You are looking to buy traffic to your website, because you believe more traffic means more sales? Here we have to assume that the content on your site is something that your visitors find interesting. If nobody knows that your site is on the internet, how will you know if your visitors are interested? Are you offering something truly unique, such as a product that nobody else has offered? Is the price right for this product?

Once at your site, the visitor will then need to feel compelled to take whatever action you want them to take, such as signing up for an e-mail list, taking a trial or purchasing the product outright. To compel your visitors to do such a thing, you will need to make sure that they have visited your site as a potential buyer, and that they also feel comfortable with the purchase, know what it is, how good it is, and that the price is right. If not then your attempt to buy website traffic will all have been a waste.

If any of these things are not correct, then sales may not be something that results from the buying of traffic. You may spend a large amount of money, changing the advertisement, when it is actually your site that has the problem. The only way to make this situation is to eliminate one of the unknowns – we recommend that you should perform some search engine optimization, so that you know that your visitors are interested in what you are saying. Once you are confident that they are – you will get repeat visitors and a low bounce rate – you can get buy traffic to ramp up the resulting sales.

So far, I have assumed that you mean to use advertising, such as Adwords as a means to buy website traffic. If instead you are purchasing from a service provider, you need to be very careful where the traffic is coming from – is it from a link on someone else’s site, and how targeted is that link to your site? Are you going to get relevant traffic? The other point is that you could get ‘visits’ from bots – a computer program that opens up your site and visits it – this would be completely useless to you – no sales, but you won’t be able to see why. Ideally you need to have knowledge of and control over the source of the visitors when you buy website traffic, in that way you can fine tune your efforts until it starts working.

Our overall recommendation would be that you use search optimization entirely, instead of spending time and money to buy website traffic. The reason that you will be continually investing time and money to keep the visitors coming to your site when you buy website traffic, is because the source of the traffic is something that you paid for initially. If instead you use search engine optimization, to improve your rankings, people will visit your site, so you will get free website traffic, instead of having to buy website traffic.

There are exceptions to this statement – if you are launching a product or have some special promotion for example, or have already got your search engine ranking to a point where it is as good as you could expect, then you might consider whether to buy website traffic.

Using an internet marketing tool to help your online business to succeed can be a good idea, so long as the tool uses white hat techniques, and is not going to place your site in jeopardy. An example could be an automatic submitter that will post your links on public sites with spam content, such as porn links. This may mean that your site gets tarred with the same brush, and becomes viewed not as an authority, but as a spam site, which obviously you do not want.

Typically the internet marketing tool would be something that does the same thing as you would do, and therefore saves you time. In the extreme, this could be translated as meaning that you make money online faster. You have to be careful with these tools, as you want them to speed up your process, but not to be noticeably as though you are using some sort of automated software. Google wants to see lots of people linking to your site, because they read it, and enjoyed the content, so that is how it should be made to look. This might mean scheduling, throttling release rates, that sort of thing – it will still save you time, as it is automated, and means that you can get onto something else instead.

Keep in mind that although generating 1,000,000 links in an hour seems like a good thing for your link count, Google will look on this as bad, especially if your site does not normally get this sort of activity. Okay, now onto some tools that I use, and you might find to be effective!

I use Traffic Travis, which I have to admit, has improved massively since I first started using it. It is a similar product to Market Samurai which I also used. Traffic Travis allows you to add projects, which you can see from a dashboard – which I really like. The software also runs quite quickly and allow you to request results in one area and move to another and work on that (the application uses threads). This software has a massive number of features, the most often used by me are rank checking which it does automatically in the background, keyword research, and on page site error checking. Please see the separate review on this site for more detailed information.

The first tool that I want to introduce, because of the massive impact on my sites that it has is SEO Blueprint made up for blog blueprint, article blueprint, and link blueprint. This internet marketing tool allows you to build links through blogs posts, article spinning and submission, and obtaining of high PR backlinks. The simplicity, set and forget interface, and the amazing results that it gets (a very large number of links quickly and easily). This isn’t a magic bullet – you still have to write articles, but this makes getting the links manageable. This is a fantastic product that everyone needs to grow their internet marketing business.

Another really useful product is Get Clicky – it is analytics at its best, this application allows you to see users on your site in real time, instead of having to wait a day or two as you do with Google Analytics. This is useful because it is less effort to correlate events, and see their results, such as adding a page, video, podcast or whatever, and seeing how many visitors that brings you as it happens.
A useful tool, to be able to create and edit graphics is through GIMP. This product is similar to Adobe Photoshop, not quite advanced, but certainly good enough for most of the things you would want such an internet marketing tool to do. The other really nice benefit with this product is that it is free. This is a great piece of software to have and use yourself up until the point at which you can afford to outsource your graphics creation to professionals. Even then, it is still useful if you need to tweak something graphical. Very powerful software.

