Targeted Traffic is a Must Have Factor for Your Online Business Success

Targeted traffic is comprised of visitors to your site who are attracted to your niche and ready to buy your information, products, or services. These visitors are pre-qualified and are characterized by a relatively high likelihood of seeing the importance of the products you offer and making a purchase.

Targeted traffic is the holy grail every Internet marketer is looking for. All other traffic is of lesser value and only possibly will have a passing interest in your niche. Converting these other visitors into customers is less probable.

While several authors call targeted traffic a marketing strategy, it is not a marketing strategy. More accurately, it is the result of a superior marketing strategy. It frequently requires time, effort, and money to drive targeted traffic to your website.

The preferred way to obtain targeted traffic is to rank close to the top of the search results in the most important search engines for keyword phrases related to your niche. Various optimization strategies exist for on page (like keyword density) and off page (like receiving links from other sites) optimization. And, it is frequently tough to reach the top for especially competitive keyword phrases. All the other marketers are optimizing their pages and trying to get backlinks as well. But, once you reach the top, the actual traffic you get from being in the "top 10" is free to you. And, that's the most desired price for anything.

The quickest way to obtain targeted traffic is to employ pay per click ads on the chief search engines. With pay per click ads you can target the keyword phrases you want and steer traffic to a suitable page on your site. The negative aspect of pay per click is that your cost for each click is often rather high and you are competing with everyone else in that niche. So, profits are often extremely narrow.

Another way to produce targeted traffic is to post ads on numerous networks. Of course Craigslist and Backpage are very high traffic places to post ads of all types. You can use your personal profile page on social networks like MySpace and Facebook to publicize yourself and your products. Twitter is increasingly popular as a place to gain followers and do promotion.

Since you're looking at this article, you should appreciate that article marketing is a growing strategy for driving targeted traffic to your website. Articles steer traffic in two ways. First, the links in the resource box at the end of an article can encourage interested readers to go to your website. Second, the links in the resource box are picked up by search engines and help improve your ranking. And, as your articles get placed on additional sites you get an even bigger benefit from the viral nature of articles.

As you can tell, there are many methods to steer targeted traffic to your site. This is the problem for numerous people who are new to Internet marketing. They spend a little time here, a little time there, and pretty soon nothing is working very well. So, they become dejected and in desperation pay for one "secret" after another to get their coveted targeted traffic.

The most effective solution, and it's no secret, is to give full attention to one approach until it is working well.

I believe the best initial approach to get targeted traffic is article marketing. You can begin creating helpful articles and distributing them right away. You don't really have to buy anything to get started. You can begin to see results in more or less a week after you distribute your articles. And, the results build up over time as your articles are picked up by ezine or newsletter owners and by website owners looking for more content on their websites.