WebSite Traffic

[z9402305245]

Does anyone know how I can get Traffic to my website without spending a large amount of money! My budget is about $100 per month. I tried search engines... overture,google adwords.. but they are killing me on my budget!

thanks!!
Neil

[Mike Taylor]

Does anyone know how I can get Traffic to my website without spending a large amount of money!

LOL, welcome to every website owners problem. What you need to do is work on ranking organically in the search engines. This will take time though.

[Malok]

Echoing Mike's sentiments:

Time - learning what to do
Time - doing what you are supposed to do
Time - waiting for it to finally start working to see results
Time - to keep on working on it


Its a never ending marathon. The people with the Time (and stamina) to stick with it, get rewarded.

[publicrealty.org]

You might try to be more specific on your keywords when using adwords and such. If you are shooting for very general keywords with a lot of competition, then that could be what is killing your budget. I have had that problem before. Just a thought...

[ER Rentals]

I use Adwords at the moment, I'm not really convinced that I'm paying for the real deal here. It gets quite expensive to run and I don't know if there's much follow through with the clicks. 20% are probably from my competitors trying to run up the bill :)

[z9402305245]

Thanks to all of you who has given me information.

[jcboy460]

The best and least expensive way to drive traffic to your site is just to work your way up the search engines. It definitely will take a HUGE chunk of your time though. It involves a ton of research and then putting what you learn into effect.

[FlatFeeKing]

I will help you, what is your website address?

[Greg]

I use Adwords at the moment, I'm not really convinced that I'm paying for the real deal here. It gets quite expensive to run and I don't know if there's much follow through with the clicks. 20% are probably from my competitors trying to run up the bill :)

So if you bid for spot #8ish you will be below the competition's clicking view. They will still continue to click all of the top ads until those budgets run out.

By the time evening comes around the clicking competition will be home and the competing ads will have run out of budget.

Your ad should move up into the empty spaces and into view of clients. You might have to experiment with placement. The majority of my leads come through in the evening.

[thedeallocator]

A $100 budget is not bad, if you know what you are doing.
You can spend some time learning SEO to improve your organic search rankings. This will take some time, but will payoff on the long run.

You can also work on improving the conversion rates on your Adwords campaign, by working on your landing pages, making a more attractive offer (why should someone sign up on your website?) adding some audio, video etc.
Use less competitive Keywords in your Adword campaigns. Bidding on "Yourhometown homes" or "Georgia Real Estate (http://www.doyenrealty.com/georgiarealestate)" can be very expensive. Use the Keyword suggestion tool in your adwords account, and you will find some relatively cheaper keywords.
Hope this helps.

[cringwall]

I'd try to use exact match and shore up your keyword selection - Also, if you live in a metro area with suburban-areas -

ie: Indianapolis has Greenwood, Speedway, etc - you can do something like this:

[homes in Speedway IN]
[homes in Speedway Indiana]
[Speedway IN homes]
[Speedway Indiana homes]

Also try [yourtown, yourstate real estate]
Don't forget to use both long spelling of your state, and Both old time and New abbreviations for the state,

ie: Indiana, Ind. IN

I like exact match (the one with brackets around it []), rather than trying to guess all the potential negative keywords - it's more work but it's cheaper because you don't get junk traffic clicking your ads. If you use phrase match, for example "Indianapolis homes for sale" - someone typing in 'Indianapolis bikes for sale' would trigger your ad-

Bids: bid low - I start at .10! Most of the time, though, your keywords will be "inactive for search" until you bid them up. BUT - don't automatically bid up a whole ad group - only bid up the keywords that actually need the bump! Like this:
hxxps://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=52155&hl=en_US



Last - #1, 2 position normally gets most of the junk clicks, try laying lower, about middle of the page :rolleyes:.

[thedeallocator]

I strongly agree with the "cringwall". I have had good results with Adwords using exact match.
You have to work hard on optimizing your landing page.
Always ask yourself this: "Why should I type in my email address and phone number here". People are always listening to this radio station: WIIIFM - what is in it for me?