To easily be able to creation clean and quick re-writes of your articles or posts, you might like to take a look at The Best Spinner. This software allows you to quickly rewrite, and generate multiple documents from one spinning syntax based document. When you are creating posts simply for the links, so whilst quality is of concern, it doesn’t need to be Pulitzer prize winning, you can use this software. You alternative is to create multiple version in your favourite work processing software. The difference with The Best Spinner is that it allows you to create many documents from this one document, by picking similar meaning works from dropdown lists. It is incredibly easy to use, and allows you to concentrate on the writing of good content.

Another great little addition to your armoury of internet marketing tools would be eCover software. I used eCover Pro, which is a paid product, there are free ones, but this one gives you a lot of functionality and is easy to use. It allows you to create book, box, DVD, CD, Business Card, Notepad eCovers, and there is a nice little online designer that you can pay for to get your covers up and running quickly. You could use GIMP for this – I did for a time, but this product saved time messing about, and produces really nice looking covers.

One final internet marketing tool, because we can’t work without music is, Media Monkey. It works a little like Apple iTunes, but allows you to take media to your player, or from your player, as well as doing the usual automatic synchronization. The best thing with this software is that it is threaded, meaning that you can drop an album onto your media player, then another, and so on, and the program will let you work in other areas, and does not lock up. There is a free version of the software, and a gold upgrade which really adds to nice features, as you will see when you take a look at the software.

So you want to start an online business, or market your business online, but are not sure where to start? You’re thinking that because you don’t know anything about internet marketing, you’re looking for an internet marketing solution that will deliver and make you money?

The trouble with paying for an internet marketing solution if you don’t know about internet marketing, is that you won’t know what results to expect, or what steps will be taken to get you’re the results that you want. How will you know what your potential your site has if you don’t know the steps that you must take? Maybe you’re underselling yourself, or expecting too much – either way you’re destined not to get the results that you would like.

Let us examine some of the things that will need to be done for internet marketing to be successful, and for your site to make money. Any of the things that are mentioned here could easily be enough to stop you from selling if they’re not done correctly, so whether you want to do this yourself, or pay someone to do it for you, you will at least have some idea what you need to do.

First and foremost, search engines are looking for content such as blog posts, and articles that are useful to the users of the search engine. What this basically means is that you will get rewarded massively for having good quality, well written, unique, helpful content. These rewards will come from search engines like Google, who will see how useful it is through the statistics they keep of your site. The visitors to your site will also reward you by staying on your site for longer, reading other posts on your site, and participating in discussions via comments, if they are enabled. This in turn will be noticed by Google, so you will be seen as an ‘Authority’ in your chosen subject(s) and hence your site rankings will improve. So first of all, you need to be aiming for quality content as part of the internet marketing solution.

To be able to get traffic to your site, which is one of the key considerations to an internet marketing system, you need to find topic, search phrases, or keyword phrases that other people using the search engines are interested in. So you need to be looking for phrases that have a high number of searches, but are still within your site’s subject area, or niche. Something else you will want to consider with your internet marketing solution, is whether that phrase has any commercial value – for example, “free paperclips” is unlikely to lead to sales, whereas “seo blueprint download”, the person is clearly looking to purchase and download a product. Whilst the phrase itself may not lead to a direct sale, it should at least whet the reader’s appetite, so that they are then curious to look and find what the product is.

The final thing with traffic that you need to consider is competition, if you have two phrases, and they both have the same traffic potential, and both a high value, but one keyword phrase is highly competitive, and the other much easier to rank for, you’d pick the one to rank easily for. That’s not to say that competition is a bad thing just that it is going to take a lot more effort, time and probably money to get good rankings for.

For search engines such as Google to see your site, and recognize that you are posting content about your subject area(s), the content on the pages must be structured in such a way as to make that obvious. So for example, if you have your keyword phrases appearing in approximately 1% of the content on your site, this will indicate strongly what the keyword phrase being targeted is. If you do it too much, then the content will start to become unreadable, and the search engines will penalize you for this.

Next you need to market your site, so that others know of its existence, you do this through backlinks, which is where a link is placed on another site, pointing to your site. The anchor text should be for the keyword phrase to rank for. The more you have, with the higher rage rank, the better. The more diverse the links are, in other words, from different locations, such as forums, blogs, web 2.0, article links and so on – this looks more natural, or normal to the search engines. To really dominate for you keywords, you shouldn’t ever stop link building, however you can probably lessen the pace once you’re ranking well.

The final part of the puzzle, is to monitor and fine tune. For this, you will need a web traffic checker such as Clicky or Google Analytics. This will tell you about your traffic, such as how many visitors you had, whether they were new or returning, bounce rate (the amount of time before someone leaves the site), which country they came from, browser, operating system, keyword phrases searched for. With this information is easy to find out which aspects of your internet marketing solution are working best, for example, which country has most visitor, what the best keyword phrases are, the browser being used (so you can optimize for it) It is also good to know your rankings for each keyword phrase, which you can do directly by searching for each keyword phrase in a search engine. There is also a plugin for Firefox, rank checker – this will automate ranking checks, and is free. You can use software such as Traffic Travis or Market Samurai that will automatically capture this information for you, much quicker than it takes to do manually, and will give you graphs of your progress.

