Attract more customers

Here are 5 cost effective ways to drive traffic to your business website

1) Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a great way to drive cost effective traffic. Every time you have an interaction with a customer or a potential customer make sure that you get their email address and add it to your CRM or your mailing list (with their permission of course). You can then use a program like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor to send out your newsletter or product offerings to those email recipients. With both of these programs you will be able to monitor how many people opened the email and how many click through. You will also be able to manage who wants to opt out of any future emails.

2) Facebook advertising

Facebook advertising can be a really cost effective way of driving traffic to your site. From my experience the cost per click can be significantly lower than what you would pay with Adwords. One of the great things about Facebook advertising is that you can really dissect the demographics of the Facebook users to target the type of customer that you are looking to recruit. Facebook allows you to target on the basis of sex, age, occupation, interests plus a whole range of other criteria.

3) Display advertising with Google

Whilst Adwords itself can be quite expensive for some very popular keywords display advertising through Google Adwords can be significantly cheaper. Display advertising is placed on websites that are within the themes that you want to target. Again, you can really refine your targeting approach to try to focus on the internet users who most fit your profile. Display advertising is managed through your regular Adwords interface.

4) Banner advertising

Banner advertising on related websites can also be a good cost effective way to drive traffic to your site. If you source these sites yourself (as opposed to going through a reseller) you can potentially get some really good rates. You should make sure however that the sites are focussed on a similar niche to your business.

5) Remarketing

Remarketing is where you show advertisements to people who have already visited your website. The great thing about this is that you are marketing to people who have already shown an interest in your business. Remarketing is done through Google Adwords and can be an effective way of bringing in new customers.

While it is great to generate new/cheap traffic to your website you always need to make sure that you are tracking and analysing that traffic. My advice would be to ensure that you have Google Analytics or another similar analytics package installed.