So what does ‘get traffic’ mean? It’s all about visitors. You need people to get to your site. There are three ways you can let people know about your website.

• 1.By word of mouth.
• 2.By offline media.
• 3.By online.

Two out of the three ways above are a complete waste of time when it comes to promoting a start-up website. All three may work for other types of start-ups, but for websites only one works - do you know which one?

Well I’ll stop you guessing - it’s number three, online. The reasons why one and two don’t work and number 3 does is because of the following.

1. Word of mouth advertising

Website names get lost in translation. All the easy to remember words as names such as house.com, cars.com, money.co.uk etc have gone. When you start to add words to these generic words then people forget. So if you found this site called www.go-money.co.uk and told someone about it eight times out of ten it will be remembered as something else such as gomoney.com, gomoney.co.uk or some other variation. Or if you see a website called www.joobydooby.com which has no meaning you will find it diificult to remember. Statistics show that the average number of times someone retypes an address if the first one isn’t the one they are looking for is two!

So statistically you’ve only got three chances to get that visitor. But this all depends on someone actually acting upon someone else’s recommendation of your website. How many times have you been given a recommendation of a website and either forgotten what it is or never acted on it anyway? Again statistics show it’s around nine out of ten times you either forget or have no interest in visiting the site.

So equating the likelihood of someone:

• hearing about your site and actually being interested in visiting it
• remembering to look you up
• remembering your actual domain name
• retyping your name until they get it correct

and actually landing at your site is pretty slim. Some will find their way to your site, but there are too many things that can go wrong, or simply not occur, for them to actually end up at your site which make word of mouth promotions ineffective.

2. Offline media advertising

This is basically any media that is not online: newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, posters, etc. This is slightly more effective than word of mouth as a viewer/reader can actually see the domain name in print or on the screen so the likelihood of a mistype is lowered. However it still requires the viewer/reader to go to their computer and type the address in.

It has been shown that unless the viewer/reader is at the computer at the time they see the ad you have only a one in ten chance of them actually visiting your site if they were interested in your advert in the first place. This in my books is a very poor statistic. And considering that advertising in any sort of well known newspaper, radio station or TV channel can cost a small fortune the return on marketing investment is extremely low.

Offline media advertising can work if it is alongside other promotions for larger corporations which are trying to promote a brand rather than a direct product. Since you are going to be a small fish in a very big pond offline advertising is not for you unless it is completely free and does not take up too much of your precious time.

3. Online advertising

For someone to visit your site all they need to do is click. That’s it. No remembering or retyping of domain names because all the reader needs to do is see your advert, link or image and if they like it they will click and - bang; they’re at your site.

Now this all assumes they have the internet so they are able to click. But without sounding obvious your customers should only be people who have access to the internet! If you are aiming your site at someone who should love your idea so much so that they badger their son, daughter, friend or work collegue to show them the site because they do not know how to use the internet then you are using the wrong platform to promote your idea.

It’s like if you were advertising a plasma TV over the TV networks such as ITV, Channel 4 or Sky, you can safely assume that the viewers have at least a TV otherwise they would not be able to view your advert. So you can safely say that the viewer could at some point be interested in the TV that is being advertised because they have a TV. It’s the same with websites. If you promote a website on someone else’s website you can assume that the reader of someone else’s website could be interested in your website because they are actually able to view your website because they have a computer! Do you catch my drift?

There is no need to try to convert people to the internet. Let Tesco, Amazon or whoever else that has billions do this. All you want are people who have regular access to a computer with an internet connection and use it. So advertising by methods 1 or 2 may create interest in your site, but will not actually result in any visitors to your site. If you have no visitors then no matter how great your site looks it’s not a website - it’s a painting!

Hopefully you’ll agree with me that the only way to promote your website is online. So how do you do it online? You do it on a little known site called ‘Google’ using their clever program Google AdWords.

Google AdWords

Google allows you to display a small three-line advert on the right hand side of their page when someone searches for a search term that you have specified. It’s called The Google AdWords Program. If the searcher sees your advert and clicks on it they will land on your home page and Google will charge you anywhere from 1p to your maximum price, which you can specify.

How Google AdWords works

Have you ever heard of the expression ‘being at the right place at the right time’?

This old expression is quoted by anyone who knows of anyone that has made a lot of money from a simple deal.

This is what Google AdWords is all about.

• The place is Google.co.uk.
• The time is when your ad is displayed.

Guess what? - Google is the new landlord and newspaper!

• Google landlord - this landlord is different. He lets you rent for free. He lets you set up shop and only charges you for when a customer enters your shop (i.e. when the user clicks on your advert)! Can you imagine that? A landlord that lets you have a shop for free, no rent or council taxes and no service charges. He only charges you when a customer enters your shop.
• Google newspaper - this newspaper is different. He lets you advertise for free. Only ever charging you when a reader responds to your advert. Try running that one by the Sunday Times!

But it gets even better. The more relevant your ad the more likely it is to be ‘aired’ and the less you have to pay. Why?

