I'm coming up on the 2 month anniversary of my recent site launch. I'm advertising on pay per click services and I am afraid I will become addicted to the traffic flow and registrations from that source. Addiction isn't a good thing in this case because my current cost of acquiring a user is high and the return on investment is minimal. Aside from spammers searching for "copyright 2009" on Google to find me almost all of my traffic is coming from pay per click ads. The last pagerank update gave me a whopping 2 from my link building using free directories, blogging, social bookmarking but hey, it's only been 2 months. What I'm worried about is all of my traffic is currently coming from PPC, it is a money pit and if I stop paying for that traffic daily then I won't get any new users. I don't mind paying for useful traffic but this current traffic doesn't generate more traffic. The only type of marketing I haven't engaged in is writing articles because honestly I am a terrible author. Anyway I'm looking for a better way to spend my monthly budget that will bring in long term traffic without using black hat techniques.
why don't you try SEO service or outsource some people to write articles and submit it? some people offered the service here... search engine marketing will give long term result than ppc but the traffic stream will be much slower than ppc...
I'm not sure what business your site is in, but I hope the following helps. One thing you should ask yourself is what would you do with the current traffic you have now. Unless you know what to do with it, you'll never know what to do with the further amount of traffic that you want. If you have already a good amount of traffic in your site, I suggest that you partly let your users do the marketing for you. If you think word of mouth marketing would work for you, then I suggest you explore that since that could dramatically decrease your marketing costs. Make your product something that people would want to talk about and share. PPC marketing will ultimately be expensive, so I suggest you learn how to get the help of your users eventually.
keep building backlinks and do onsite seo, although it depends how competitive your keyword is, your main focus should be getting high PR on the big G
You really need both ppc and natural search traffic. The first thing I would do is figure out what is wrong with the ppc campaign. Could be you are not targeting the right people, paying too much because ctr is too low, keywords are no good, or maybe even your product is no good. This is why I like to start with ppc first before moving on to getting natural traffic and doing some serious SEO. No sense wasting your time with the natural stuff if you can't find a market for it. Once you get the ppc problem correct, then look into doing the basic SEO, getting back links, and paying someone to do your articles. You might consider submitting to major directories as well as a good press release. Good luck!! Zeek
SEO, Article marketing, forum posting, blogs and video marketing to name a few. These are great FREE methods you can use. Better starting with 1 or 2 methods and stick with them until you start generating some results then add more methods gradually.
I have no idea what your budget is or if you suck more than I do at writing but my main method of advertising/marketing is articles. I write no less than 11 a day and submit 5 a day to ezine. It gives a good backlink and I get some very nice targeted traffic from them. If your budget allows, check around here for some writers if you are worse than me... it would be hard to believe that you would be worse than I am but one never knows. I write articles in the 300 - 325 word range, business related, make the resource box look like it is part of the article and it works real well for me. My traffic comes from those articles, other blogs that I have set up where I place the other 6 articles daily and the search engines as we are on the front page of the search engines for dozens of keyword phrases. My income is such that I do this on a full time basis and earn between 8K and 10K monthly between Adsense, CJ, Clickbank and Amazon and it's because someone told me to write articles, write articles, write articles. I'm sure there are other and even better ways to make a good living with your websites but this is one method that was kind of jammed down my throat and I am very glad it was. Hope some of what I wrote helps you.
Hey jaxrefinance.. Your Adsense income. Are these strictly Adsense sites or just ads you place on a normal site? There is no doubt that you can get some good traffic from articles. A friend of mine is still making sales from an article he wrote several years ago. He doesn't have a regular content site, just a basic landing page or mini site with the basic pages. Course he did his homework and found the right keywords etc. If you think about it, you can pay someone to write a 300 word article about $5. All you need to do is make one sale and the article pays for itself. That frees up a lot of time. Good luck!!
The adsense is really the smallest part of my income... it fluctuates between 800 and 1000 monthly. My sites are content strong, with adsense ads on them and links to CJ, Clickbank and Amazon products peppered throughout. Back in the day, I did have some MFA sites but I felt kind of dirty and shut those puppies down. Content rich sites that bring solid information to the table builds credibility to the viewer and gets you a better CTR and the search engines look favorably on your site as well.
I've been working real hard to come up with with a way to get some kind of viral marketing. I've considered an invite your friend contest but the site isn't social in the way that most viral marketing campaigns are. I recently cut out some pricey keywords and am seeing improvements there so I think there is much tweaking to be done. I opened up two more PPC campaigns today with small budgets to try and spread out to other audiences. My return on the PPC is good for what I wanted, users and it is time to focus on the natural search. I think I'm sold, article marketing seems to be hot stuff right now with nofollow on most other link building resources. Thanks for the advice and your story. I'll give my writing skills a run for their money.