambitious business launches and subsequent failures continues to this day when still only a handful of Internet businesses succeed.

So the question becomes, what makes a successful Internet business launch? And what leads to subsequent failures of so many (the vast majority?) Is some luckier than others? That hardly seems fair if such a thing as luck is the answer, unless it is the kind of luck made famous in this Thomas Jefferson quote: “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” So if it’s this brand of luck that is responsible for that “handful” of Internet businesses that achieves success, then it would seem to make sense.

The most important ingredients any aspiring business person could have is ambition and the eagerness to succeed which, when combined with the determination to learn and the willingness to invest a lot of hard work and some money, will indeed go a long way in creating a lot of that Thomas Jefferson brand of luck for his/her own uses in the operation of his/her enterprise.

Traffic is the one and very basic element

If you are familiar with the popular movie, The Matrix, you know that Neo was “The One.” Well for any Web business to achieve success, traffic is “The One”. Without traffic, all your efforts would just go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products to.

In the world of Internet business, traffic is to a website as the walk-in customer is to a brick and mortar (offline) business. The more traffic your website attracts, the more people you would have to sell your products to.

But like any business located in any corner building or mall, not everyone that goes in will buy, so it must be considered a numbers game in the sense that the more visitors that do come to browse your merchandise, the more people that will likely become customers and eventually buy your products. The law of averages is another way of stating this simple but well known fact.

Enough traffic need not be large traffic

That having been said, how do you get traffic? Traffic large enough that could make a small percentage of eventual buyers enough to make a good profit. Enough traffic to satisfy your own law of averages? Many big companies generate traffic in amounts of tens of thousands a day and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buys, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good enough profits to satisfy their numbers requirements.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others. Yes that’s right, you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people who knows that your site exists, the more people would of course go to your site. If that seems to make sense, it is because it is practical and is also a basic component of the law of averages.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, they do not generate the same high volume as those methods that must be paid for. Another statement that seems to make sense and does, because when a product or service is paid for the payee is obligated to deliver satisfactory results, as opposed to when the product/sevice is free, you take it as is without guarantee of the quality. In addition, paid advertisements include advertising schemes by reputable companies like Google and Yahoo.

The value of searches

A Web search is and will continue to be the easiest and fastest method of finding something on the Web. Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many Web users. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors and clicks which make them some of the most common sites that people go to. It is easy to understand why so many companies would pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide information to the millions of users that they have each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites link pop up in the high ranks of the search results page, chances are good that they will go to your site.

While search engine optimization is a cheaper and lower cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that your website will rank very high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may sound like not such a good idea, but the payoffs would tell a different story. When you pay for your traffic, you are guaranteed a consistent traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day; and that, ultimately, is the results every business on the Web wants and craves.

Paying for traffic that pays you back

Usually, you will be charged with the number of hits a link gets when your ads is clicked. This advertisement and payment method is known as pay per click (PPC). For some search engines, you will be charged with the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched. It is imperative that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keyword for the right moment.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be for naught. You will get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result to a great boost in your sales figures. Paying for your traffic would be a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer guaranteed.

More Traffic with Effective Use of Yahoo’s Overture


Traffic generating ideas that endure

Overture, now known as Yahoo as a result of Yahoo’s takeover, was the entity that originally invented use of the P4P or Pay for Performance to the Internet community. Overture saw that the Internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in this marketplace.

To get an individual to a particular website rather than have him/her visit a similar or competing site, the target website needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow website publishers and marketers to have an increased traffic flow, thereby increasing sales simultaneously.

Yahoo provides a service that allows website owners to place a company’s ads on their sites in a way that those ads can be shown when certain keywords are entered in the search box. Yahoo offers companies a chance to increase traffic by using these services.

With more people becoming aware of your site, there would be an additional influx of traffic and visitors who will be given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. Even if your conversion rate is among the lower percentages of successful sales, the high traffic volume would still be a substantial enough figure to support your company’s expenditures for this service.

Keywords, key phrases and the SERPs

Getting a consistently substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your Web-based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other in the sense that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines results page (SERP) will consist of the sites generated by that search.

Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched. For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site.

 

You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the SERP when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

Compare results from SEO against PPC

While some labor so hard at optimizing their websites to get them among the highest ranking sites per keyword search, and they get the chance to be on top of the list or at least among the first page of a search results, thereby increasing their chance to be clicked on. As a result of this work they are often able drive traffic and website visitors to their a little faster.

Yes, there is a cost associated with this method of driving traffic; because you will have to pony up some cash in order to use this service. But there are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you based on their convenient payment methods.

It may be based on the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the number of times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up, not only in the SERPs, but also with some third party sites.

Combine the Yahoo service with other sources

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as the primary sites. The more areas your ad is shown in, the better your chances are that more people will learn about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment in your advertising a wise one.

Let’s face it, there is a lot of competition among Internet-based (or Web-based) businesses, so it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack with superior advertising methods. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of their decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting which ultimately leads to more profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as that which Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned the unfortunate and expensive lesson of using sub-par services offered by sub-par entities that are designed to do one thing, and that is to take your money. Don’t be counted among them.