In the last Driving Traffic to Your Web Site post I talked a little bit about marketing and a handful of ways to start driving traffic to your web site. Using printed materials, a mailing list and posting on newsgroups and forums. Do you remember the mantra? Be consistent and persistent…if you stop your marketing techniques, your traffic will drop.
In this edition of Driving Traffic to Your Web Site I talk about ways to get traffic to your site that take more of a comittment. If the others weren’t a challenge, you might want to try the following:
Blog
I suggest blogging only if it is something that you can do how? Consistently and persistently. Blogging is a great way to get repeat traffic to your site but you must offer something of value on a regular basis to make people want to come back. Talking about the weather or your sick kids isn’t going to keep people running back. Blogging is definitely an area to get creative and captivate would-be customers.
Blogging can be a business in itself and take up a lot of time. If you have great work, the gift of gab, a little personality and the ability to put it down on computer screen, blogging might be for you. With modern technologies like blogger.com and wordpress.com it is easier than you think. However, just as with your web site, when you first start blogging you will have to get people to your blog in order to be able to convince them that they need to come back.
eBay
Yes, the dreaded eBay. You love it or you hate it but it is some of the best advertising you can get for the money. Again, consistent and persistent gets you the best results and maybe even some sales from your auctions along the way. Even if your auction doesn’t sell, chances are, if the product you’re showing looks great, people will go to your ‘about me’ page where you should have your web site link so they can follow it and see what else you have.
Other auction sites can work in the same way but the number of people that see you on eBay is much higher than I’ve found on the other sites and not all of them let you put a link or even mention your web site anywhere on their pages.
Magazine and Online Ads
Now we’re getting into the ‘spend money’ category. While magazine ads can be expensive, you can get a lot of traffic to your site from them, and even some pretty nice sales. Advertising in the forums that you should be posting in brings traffic too.
If you choose the route of paid advertising I recommend researching the readership of the publication before you sign a contract. It makes more sense to get in front of potential customers than it does your peers. While the latter helps build name recognition, it can be an expensive route to go to get known.
Submit to Magazines
Writing articles for magazines can be a great way to get a two or three page spread, complete with your web site and contact information, without having to pay for advertising. You can find submission guidelines at the web sites of popular magazines. While this might sound like the least expensive way to get into a magazine, you will find that if accepted, the time it takes to write and photograph the article will cost you just as much as paying for an ad, however, you’re not committed for 3 to 8 issues.
Look in magazines where you would like to see your work appear and you might find that they have galleries of the work that readers have done or other shorter sections like tips and tricks that you can submit to. Start looking at the magazines as something you can submit to rather than just something you get something from.
Write on-line tutorials or articles
I still get a lot of hits on my web site from a photography tutorial I originally posted on WetCanvas! specifically geared towards beads and jewelry designers. Three years later I revised and reprinted on Art Bead Scene, another blog I contributed to for a short time.
For the best exposure, think about what a potential customer might want to learn about and write it into an article or tutorial and post it in a related forum.
One thing to remember when you are using methods to get traffic to your web site is what kind of traffic you are generating. There are many methods that can bring traffic to your site but if you are focusing on avenues that bring browsers and not buyers, you will be wasting your time.
Examples that I have found that don’t usually translate into customers are the ‘vote for me’ sites. That is where you put a graphic on your site that prompts people to vote for your site and it will be ranked along with other similar sites. Usually, for this type of ranking you have to work just as hard to get votes (asking for them or holding contests) as you would for getting regular traffic from a different method. I have a field in my shopping cart that asks how customers found me and I don’t ever recall one mentioning a voting site.
I mentioned contests. While contests can bring repeat traffic, they often take a lot of time to manage the incoming emails and you spend time and materials to make the prize as well as paying shipping to the winner with very little conversion to paying customer. If you have time to kill, they can be fun and you might meet some nice people.
And last but not least, get creative. Try everything. Come up with the next cool gimmick. There are no rules and you don’t have to do it as it has always been done.
And remember:
1. Be consistent and persistent
2. I takes SIX times before something sticks. Get out there!
3. Get creative.
4. Marketing is fun!
What ways have you found to work for generating web site traffic? Share them in a comment below.
In Part 1 I was telling you about the importance of a mailing list. Mainly an e-mail list. There are different kinds of email newsletters with different goals to each. I will be focusing on one that will help you sell your beads and remember, you can write a killer newsletter but there ain’t no copy writing that will sell them as well as 
