Copyright (c) 2006 Brigitte Jaeger-Dabek

Congratulations! You got your website up and running. You hired an excellent web designer who created a perfect website that will really pull in the visitors and inspire them to buy. And of course you have a shiny catalog like list of products with detailed descriptions of how they will benefit your customers. You prepared a section dedicated to the services you provide with testimonials from past customers. Additionally you got the best online shopping cart service available so that you customers can buy from you safely, with no hassles and next day shipping. That's all really great looking and you are so happy about it! But there is only this one big but: where are your customers?

Driving traffic to your website as an essential for your success is much discussed and even more misunderstood. You've probably seen the zillions and theories of advertisings out there, all promising to drive tons of new visitors to your site daily.There are services that say they will increase your traffic over night byan enormous percentage and your sales will be going through the roof if you will only pay them their small fee. All over the internet you will find so-called experts and gurus who will place your pages on all the best search engines on the net for some measly dollars. They all claim that with this kind of website exposure, your trafficnumbers and profits will explode within days.

But the truth ist his: the only guaranteed successfaul way to draw productive traffic to your website is through targeting you marketing. The important words to notice here are "targeted" and "productive". You can draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site every year by having any kind of a giveawayfor example a free ebook - on your site. Loads of services that search the internet for freebies will have people clicking the link to your site like crazy. But do these people buy anything from your site? Not at all, and they never will, they are just looking for freebies. So for you, they are empty clicks and this traffic is not productive at all. Remember: people looking for free stuff will never make you any money. And making money by sales is what you're after, right?

So the real secret ist his: target your marketing to the people who really want to buy what you have to offer. Don't be afraid, it's not rocker-science. Start by trying these basic Stepps:

- Write articles and submit them to free ezine sites. This is especially helpful if you are a service provider. You can write yourself, or hire a ghostwriter, to write an article for you about your fields of expertise. Give some free tips to the reader, offer your experience, and be accessible in the text. And here comes your benefit: at the bottom of the article, you are allowed to put a link to your website advertising your services. Every time someone publishes your article in their ezine or newsletter, they must use the resources-box with your web address at the bottom. You will get loads of highly targeted traffic by this.

- Sign up to various pay per click search engines. Obviously, google.com is the big player, but almost all of the most popular keywords are already taken or the bids by far too high for experimentation. If you can think of how people would search for your product, you will find more targeted keyword phrases, that are much cheaper. After you found those targeted phrases that people use to search for your products or services, you can post your ad next to the text that comes up when people search for that phrase. Every time someone clicks on your ad to go to your site, you pay google.com a nominal fee. This ist he Adwords-program, the leader in the so called ppc-industrie.But of course, there is not only google, there are many search engines, where you can start a pay per click-campaign for less money.

- Try to tweak your copy, and if copywriting is not your world, hire an experienced copywriter. The copy that is on your site makes a world of difference in your sales. Most important for targeting your marketing are the keywords found in your website's HTML-code, that means in the title-tag and in the metatags. An experienced copywriter should know how to determine the most effective keywords and place them strategically in your site's copy. If you cannot afford a copywriter, you have to do it the hard way and learn: do some research in the forums about inserting metatags and talk to as many people you can find.

If you follow this recommendations, you are guaranteed to avoid empty clicks swallowing up your budget and get the traffic your website needs. And always remember: above all, there is one main point for your success: be consistent.