Well, when Google first started, way back in 1998 (which was only nine years ago - a lifetime on the net), they were the first search engine that produced relevant results.

So while Yahoo and AltaVista were search engines as well as re-sellers of goods, Google were just damned good result providers. So by 2004 they became the most used search engine because of the way their programs worked.

So Google’s USP (unique selling point) was that they were relevant. Relevance is key to the success of any search engine. What is the point of visiting a search engine if all they produce are irrelevant results? So relevance is what they demand from any advertiser also.

• If you are relevant you do not pay so much.
• If you’re mildly relevant you’ll pay heavily.
• If you are irrelevant you won’t pay anything at all as you won’t even get shown!

So the key is to be relevant!

Relevance

So how can you be relevant? The best way to be relevant is to know your customer. There is a really easy way to know your customer. All you have to do is work out what your customer wants by the way they search.

If you know what they search and all variations of it then your ad will show. With a well written ad you’ll get chosen. If you get chosen consistently then you must be relevant!

Google have a neat way of deciding on whether you are relevant. It’s called the:

                                         click thru rate (CTR).

This means:

• if your ad is clicked thru 100 times, every 100 times it is aired your CTR is 100% and you are very relevant!
• If your ad is clicked thru once every 100 times it is aired your CTR is 1% and you are mildly relevant.
• If your ad is never clicked thru your CTR is 0% and your ad will get thrown out and won’t even get a look in.

Think about it. If you do get clicked thru based on the search term 100 times out of every 100 times you are displayed then you must be very relevant to what is being searched. Google will love you as you follow their mission statement which is:

Google must provide relevant results.

So if you are following Google’s mission statement they feel obliged to reward you. The way they reward you is to charge you less the more relevant you are. They do this by working out your Google score.

Google score

Your Google score is determined as:

           CTR X maximum bid price in pence for a search term = Google score.

So in the above example (extreme as it is) if you have company A having a maximum bid price of £1 for the search term ‘property’, and company B having a maximum bid price of £2, and company A having a CTR of 100% and company B having a CTR of 1%, then their respective Google scores are:

Company A: 100% × 100p = 100
Company B: 1% × 200p = 2

So company A has a higher Google score than company B. So even though company B is willing to pay £2 per click company A still ranks higher and pays only £1 for the click.

But it gets even better! All company A has to do to beat company B is get a score greater than 2. If they can maintain a CTR of 100% and pay a cost per click of 10p then their score is:

Company A: 100% × 10p = 10

This is greater than company B.

So even though company B is willing to pay £2 per click and company A is only willing to pay 10p, company A still gets ranked higher.

Cost per click

So in this extreme example company A pays only 10p and gets ranked first. So what does company B pay? Well Google have another rule:

You only pay 1p more than the next highest bidder

So if you introduce company C and company D, who have a click thru rate of 10% and are willing to pay 50p and 5p per click, you have their Google score at:

Company C: 10% × 50p = 5
Company D: 10% × 5p = 0.5

So the cost per clicks (known as CPC) are as follows:

Rank position		Google score	Max CPC	CPC
1st	Company A	10	10p	8p
2nd	Company C	5	50p	7p
3rd	Company B	2	£2	6p
4th	Company D	0.5	5p	5p

So companies A, B, C and D can be identified as these following typical companies:

Company	Name	Why?
Company A	The winner	This company knows the value of money and relevance. They are playing Google’s game. Since Google have earned their position to be the number one search engine they are deciding to play by Google’s rules. They have studied how Google’s system works and thus worked the system knowing full well they will get rewarded for it.
Company C	The amateur	They have some understanding of being relevant. They know that being relevant costs them less money, but being relevant requires effort! So to bypass effort they’ll just increase their cost per click to a level they can afford with the hope they’ll ppear somewhere on the first or second page.
Company B	The lazy	This company is stupid. They have no idea of being relevant. All they have is a big marketing budget. This budget has been given to an employee who has no understanding of money or ROI (return on investment). This company will spend that marketing budget in full but will get very few real enquiries.
Company D	The poor	This company will rarely get their ads viewed as they will be placed on the eigth or ninth page. They can still do well as the type of user viewing the eigth or ninth page will be a serious searcher. They will pay less than 8p per click and generally be start-ups or less established companies.

I have helped many people with their ‘pay per click’ (PPC) campaigns and most fall into the amateur or the poor category. Very few were in the lazy category because I had very few clients that had budgets of greater than £100,000 per month. But they all had one mission in mind: they wanted to be in the winner category.

We all know in life that not everyone can be the winner. To be the winner requires you being better than your competitors. The information below will help you become the winner. I still sell this information below as an eBook for £60 on one of my websites, but I am giving you this for free. It’s called ‘mastering the art of Google AdWords’. Most website creators cannot be bothered to master Google AdWords as they do not appreciate how effective it can be. I hope you will not behave like most website creators. However if you’re the lazy type then skip this section and read the section in the next chapter called ‘The lazy man’s guide to Google AdWords’.