But it means that you need to be seen in the search engines, which means making sure your site appears on the first page of a search engine's results when someone searches for your product or service. Any of you who have tried to do this will know it's not easy, but investing resources into doing it properly can reward you many times over.

Our research has shown that search engine optimisation brings in very high amounts of quality traffic to your site. The majority of our search engine ranking customers see their web site traffic double or even triple within months of starting, and continue to see similar increases over the following months.

Tip #2 - Inbound Links

The next best traffic producer is to build quality, inbound links to your site. By this we mean arrange with other appropriate web sites to link to yours. The links need to be appropriate, and at best should be on sites that are related to yours in some way. For example, if you sell outdoor furniture, arrange links from other outdoor related sites such as gardening sites or home improvement sites.

The more sites, the better. Our own statistics show that a very large percentage of our traffic comes from other sites where the visitor has clicked on our link.

And as an added bonus, creating quality related links will have a positive effect on your search engine ranking too, as most search engines take this into account when ranking your site.

Tip #3 - Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the perfect traffic generator for small businesses who don't have a lot of spare cash. The basic idea is that you get other people to promote or recommend your product, and you pay those people a percentage of each sale that's made.

For example, we have an affiliate program where we will pay a commission on many of our services. This means that people are happy to promote us because they get money each time they refer a customer to us - without having to really do anything.

It works for us too. Not only does our traffic greatly improve, but we only have to pay for the advertising when we actually sell something out of it! Again, our statistics show that this is another major source of traffic.

Myth #1 - Blind Submission

See those ads offering to submit your site to 100,000 search engines and advertisement pages? We saw one the other day that said it would submit you to 1 billion sites!

Even if these claims are true, you will in fact get NO REAL TRAFFIC from these sites. How can that be you ask? Believe me, we have tested it over and over again. Our test pages received no increase in traffic from these services on all the occasions we tested them.

The main reason for this is because if your site isn't optimised to suit the engines, you may get submitted to them all but your site could be rejected by many, or ranked number 3982 (for example). Either way you will never be seen.

Myth #2 - Link Programs

A number of link programs and web rings are out there that allow you to join a group of web sites that all link to each other, thereby increasing greatly the number of sites linking to yours.

These programs sometimes bring in a little traffic, but it is mostly untargeted traffic. That is, it's normally people who are surfing an unrelated site and simply clicked on your link. These kinds of referrals are less likely to be interested in your product and even less likely to want to spend money on your product.

Even worse, search engines don't like link programs, and will often penalise or ban your site if you are a member of them. This works against the best traffic generator mentioned in Tip #1 above.

Our experience is that these link programs bring in little or no traffic, and any increase in traffic they provide is far outweighed by the negative effect it has on your search engine ranking - particularly Google, which is one of the most popular search engines used.

Myth #3 - Purchasing Email Lists

A more and more common query we receive from local businesses is how to purchase an email list so that they can advertise via email. There are many offers around where you can purchase supposedly "opt in" email lists that you can then use to advertise to.

Purchasing these email lists is never a good idea. Apart from a large percentage of the addresses being out of date by the time you get the list, the remaining recipients are likely to either be uninterested in your product, or angry that they receive unsolicited mail from you.

Emailing people is often a good marketing strategy, but only to people who have willingly provided you with their email in the first place.

Looking for a good traffic monitoring service? Try www.hitslink.com.

Contact us for further information about this topic.

Disclaimer: This page is designed to provide information only and is not a substitute for advice that is specific to your business. Before acting on any of the information above it is important you seek further advice from a professional who has taken into consideration the nature and circumstances of your business.

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