This is the fifth Thursday post about how to encourage visitors to your site; pay per click. The full list of approaches to increasing traffic is in the post “How to Help the Right People Find Your Site”. (You may spot I’ve not covered search engines. My mistake! I shall correct it in the near future!)
I’m writing about Pay Per Click (PPC) so that you have a complete picture. I don’t necessarily endorse using paid advertising and I would maximise traffic through free sources before I considered paying. Indeed, if you’re not getting traffic through free sources it is usually a bad idea to try paid sources.
So, why use paid advertising? PPC is usually for commercial sites, and so would normally be used for a social enterprise or other neighbourhood trading project. There is no reason you couldn’t advertise a cause, to increase traffic to your site. However, a cause that doesn’t pay would be a net cost to your organisation. If you can afford it, fine.
Some Things to Consider
- Do you have a market? Can you name a group of people who are interested? Can you define them in terms of sex, age, where they live, etc?
- You need to decide how much you can spend and stick to it. Most paid services allow you to limit your spend.
- Increasing traffic to your site, video or social media is usually OK. So, the advert means they arrive at your site, read the content and decide. That’s usually fine. What is not fine, is paying for things like ‘likes’, which imply your offer is more popular than it is. If you are working from a social media platform, you must check out what they approve of and play by their rules or you might be thrown off it for spamming.
- Remember it is your responsibility to check out exactly what is on offer, its costs and the likely outcomes. Always read the small print and take whatever advice there is before you commit to anything.
Two Places Where You Can Advertise
- Google Adwords. I’ll write more about this later because it is useful tool whether you plan to purchase ads.
- Facebook, which many believe is better targeted than Google, so you can select an accurate demographic.
- And there are other opportunities on other social media, eg Twitter and YouTube.
This almost completes the list of ways to increase traffic to your site. Have I missed any (apart from search engines!)?