The idea of becoming a traffic magnet should be appealing to anyone with a website.  Attracting traffic is much easier than having to fight for it and it’s easy when you think of your customer’s way of seeing things.  What is stopping them from buying what you sell?  

First, you should use an analytics program.  This gives you insight into why people leave without buying.  If you know why they leave, you can fix it and they might stay and buy.  Google’s free analytics is available to the public at no cost.  Obtaining the visitor date from your website can help you improve your sales.

Now, find where your audience is already going.  Do searches for your main keyword terms (if you sell executive leather office chairs, doing a search for chair would work) and see what sites pop up.  Visit the first 3 sites that come up, as they will be getting the most traffic from their current ranking.  Look for advertising on the page, if someone else is advertising there, you should be able to, too.  Advertising on one of these sites is a great shortcut when trying to get more traffic.  Even better, you may find forums, blogs, or other social sites where you can post there for free, just don’t be a spammer.

Have you ever heard of Google alerts?  Google runs a free service where you can have them send you an update whenever they find keywords you want to be kept informed about.  Think about this: Your prospect goes to Yahoo Answers or a forum and asks a question that relates to something you sell.  You can now go and help them out by answering their question and leave a link to your website, too.  All you have to do to make this happen is setup possible questions as Google Alerts!  To figure out what questions are being asked, go to Yahoo Answers and search your most basic keyword term.  Wrap the beginning of the question in quotes (example: “how do I buy a mattress”), this ensures you only get qualified results.  The best part is that Google already knows that the question is there, so it will be back to find your link to your site and will give you credit for it.

Here is an obvious step that nobody considers.  Google implemented something called Universal Search in May of 2007.  They took all of their individual search engines (video, news, blogs, images, etc…) and combined the results to create one massive index.  The last time you searched Google, I’m sure you saw it for yourself.  This revealed to us marketers that we should target video, news, blogs, local listings to get ranked easier.  Think about it, there are a lot less press releases and videos targeting your keyword terms then websites.  Take advantage of this and use press releases and video when marketing your business.

Ross Goldberg is a traffic generation master who reveals all you could ever need to know about increasing traffic to your websites the right way.