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

Targeted traffic consists of visitors to your website who are interested in your niche and eager to buy your information, products, or services. These visitors are pre-qualified and have a comparatively high probability of seeing the value of what you have to offer and making a purchase.

Targeted traffic is what every online marketer is seeking. All other traffic is of lower quality and may or may not have a passing interest in your niche. Conversion of these other visitors into buyers is less probable.

While several writers call targeted traffic a marketing strategy, it is not a strategy. Rather, it is caused by a good marketing strategy. It often takes time, effort, and money to drive targeted traffic to your website.

The best way to get targeted traffic is to rank near the top results in the chief search engines for keyword phrases that are related to your niche. A number of optimization strategies exist for on page (like keyword density) and off page optimization (like getting links from other sites), it is often difficult to reach the top for very competitive keyword phrases. Everyone else is optimizing their pages and getting backlinks too. Of course, once you reach the top, the actual traffic you get from being in the "top 10" is free to you. And, that's the best price for anything.

The fastest way to get targeted traffic is to use pay per click ads on the major search engines. With pay per click ads you can target the keyword phrases you want and drive traffic to an appropriate page on your website. The downside of pay per click is that the cost to you for each click is often relatively high and you are in competition with everyone else in that niche. So, profits are often extremely narrow.

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

Since you're reading this article, you ought to appreciate that article marketing is a growing strategy for driving targeted traffic to your site. Articles drive traffic in two ways. First, the links in the resource box at the end of an article can cause interested readers to visit your site. Second, the links in the resource box are picked up by search engines and help enhance your ranking. And, as your articles get placed on additional sites you get an even bigger advantage from the viral nature of articles.

As you can tell, there are many ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. This is the difficulty for many 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 disheartened and in desperation pay for one "secret" after another to get their coveted targeted traffic.

The best way out, and it's no secret, is to concentrate on one scheme until you have it working properly.

I believe the best initial strategy to receive targeted traffic is article marketing. You can start creating helpful articles and distributing them instantly. You don't really have to purchase anything to get started. You can begin to see success in roughly 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 site owners looking for additional content on their websites.

About the Author:
Bob Sherman have been marketing online for 5 years and has experienced the positive effects of article marketing. Be sure to take advantage of his free article marketing newsletter at Fast Article Marketing.