Traffic Equal Sales???
Revised 2002 by Willie Crawford

Everything being equal, more traffic to your website
translates into more sales. Hence you read a lot
lately about ways to generate more traffic to your
website.

I'd like to begin by saying that more traffic does
not necessarily equal more sales. Your website can
attract tons of traffic for the freebies and if it
is not conducive to making sales, you will probably
not make more sales. Being conducive to more sales
means offering quality, needed products at a good
price, and making it easy to order these products.
This point must always be kept in mind.

Everything is not usually equal - especially if you
are offering the same affiliate products as everyone
else. The one thing that distinguishes your site
from all the others is the relationship you have with
your site visitors. Given the chance to buy the same
product from hundreds of sites, most people will buy
from someone they know, trust, and feel some type of
connection with. This is true for me and I am sure
it is true for most of you. So part of your focus
everyday must be on being responsive to customers
reaching out to you. They reach out with questions,
comments, requests for help, and other notes. If
you are not responding promptly to these little notes
you are missing a very big part of the picture.

Assuming you are busy building relationships with
your current customer-base, then your next focus
should be on attracting new visitors to your website.
Techniques that have proven themselves to me include
ezine ads, signature files, banner exchanges, links
exchanges, notices on bulletin boards, news and
discussion group postings and ezine articles. You
should be using as many of these as practical.

Targeted ezine ads work great. However, you must
constantly refine and test your ads. Change the
headline and see what the difference in response rate
is. It is a never-ending process of improving and
refining. However, when you get an ad that works
great, be very slow to change it.

Banner exchanges are the same - you must constantly
work to improve your banner. A good attention
grabbing banner with a compelling message will
produce click-thrus. An animated banner will
generally attract more attention, and with the right
message will compel the reader to click on it.
With banners - the old warning - no more than 2
banners per page. More than this will probably slow
the page down and you won't benefit from the click-
thrus since the surfer won't wait for your page to
finish loading.

I also exchange a few links from time to time.
After all - your visitor is going to eventually
leave, so you may as well trade traffic with
complimentary websites. Just make sure that the
trade benefits both webmasters, and your visitors.
Trading links with a disreputable or questionable
site harms longterm customer relationships.

While on links, free-for-all links pages also
produce traffic to your website although not the
flood that many hope for. The key here is to post
to as many sites as possible since it is a numbers
game. For this reason, I recommend using automatic
submission software or programs such as linkomatic.
The drawback with posting to hundreds or thousands
of free-for-all links pages is that many of them
will send you an acknowledgement message. To
handle this flood of email, I recommend having an
email address that you use just for this purpose.
That way, you can sort through these emails at
your leisure. Some of them do contain worthwhile
offers.

Posting to discussion groups and newsgroups pulls
in some traffic too. The key is to offer helpful
information and then a signature file with a
compelling teaser. Vary your signature file until
you find one that works. Think of your signature
file just as you do any other headline. It should
tell the customer what benefits he will gain from
clicking through to your website.

The final method of driving traffic to your website
that I will touch upon is writing ezine articles.
It's no secret that a well-written ezine article
establishes your experise and can generate many
visits. Getting an article published in one of
the larger ezines will generate hundreds of quality
visitors. Many of these will bookmark your site
and become repeat visitors. This is what you are
really aiming for. Look for a topic that you do
not feel is adequately explained. Do some research
and write an article explaining it better. You
have produced a very valuable article and your
readers notice this. Readers notice the difference
in the quality of articles, and hence your level
of expertise.

Do all of the above things and your will increase
traffic to your website. Keep in touch and work
to build relationships with new and repeat visitors.
Work to constantly refine your website and you
should see a steady increase in sales. It is a
process of gradually building up steam - while
constantly improving.
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Willie Crawford has taught thousands the secrets of operating
a successful on-line business through his free Internet
Business Success Course. It's more extensive than many $197
courses. Sign up today and start building your *successful*
online business: http://williecrawford.com/
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Note:
This article first appeared in our ezine, Limitless
Marketing Ezine. I publish original material
similar to this in each weekly issue. If you are not
a subscriber please sign up today using the form at:
http://williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

Feel free to publish this article in your ezine,
in your ebook or on your website. A note telling me
that you published the article would be appreciated.
My email address is willie@williecrawford.com

Thank you,
Willie Crawford

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