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.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.