This is the first in a series of articles dedicated to helping you understand the latest methods of generating quality traffic to your web site or eBay store. In this edition I will discuss some of the quickest ways to deliver targeted traffic. Why targeted traffic? It should be obvious that we'd like to have people who are interested in the types of products or services we offer visit us, rather than just "casual surfers". Let me explain: Many sites will promise you free traffic or hits to your web pages. Some are free, others charge a fee for a membership. Before committing yourself to these programs, be sure that you can choose the audience that you want to target. For example: If your web site is geared to health & fitness enthusiasts, your traffic should consist of people who are actually interested in this type of product. The more focused your traffic is, the more sales you will make from this traffic. It really is worth your time to understand your customer & then go after them specifically. Beware of traffic providers who promise you an outrageous number of visitors per day, like 5,000 or 10,000. Many of these companies just load your URL into a web browser & then set it to auto-refresh (reload) every few seconds. Yes, you will get 10K hits in a day, but they will all be from the same computer/IP address & will not provide you with a single lead or sale. Don't waste your time with them. Instead, choose a hit-exchange partner that allows you to select your audience: TrafficSwarm is great & I use them myself every day to generate about 1700 good quality hits/day. There are many others too. Just do a Google search for "traffic exchanges" & you should find several. The only problem I have with TrafficSwarm is that they do not allow your page to break out of a frame. I do, however, understand their reasons for doing this, as it stops (at least temporarily) the user's TrafficSwarm session. While this is not usually a problem, sometimes it creates extra work for me when setting up an affiliate page to use with them because some of the affiliate pages (especially ClickBank hop links) try to break the frames. You can overcome this by creating a simple page for the product on your own server that doesn't use frames & just link to that one in TrafficSwarm. Your customer will see your page instead of the affiliate page & (hopefully) will click on it for more info. Then, you forward them to the "real" product page. You can see an example of how I do this here: http://www.nalbone.org/beer.html This page is located on my server & it's the one that the TrafficSwarm member sees. If they are interested, they will click for more info & that sends them to the sales page.

For more info on TrafficSwarm, see: http://www.nalbone.org/ts.htm l