Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

The title "Why Paying For Your Traffic Is A Smart Move" may seem a bit of a contradiction to what I say in many other search engine related articles, and, perhaps I should call it "Why Paying For Your Traffic Is 'Sometimes' A Smart Move - but should not be the Be All And End All Of Your Internet Marketing" - there, now that's cleared up, on with the article...

There are so many success stories about businesses enjoying massive success on the internet. However, there are many, many stories of failed businesses on the Internet.

Is success online purely through luck? Unlikely. It takes good business sense, a lot of help and a team effort. It takes an eagerness to succeed, the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work, time and money.

The Very Basic fact: We All Need Traffic.

Without traffic, all your effort exhausted on designing your web site would be wasted. Every business needs customers and, obviously, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products or services to. In the internet world traffic is your "walk in customer". The more traffic you have, the more people you have to sell to.

But, like any business with a shop-fron in the shopping centre, not everyone who goes in will actually buy, but the greater the number of 'walk ins', the greater the number of people that will buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

So how do you get traffic, enough traffic that could make a small percentage of eventual buyers enough to make a good profit? Many big companies generate traffic of tens of thousands a day and just ten to fifteen percent actually buy anything, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with solid business.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others to promote their web site. Yes that’s right; you have to spend money to make money (I'm guessing that is fairly obvious). Advertising is the key to business success. The more people that know you exist, the more people would of course go to your site.

The Value of Search Engine Traffic

The search engine is the easiest and fastest way for a person to find what he/she needs on the internet. Search engines are extremely popular because they provide a vital service to many people all of us. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors and clicks - they are 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 us that use them each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites ranks high in the search results page, you get a better chance that they will go to your site. While search engine optimisation is the cheapest way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will be on the top ranks in the shortest time.

When you pay for your advertisements, you are paying for your traffic. This may sound like not such a good business model, but the payoffs clearly demonstrate that it works. When you pay for your traffic, you are almost guaranteed a consistent traffic flow to your site. Used correctly, and if the links take the search engine user to a relevant, easy to use page on your site, you should enjoy an improved number of sales.

Paying for your Traffic

Usually, you will be charged for the number of clicks your link gets when your ad is clicked, this is called Pay Per Click. For some search engines (although no longer a very common advertising model), you will be charged for the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched, this is called Pay Per Impression.

To get Pay Per Click to work effectively for you It is imperative that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keywords for the right product/service - my advice is to use every bit of help you can so that you don't waste a lot of money on your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

While there is always a worry that your budget could be exhausted quickly, the money you spend on PPC traffic will not be wasted. You should get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result in a great boost to your sales figures.

No replacement for SEO

Paying for your traffic is, in the right circumstances, a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer.