10 paid methods to Increase Traffic & Online Visibility

If you wish to increase the online visibility and the traffic of your website you basically have 2 options: You can use the free channels and you can invest money on advertising. As we have explained in previous articles the free channels can bring lots of traffic to your website but they require lots of time and effort. On the other hand a successful ad campaign can bring easier thousands of users to your website and it can help you boost your sales faster.

Creating a successful advertising campaign requires careful planning and implementation. As we have seen in previous blog posts, failing to define clearly your goals and to select the appropriate channels can lead to an unsuccessful campaign that will not only cost you money but also bring undesired results.

Given that you have a clear view of what you want to achieve and that you have a clear plan, the next step is to select the appropriate channels. In this article we list the 10 most common paid methods that you can use to advertise your services and to increase the traffic of your website. Note that you should select one or more of the methods below, based on your goals, on your industry and on the type of services that you offer.

1. Banner Advertising

The Banner advertising is one the most common forms of advertising on the web. One of the key factors of launching a successful banner campaign is to create an attractive ad banner and place it on high traffic and relevant websites. This will help you maximize your click through rate and your conversion rate. Usually the pricing models that are used in Banner campaigns are the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and the CPC (cost per click).

2. Adwords and other PPC Advertising

The PPC advertising can help you boost your business with a relatively low cost. As we saw in several previous articles, you can use Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or other similar services to create your own ppc campaigns. Text, display or video ads with a pay per click pricing model is a convenient and effective tool to support your online business efforts.

3. Social Media Ads

The Facebook Display ads, the LinkedIn Ads, the promoted Tweets, the paid discovery (StumbleUpon) and the other similar social network ads have become very popular ways to promote a website. This is because these social media websites offer valuable demographics and infographics that enable webmasters to buy space and show their messages to highly targeted audiences. Note that selecting the appropriate social media network and form of advertising is extremely important to ensure the success of the campaign.

4. Buy Opt-in email lists

The Email marketing has been used extensively by the webmasters and the online marketers to promote their businesses. Several companies sale opt-in email lists that can generate useful leads for your company. If you decide to invest on this type of marketing, make sure that the lists were collected in a legal and ethical way. Using stolen email addresses will not lead to the desired results, it can really hurt the reputation of your company and it might even lead to legal problems.

5. Ads on newsletters

Purchasing ad space on highly targeted newsletters that have thousands of subscribers can help you improve your exposure and increase your traffic. The cost of this type of advertising depends on the number of subscribers of a given newsletter, the size and the position of the ad in the newsletter template.

6. Affiliate programs

Theoretically by launching an affiliate program you can recruit thousands of online marketers that promote your business with relatively low cost. Affiliate programs can help you increase your sales and build a network of collaborators that generate new leads for your company. Launching an affiliate program is not a simple task. You need to design an attractive program, you have to define a solid policy, you have to train your affiliates and you need to use the appropriate software to monitor the sales, manage your affiliates, make payments and manage your campaigns. Closely monitoring your affiliates is a must in order to ensure that they use no blackhat techniques that can damage your company’s online reputation.

7. Paid listings on targeted and high traffic web directories

As you know there are thousands of web directories on the net. Unfortunately most of them are low quality link farms that were launched to support the link building efforts of SEOs and as a result they do not attract any visitors. Nevertheless niche directories do exist and they can really help you receive highly targeted traffic. As a result purchasing featured listings on high traffic and high targeted business directories can help you boost your business.

8. Sponsorships

Another great way to get exposure is to become a sponsor on interesting blogs, applications or events. Sponsoring free services is a great way to get the desired exposure and increase your brand awareness.

9. Paid press release services

As we mentioned in previous articles, Press Releases are important tools that can affect both your SEO campaign and your online exposure. In order to make the most out of them you need to be able to push them through high traffic channels (news websites, niche article submission directories etc). If you do not own such a channel, you can still reach thousands of users: A paid press release service could do the trick for you and enable you to increase your visibility on news sites and on search results.

10. Paid reviews on blogs

Another method that can boost your traffic is to get paid reviews from influential bloggers. A paid review is a useful approach especially when you want to inform people for a new product or service. Keep in mind though that reviews can be not only positive but also negative.

Increasing the traffic of a website is usually considered a difficult and important task. Nevertheless you should never forget that attracting more visitors does not automatically leads to an increase of your sales. Defining clear objectives, planning carefully your campaign and using the right channels right are extremely important to become successful.