Friday, December 11, 2009

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Website Traffic Generation Planning and Methodologies

12:42 AM

By Duncan Wierman 
Real Estate internet marketing is like any other kind of marketing, you're trying to reach a niche market and must plan accordingly. You have to start by identifying your target market in order to develop your message conveying exactly the kind of high value business proposition which your niche will respond to.

The first steps are to:

     1) Identify your target market; start with geo targeting and work with the demographics from there.

     2) Decide how you want to be perceived by this target market and decide how you'll foster this
         perception.

     3) Identify and refine your value proposition. 



Once you've done this, the next step is to develop and distribute your value proposition, making sure that your value proposition is perceived by your target market exactly as intended. In marketing, shaping consumer perception isn't just the most important thing: it's everything.

You have to start by positioning yourself to be perceived in a specific way; from here, you'll need to maintain, develop, grow or alter this market position as you deem necessary.

The real challenge is putting these principles into action:

Driving Traffic

There are some important principles of traffic generation you need to understand in order to be successful at bringing visitors into your website.

There are both principles and rules of traffic generation; principles have to do with your approach to the task and the rules are the practical nuts and bolts of driving traffic. You need to have an understanding of the larger picture before you can successfully put the practical techniques into action.

What you'll usually see a lot of is the techniques alone. While this is still valuable information, you probably won't get far with these techniques if you aren't versed in the underlying principles of traffic generation.

These are the most important principles of traffic generation:
• Traffic generation isn't a black art - it's something which largely relies on common sense and methods which can be replicated with consistent results.

• The reason people usually fail in their traffic generation efforts is that they don't truly commit to making traffic generation techniques a fully integrated part of their business strategy.

• You need to create a plan for driving traffic. Think of it as a road map; follow it, but remember that it's not carved in stone. Your plan can and should evolve to reflect your real life experience and results.

• Continually test and track the results of your traffic generation efforts - and adjust your plan accordingly.

• Set goals for yourself and as you meet them, raise the bar; traffic generation is a process, not a single objective.

• Don't be discouraged if you don't see results immediately.

• Remember that driving traffic begins with building your site - Why is this? Because your site should be built from the ground up with visitors in mind. Look at other sites in your industry to gain an understanding of patterns of visitor behavior.
See what these other sites are doing; don't hesitate to take a page from your competition's playbook if you see something which is working for them.

This is where things can become challenging; it's something like standing in Grand Central Station at rush hour with a megaphone, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd. The goal here is to get the attention of your target market and get them to come to your site.

All business is arbitrage. You're taking something which is cheap (to you, at least) and exchanging it for something of higher value - buy low, sell high.

For example, SEO and other free traffic generation strategies essentially trade your time for traffic which is of higher value to you; this value may be measured directly in monetary terms or in other means (for instance, as signups to a list). The same is true of paid methods of driving traffic like PPC advertising; you're paying what you deem to be a small amount for something else which you see as more valuable.

If you've been reading carefully so far, you may have noticed that I haven't said a word about being indexed by the search engines; that's because this falls under the heading of techniques, not the principles of traffic generation. While you do of course want to be indexed, this isn't your primary objective - and it's something which will happen naturally as you work to drive traffic using other strategies.

Don't lose sleep over the search engine crawlers; they will come sooner or later. Remember that even once your site is indexed, there's no assurance that visitors will follow. Focusing on being indexed is losing sight of the forest for the trees. This will happen anyway as a side effect of using other traffic generation methods. What you should be focused on is getting targeted traffíc to your site. For instance, if you exchange links with another site (or even a directory) relevant to your industry, the search engine crawlers will follow these links when indexing this other site and voila! Your site will be indexed.

What you need to do is to let the web know that your site is there while simultaneously driving targeted traffíc. The best way to do so is to create links to your site from other sites; not only do these result in your site being indexed, but back links are great SEO and of course, they can generate traffic directly through visitor clicks. 
About The Author
Duncan Wierman is an Ex Software company CEO turned Real Estate Investor and Marketer. Discover how to outsmart your competitor, ethically dominate the search engines, and legally siphon off tons of cash in hand buyers from your website! Get a customized Free report on what is wrong with your website! InternetMarketingConsultingGroup.com



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