Paid and Free Traffic Acquisition Models

Traffic acquisition is the method by which you drive traffic to your site. All traffic has to be acquired via some means. It is pointless expecting people to happen on your web site by chance : they will either be referred to it through word of mouth, click on an advert, or be driven to it as part of a bulk traffic campaign.

PPC & Free Traffic Acquisition Models

These are advertising based. We're all familiar with the model - a potential visitor sees an advert, is attracted to the site, visits it by clicking the link, and then converts (we hope) to a customer.

Pay Per Click (PPC) exchanges, of which Google AdSense / AdWords is one, offer the possibility to pay a set price per click. This makes it very easy to manage the total cost of acquiring the traffic. However, competition means that this can be an expensive way to acquire traffic. However, the upside i that the traffic will usually be pretty responsive; and you don't pay if nobody clicks your advert.

Services like Traffic Swarm are great, in that they offer a PPC model, but for free. The way that this works is that you earn credits by visiting other people's sites, which can then be used to display your own advert. It is a little self-serving, but as long as you are offering something original, that is of use to fellow Traffic Swarm users, it can be very effective.

Bulk Traffic Acquisition Models

Bulk traffic is slightly different, in that the cost of acquisition is fixed on the number of visitors generated; regardless of the way that they are generated. So, one could be paying $40 for 1,500 visitors without them having chosen to visit the site at all.

How does this work?

It's easy. A bulk traffic service sells popup, redirected, and search engine traffic. They either pop a site up in a window, redirect traffic from a defunct domain name in a similar business area, or redirect it from search engine results tailored to specific keywords. This means that the quality of the traffic varies, and, more importantly, it's passive traffic.

Crucially, this means that the visitor has not elected to visit the site - they're being forced to do so.

However, this may well work for some - and the low cost CPM (cost per thousand) often makes it worth testing out. The service of choice as far as the KeywordCracker is concerned is Revisitors. They offer a professional service, and deliver exactly what they promise. As always, your mileage will vary depending on how compelling your sales letter is, and the nature of your niche.

CPC and CPM

CPM is the cost per thousand, and is a reasonable measure of the cost of traffic acquisition. It is the figure usually quoted by other online advertising channels. A CPC of five cents is a CPM of $50. This means that, in order to attract 1,000 visitors to your site, using PPC, you will pay $50.

On the other hand, using a bulk traffic service, the cost will be substantially lower. However, remember that PPC visitors have chosen to visit your site, based on your advert copy. Bulk traffic visitors, on the other hand, have had little choice but to land on your sales letter or web site. Subsequently, they may be less inclined to stay, depending on how compelling your offer is.

This will affect the conversion rate. PPC traffic, and fre.e traffic that is sourced from search engines or advert based services will offer a higher conversion rate than bulk traffic, but bulk traffic can produce very quick results if it is correctly targeted.

And that's one of the reasons we use Revisitors - they offer the possibility to target the bulk traffic to offer the best chance of traffic conversion at a very low cost of acquisition.

Making Money with Keyword Research

Web Marketing and Money Making Tips from SEO, PPC and Business Strategy Guru.

Marketing tips and ways to increase income using keyword research, SEO, PPC and everything else you are already doing.

Nothing you do online should ever be a one-shot activity.

If you write a blog entry (like this one), then it should be done with re-use in mind. If you write articles, they should be easy to rewrite as blogs. Any Yahoo! Answers question that you answer can itself become an article or blog entry, and vice-versa. The same goes for forums posts, emails, phone calls, etc.

Over time, this will all bring great search engine marketing dividends; but how does keyword research fit in to this 'monetize everything' strategy?

Here are a few key ideas:

• Single keyword lists - multiple uses;
• AdSense / AdWords arbitrage;
• Content themeing;
• PLR resource creation;
• etc.

Do you see a pattern? It starts with the keyword research, expands with knowledge about the keywords being used to describe the niche, and spreads into wider knowledge about the subject. Before you know it - you're an expert, and another people will pay you for the niche knowledge that your research has thrown up.

Let's take these one point at a time.

A keyword list (such as you might download from Google AdSense) of around 100 - 150 words contains information that can be used for different things. For example, sorted by PPC value, it tells you how much you can make from clicks on adverts related to the keyword phrase. Sorted by average search traffic, it tells you how many visitors, comparatively, you might expect for a set of keyword phrases.

It's the same list, sorted two different ways. So, learn how to use a spreadsheet like OpenOffice.org, or Excel, and start making multiple uses of the same data. This is key to the Keyword Cracker mentality, spelled out in the acclaimed eBook 'AdSense and Keyword Research Guide'.

In that list, you might spot anomalies which indicate an arbitrage opportunity. For example, in my list 'adwords keyword research' has a PPC value of $0.05 which means that for every 1,000 visitors that click my link, I will pay $50. Now, if I have a product with a good sales page that converts at around 10-15%, and sells for $37, then I can make $3,700 from that $50. This is a good ratio, but there's more.

My research also tells me that 'adwords' appears in items with a PPC of around $16. So, even if my product fails to make a sale, some of the visitors are bound to click on related adverts displayed to them on the exit page, or a popup/under. I only need a few tens of those to click through to recoup my original $50 : it's a kind of safety net.

Now that I've started looking at AdSense and AdWords in my keyword list, it would be silly not to theme some content around the keywords. After all, sorting the same list by Advertiser Competition reveals what the industry thinks is important : 'AdWords', 'Pay Per Click Optimization', 'AdWords Advertising', 'AdWords Marketing', and 'Search Engine Marketing' are the top 5.

Now, I happen to know enough about all 5 to write 5 articles, and create a themed web of content around them; off the top of my head. And, I can even allow people to customize them and use them for their own site (the PLR angle). If I write 5 tightly focussed, 400-600 word articles (like this one), optimized for keyword phrases that Google reports as having a PPC of $5 to $10 per click, all with above average search engine traffic, how much would you pay for them? $10 the set? $15? $20?

If I make just two or three sales per 1,000 clicks, my time has been worthwhile.

Put all these streams together, and one little bit of research will pay dividends.

To your continued success with Keyword Research,
Guy

The Keyword Cracker
Get the acclaimed 'AdSense Keyword Research Guide'