For anyone who wants to jump start their business, using paid traffic sources is a great solution. However, if you have never paid for traffic before getting started this may be a little daunting. This article will cover the basics of what you can expect when starting out with paid traffic using social media marketing for the first time.
When we mean paid traffic, we are referring to advertising on social media sites. We are not referring to buying a cheap price for an automated tool. These automated tools run through your site and give you a false sense of hope that these are actual visitors. No, we want to talk about advertising.
Starting Social Media Marketing…First Things First
The first thing I will recommend for anyone wanting to pay for traffic is to ensure that your site is done first. Nothing is worse then clicking on an ad to see either a 404 “Page not found” error, or an obviously incomplete site. Work on your content, your sales copy, and design first prior to spending a penny on traffic.
Advertising Traffic Goals
You need to have a goal in mind before starting any advertising campaign. Are you looking to create sales, get people to sign up to your email list or to like your Facebook page? These are all great goals and will help deliver more traffic to your site.
Social Media Marketing
First you want to understand what paid traffic methods are available. Some of the top ones that you may recognize are
As you will see many of the top social sites are offering their own advertising methods. These methods only apply to their sites so remember this, but when you think about how large Facebook and LinkedIn are, you can see that these are a great traffic source to tap into.
The days of thinking that social media is a fad are over. Social media is here to stay. While over the years some companies may come and go, social media marketing is at best an extremely good way to advertise and gain traffic for your site.
Setting up a Budget for Advertising
With any paid advertising method you will have to set up an account with the program that you choose to use. Along with this you will have to provide them with a payment method for your ads. This is normally a credit card so you need to have one that you can use for your business. It is advisable to have a credit card that is dedicated to business expenses, easier for doing your taxes at the end of the year.
By planning your campaigns and managing them you will be in control of your budget. It is so important to set a budget that you can afford. Just because you hear about people spending $100 per day on traffic you don’t have to. You can get started by using just a few dollars a day. Do an amount that you are comfortable with and stick to it.
Preparing your Ads
Your next step is to prepare your ads and this is done by researching which keywords to use. You can use a free keyword tool for ideas. Here is a list of some of the best free keyword tools.
These keyword tools will allow you to come up with ideas for specific keywords to use in your campaigns. Remember you want to set up more than one ad group of keywords and always use keywords that are relevant.
If you are going to use Bing Ads, then you can use the Bing Keyword Research tool.
Ad Creation
To write a successful ad you need to know and understand who your target customer is. If you know who your customers are that is great and you should know the following about them including:
Gender
Age
Location
Education
Use a site such as Quantcast for learning the demographics of your potential new customers. This site is basically for US websites and can give you a great insight of who your visitors are and where they are coming from.
You can use this information to write an ad that will appeal to your target market. For example if you know that your target customer is aged in their twenties and has a college education you can write directly for them. For an older market you would want to write an ad from a different perspective.
[Tweet “By getting into the head of your customer you will begin to understand what they are looking for”]
You can then offer solutions for them and this will generate more traffic to your site.
Always write at least two ads so that you can split test them and see which one delivers better results. This is easy to do if you decide to use Google Adwords as your paid advertising method. They allow you to easily set up and test different campaigns that you can track inside your account.
The above are the basics that you will need to get started with using paid traffic sources. There are other methods available but this can give you an idea of what is needed to start driving traffic to your site.
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