You’d think if you get lots of traffic that you would be onto a winner, right? That people will come flooding to your site and pay for whatever it is that you are selling. Traffic analysis is a lot more complicated than that – who came to the site, how they got there, what they were interested in, how long they stayed, and whether they returned to the site, are all important statistic.

There is a lot of software out there that will tell you how much traffic you have or had going to your site, and some will give you the information that I mentioned above. The following is a small review of a few website traffic checker tools, and how well they work.

Alexa is a site that will give your web page a global ranking, this is utility is useful to quickly compare how the traffic on your site compares to that of your competition, and the overall top sites on the internet. The free version will tell you the sites’ global Alexa ranking. You can pay do a full Alexa Site Audit, or you can upgrade the account, which will add features such as a premium listing, certify your site and gather detailed statistics, and perform bi-weekly site audits for you.

Traffic Travis is a piece of software that will do a lot of things, including giving you an idea of the number of visitors that you may get to your site per month for a given keyword. It can also tell you the rankings of your pages in the search engines, as well as monitoring the page rank of the pages on your website. Traffic Travis allows you to do keyword research for a site, and will also do a simple audit of your web pages to ensure that the on-page SEO is correct, and that there are no errors. This is a very good piece of software – I use it all the time, it’s not really analytics based, but I had to mention it, due to its tight connection with website traffic. This is a big piece of software, and will be reviewed separately.

Market Samurai is another software product similar to Traffic Travis, actually it has been around longer than Traffic Travis. This is a very reliable piece of software to help you do keyword research, find SEO competition for those keywords, and do other things like find content for keywords, and locate links. Again, this is not an analytics software tool, but does allow you to check your rankings by page rank and also by keyword, and therefore does fall into the category of Website Traffic Checker. This software will have its own separate review.

Google Analytics is a well-known free tool that will give you pretty much all the statistics that I mentioned. It is pretty accurate, and be linked to Google webmaster tools so that you are able to see some search engine optimization statistics, such as landing pages, search engine queries and geographical summary. The interesting parts of Google Analytics are obviously the number of visitors, the number of returning visitors, the bounce rate, search engine queries, and to some extent geographic summary. Given all this information it is entirely possible to fine tune your site to improve things like bounce rate, to do more search engine optimization to increase rankings, and hence visitors, and perhaps to provide different languages to better cater to the geographic audience that you have. The one downside to Google Analytics is the fact that the data can be delayed by two days or so, which makes it harder to correlate cause and effect.

One such tool that is real time, and offers the same sort of power as Google Analytics is a tool called Clicky Web Analytics. This is very similar to Google Analytics, but is real time – clicks does have some extra cool features in the paid version, such as spy, which allows you to see the real time details of the users on your site, such as IP address, country, operating system, browser, page they are viewing and where they came from. The paid version also comes with something called big screen, which is, you guess it, a big screen full of analytic data, such as visitors, actions, searches, referrers, goals and campaign. It is a summary screen, but is quite a nice little addition to allow you to get to the data that you want in the shortest possible time. There is functionality to be able to track tweets from twitter, and a summary of users who reply, the links, senders and receivers, hash tags used and statistics on how positively or negatively your message is being heard by your audience. You can also access the tweets directly. Very cool little addition to see how much of your web traffic is due to twitter. This really is a great tool, and is improving all the time – new features are constantly being added – highly recommended Website Traffic Checker.

Included with some hosting packages is a statistics application, called ‘AW Stat’, usually this is free. This application will record all the visits to your site; its biggest benefit is also its biggest drawback. It shows you all the visits, including computer programs (bots) such as search engine spiders that search your site. This information is very interesting to see, but is not in any way relevant to what you want a Website Traffic Checker for. The data is very detailed, which is good, but you need to spend a good deal of time getting used to where the data is, so that you can find out what you need to quickly. You would also have to log in to your hosting control panel to do this check, which makes it a little slower than other Website Traffic Checker tools out there.

There is also Stat Counter which is another free Website Traffic Checker; this particular tool is limited by the number of allowable page loads, and the size of the logs. If you have more than 250,000 page loads per month, then you will need to pay for this service. This is another very comprehensive analytics tool, which has the usual statistics that you would expect, plus some additional ones such as exit pages, exit links, details of the systems accessing the site, such as screen resolutions, operating systems, and whether JavaScript was available.

Overall the best combination I can think of would be Clicky paid and Market Samurai, although Traffic Travis is also good (and you can get a free version first). This will cover that you pick the keywords with the best return on investment, and traffic potential, and that you can see the results of your efforts once you start SEO.