[micasa]

Many SEO techniques that are "popular" and "easy" can get you banned from Google alltogether!
Beware of what you do, read all available information first!

[cringwall]

If you are going to blog, get your own domain name. It's not very expensive, and you'll get better traffic. Use Wordpress, most web hosts can install it for you for free.

The strategy most internet marketers use now is to set up an autoresponder through Aweber.com and then offer something on the blog to get people to sign up for your blog announcements via email. -- offer a free report, movie passes, whatever.

Then use the autoresponder software to notify your signups when you make a blog post- give them plenty of opportunities and avenues to call or email you.

You can get a cheap web host for 5-8 bucks a month, and Aweber costs 20/month.

Blog regularly (1-3 x week), use region specific keywords in your blog posts. Also feature your listings as blog posts - 'fill in' the info that MLS and the other online resources miss.

[GringoBob]

good morning PaulsPS - according to Craigslist Terms Of Service, you are NOT allowed to have an offsite link in your posting - you can put the www.address but if you hyper it with http:// they will "flag" your post and if several folks flag it, then it will be removed by staff

how do you circumvent their TOS ?

[GringoBob]

we use CL every day Paul and we have been flagged and removed for including links to individual properties - what can I say ?

agree with the overall value - we get 18-24 hits a day from CL - it is a good resource even if a high per-centage are tirekickers ;)

[BSS2T]

You cant do PPC for 100/month. Its just not possible. Even if you have a high conversion rate, which is not the normal site. Point2agent has about a 3-5% conversion rate, depending on market. Your best bet is to go to realnetadvantage.com and get organically listed. They can do 3 markets for 147 monthly, which is what I do. Be there 24 hours a day.

Take care and hope I helped some.

[BRITT REED]

Has anyone tried azoogleads.com?

[FJCOM]

Post a simple ad in craigslist for each one of your listings and make sure it has a link back to your website. This is free and easy and quick to do!

Still brings a lot of traffic, but won't help with linkbacks and ranking as CL now uses a <nofollow> tag.

[funtoosh]

I think you should try and get a few of your friends to your site regularly and then improve the contentand look of the site. Pay some money for a bit of SEO and the PR would Increase.

[rama1]

I think you should try and get a few of your friends to your site regularly and then improve the contentand look of the site. Pay some money for a bit of SEO and the PR would Increase.
That will get you banned from Google. However, if you have friends in different states, that will help you a lot.

[athand]

Chose carefuly your key words!
Write some quallity articles on your topic and add a refference to your site.
Post the articles on some of the good article directories.

Also good idea is to write some kind of ebook with tips or ideas and give it for free. Everyone love fribies!

[DBQ]

CONTENT IS KING

If you want to rank for "Real Estate Las Vegas" then you need to write a quality article with your keywords in mind. Every time you do this your website gains more internal value. A lot of the marketing costs now days in Google are directly related to your quality score.

What is a quality score? Google it. :)

[krolfe]

It is important to put your website where ever possible. Any other forms of advertising, make sure your website is on their. Put it on business cards, flyers, mailings. Try and get linked to other websites. Start a blog. Just get the URL posted where ever you can. Good Luck.

[Gene]

The more one-way incoming links to your website you can get, the better your rankings will be in Google. You can accomplish this by writing an informative article (400 words or so) and have a short resource box at the end with a link to your site. Then, submit your article to as many of the free article sites as you can find (google "free articles" to find these sites). Submit to a few of these sites every day. You don't want to do it all at once.

Gene

[real-estate-crm-software]

Neil,
From everything I've learned so far, you have a few options: The most important, find those "long tail" keywords!



