TrafficTsar Web Traffic Generation

I’m doing market research on several sites to determine the feasibility of a new business I’m working on. Since my project will be web-based, I need to gain good information on the amount and kind of traffic that goes to some other websites.

The question is, what’s the best way to do this? I have tried Quantcast, Alexa and a slew of other sites but they each seem to give differing results, which in turn makes me doubt the validity of the information?

Research tools:
1. Alexa, of course. This will give you Alexa’s score of the site’s popularity. Anything >100,000 is useless since the sample of traffic is too small to discern a proper placement.
2. Compete - also scores the site. Different algorithm, same idea.
3. Quantcast - another score, different algorithm.

Alexa and Domaintools.com will give you a geographic breakdown of the traffic sources to the domain, useful when looking for int’l bizdev.

Compete offers some keywords users use to find the site on search engines.

Quantcast tries to estimate #s on demographics of users (male, female, income, etc)

If you build a matrix of sites you are interested in and then figure out where you can target and be successful, you can turn the matrix into a sales dartboard.

I own a web site (I don’t want to be accused of advertisings so I won’t say which one) and I have tried everything I can think of to increase traffic..

PLEASE HELP!

The best way is to have good, useful content. If you don’t have content, nobody’s going to want to go to your site.

Other ideas (most of which you probably already tried):
Submit your domain to search engines.
Trade links with high traffic related sites (this gets people from other sites to your site and also may raise your pagerank for search engines, making you show up earlier.)
Have relavent keywords for your page, so that it shows up when people search for a topic related to your site..

If you decide to pay for a SEO, make sure you READ your contract VERY CAREFULLY. Some have been known to promise to "try" to raise your pagerank, not promise results.

Many internet marketers make a simple mistake when doing video marketing. They forget that views on a video sharing site are not the only reason to engage in video marketing. There are three reasons to post videos and video views are only one of those reasons.

Here’s quick explanation of how video marketing works. You make a video, upload it to the video sharing site such as YouTube, write a good, keyword rich description and wait until it’s posted. Video sharing site visitors watch your video and are counted as “views“. 

It’s possible that viewers will visit your site. Some sharing sites allow you to post your site url and you can always include it in the video itself. But unless you are fortunate enough to have produced a really cool video that viewers bookmark, add to their own pages and share with friends, you probably won’t get that many views. If your video does start to make the rounds of the net through “sharing” it’s called “going viral“. You really have no control over this, it’s done by your viewers. If they think someone they know would enjoy it, they’ll share it. If they think it will be something THEIR site visitors will enjoy, they’ll embed it on their pages. Viral videos can get millions of views, especially if they are picked up by major news sites such as CNN and USA Today.

So you see, views are not a great source of web traffic. They can help, but you won’t see 500 web visitors because you post a vid to YouTube.

The other two parts of video marketing are what really count. On any given day it’s probable that 3 of the top 10 most visited sites on the entire web will be video sharing sites. How much is a backlink from those sites using one or more of your targeted keywords worth? Pure gold! You can’t buy that sort of link love!

How much is getting ranked in hours not weeks worth? Google hits the vid sites often. I think they actually have an army of search bots sitting on the major video sharing sites. They sit there sipping coffee and munching donuts until someone posts a vid, which is when they grab the keyword tags and put you into the rankings. Google seems to give emphasis to videos. When you look at a typical search results page on Google, you’ll often find normal site rankings, along with videos in their own section, and sometimes images. 

The videos are always highly placed on the search results page. I’ve had videos ranked on page one for my keyterm within two hours. This doesn’t always happen, of course, but it happens often enough that I know from my traffic increase when it does. 

In my own humble opinion, I don’t really care if not one single person views my video on YouTube. What matters to my web traffic and sales is the website ranking and the web traffic I get from it. And that lovely backlink on my keyterm from the number 1, 3 or 5 site on the entire net.

As internet marketers we must always remember that what counts is the bottom line - how much money we put in our pocket at the end of the day. Getting even 100 video views on on file sharing site is not going to put that money in my pocket nearly as fast as a first page ranking for my keywords.

Article Marketing has been used by Internet Marketing experts for years. But the answer to “Does Article Marketing Work?” isn’t as simple as yes or no. Article Marketing works IF it is done right. Like almost every other part of marketing on the net, done wrong it can hurt, not help your web traffic building and website ranking efforts. 

Here’s a thumbnail overview of how article marketing is done. You write a keyword rich article that pertains to the information or products on the website you are trying to get traffic to. You then submit the article to Article Distribution sites. These sites list your article in their directories, categorized by your subject matter.

Bloggers and site owners come to these directories and pick up articles that help the content on THEIR sites. Your author information, including your site url and other info must stay attached to your article no matter who grabs it and no matter where it appears on the net.

So your article now has backlinks from highly rated article sites plus anyone who has grabbed it as content for their site. Because it is text, Google likes the content and your website ranking rises.

Sounds simple enough, but there are many pitfalls. For example, there are hundreds of article directories. SUbmit to them all and your link juice suffers because it’s from the SAME article everytime. The duplicate content rules start to take over and your ranking will at best be unaffected and at worst actually go down as those links are diluted.

Not every Article Directory accepts the same file format. In fact, even the ones who accept .txt formats only will not always display the article the same way. Did you know there are several different types of .txt encoding? And each one may deal with paragraph breaks differently! On one site your article may be displayed perfectly, on the next site it may be one long ugly block of text.

There are other pitfalls to article writing which we’ll go into in future posts, but for now remember that article writing is one of the best marketing techniques for getting your website ranked well and driving traffic quickly. While it is only one tool in your marketing arsenal, it’s a pretty heavy gun, capable of helping you dominate rankings for even competitive keywords.

If you’re not doing article marketing, learn more about it, hopefully by coming back here, and implement it as part of your weekly marketing duties. 

While the internet itself may be new, there’s nothing new about internet marketing. At least there wasn’t until recently. When people began selling things online, they used the old tried and true methods that the pen and ink guys had perfected in the brick and mortar world for ages. They wrote their compelling copy for a sales page or a site, then put together an email campaign and hoped to drive visitors and website traffic for sales. If the email bombed, no problem. Make a few changes, hit a key and off it went again. That was Internet Marketing then. 

Internet Marketing now has evolved, just like the net itself. Web traffic now depends on website ranking in the search engines. Let’s be real here - that’s search engine - Google. There are all sorts of ways to get better website ranking. Much has been written about search engine optimization, and while important, that is only one part of the internet marketing equation. 

The net has evolved into a place to get information, socialize with people who share your interests and immerse yourself in live or streaming media. Each of these areas can be used to help your website ranking.

Article marketing can give information. Video marketing can entertain, inform, brand products and more. Podcasting can do everything video can and is an excellent way for the camera shy among us to reach our audience.

Unlike most search engine optimization techniques which often take months to show results, article and video marketing can improve your website ranking and web traffic overnight. They are two of the most powerful tools in the internet marketer’s arsenal. ANd the best thing about them is they don’t require a huge cash outlay or a long learning curve.

In this blog we’ll explore the ins and outs of article and video marketing and how it can help your site rise in the rankings to get more traffic. The equation is simple. Better website ranking = more web traffic and more web traffic = more sales opportunities. In the end that’s what we are here for - more sales, more money and the lifestyle that can make possible.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, internet marketing, video marketing, web traffic, website ranking