Find those hard to find keywords: Use wordtracker.com or nichebot.com to find what they call " Long Tail" keywords. These keywords/phrases have somewhat low traffic. But here is the kicker. They typically cost like 10 cents for the cost per click (CPC) because it takes time to find that certain key phrase. If you find many of these, you can score! So, how do you stretch your 100.00? By either hiring a company to find you the "long tail" keywords or you do it yourself. Then, and only then, should you kick off your PPC campaign again. ( One hundred dollars doesn't go far in PPC)
Participate in a few communities: ActiveRain is a good one! I know people who have posted on ActiveRain and have closed deals. I also know about the new Realtor.com system. ( talk.realtor.com)Take care and see you around the forum!

[jwscpa5]

Links to other websites are good ideas. Sometimes large industry groups will allow links. SEO is important. Geographical keywords let you hone in on certain areas.

[plessard]

The other answers are all accurate. Being found naturally on search is of paramount importance. It is not a fast process.

The number one thing you can do is get quality backlinks to your site. The most valuable are non reciprocal links.

Backlinks has turned out to be the most profitable area of one of my business models thetop10sites.

These are currently 52 business directories that charge an owner to list in once city. After we started to rank on the first page of search for over 10,000 key phrases a whole different set of customer came out of the woodwork. Essentially they wanted a discounted price to list on all our sites and they knew it would do little to generate customers if they listed on our small city sites but that was not their goal. They just wanted to purchase over 50 quality backlinks in one shot.

Best part is it worked so well we put it to use for our own company. If you visit any of thetop10sites local portals you can see a small grey link on the bottom of each main page called "business lists". In 40 days it took a brand new site that had never been heard of and put it on page one of Yahoo for the phrase "US fax lists". This phrase has 50 million competitors. Needless to say our businesslistsforsale dot com website is doing very well.

For other companies we create one ad in one category across all our sites. The impact is tremendous after about 60 days.

For a low budget get those links anywhere you can that is free.

[RobM]

There is no easy answer to this question. $100 a month is an ok amount to spend on PPC for example, what I would recommend is putting some of that money in PPC for say yahoo, make sure you are listed at 2nd or 3rd position, and check the traffic during the week. Track what days are high and what days are low. For example, for me it was low during the first of the week, went high wed-friday and died down on the weekend so I made adjustments accordingly.

give it a try and you may find that it will work for you

[castlelady]

If you are going to blog, get your own domain name. It's not very expensive, and you'll get better traffic. Use Wordpress, most web hosts can install it for you for free.

The strategy most internet marketers use now is to set up an autoresponder through Aweber.com and then offer something on the blog to get people to sign up for your blog announcements via email. -- offer a free report, movie passes, whatever.

Then use the autoresponder software to notify your signups when you make a blog post- give them plenty of opportunities and avenues to call or email you.

You can get a cheap web host for 5-8 bucks a month, and Aweber costs 20/month.

Blog regularly (1-3 x week), use region specific keywords in your blog posts. Also feature your listings as blog posts - 'fill in' the info that MLS and the other online resources miss.

I want to start a blog and have a cute, catchy and memorable name in mind. However - I'm wondering if it's more important to use the city and state in the name instead? My main website is catchy and memorable and I've found that it has helped to brand my name and people remember me because of it. So that's why I'd like to do that same type of thing - but with a different theme for a blog. I was thinking that if I include the keyword links in the blog then that would make more of an impact than the name of the blog anyway? Does that make sense?

[Malok]

I want to start a blog and have a cute, catchy and memorable name in mind. However - I'm wondering if it's more important to use the city and state in the name instead? My main website is catchy and memorable and I've found that it has helped to brand my name and people remember me because of it. So that's why I'd like to do that same type of thing - but with a different theme for a blog. I was thinking that if I include the keyword links in the blog then that would make more of an impact than the name of the blog anyway? Does that make sense?

You can rank for most any domain name you can think of. It helps some - but not nearly as much as it used to.

If you have built a brand around a particular name/phrase, etc - keep with it.

[castlelady]

Thanks for the response. I was thinking that in years past the domain name including the city and state was more important than it is now. So hopefully I'm thinking correctly because it's much more fun to have a cute and catchy name and theme.:D