Home Business Success Requires A Targeted Marketing Program
Kirk Bannerman

It has often been stated that Internet traffic is one thing, but targeted Internet traffic is everything.

You have no doubt seen dozens of offers similar to 10,000 hitsper hour driven to your website!. This type of website trafficis completely untargeted and will undoubtedly result in a verylow conversion ratio. Its basically throw it up against thewall and hope something sticks. The big incoming numbers give the illusion of progress, but you will achieve much better results with a lower volume of highly targeted traffic.

I speak from experience because in the early days of developing my online home based business, I went for the big numbers instead of focusing on targeted prospects. It took me a while to appreciate the importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for the big numbers, but it was a lesson well learned.

Exchanging links has been an important part of generating websitetraffic for quite some time, but the vast majority of people looking to trade links dont understand that just wildly swappinglinks with any willing webmaster is not the way to go.

For the last few years, most webmasters have been in a pleasingGoogle mode since Google had such a dominant position. Now thatchallengers are emerging, most notably Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, the search engine ranking landscape is becoming much morecomplicated than just marching to the tune Google played.

Many website owners seem to be of the opinion that the sole purpose of exchanging links is to try to improve the search engine ranking position of their website. While it is true thatlinks pointing to your website can help your search engine ranking, the reason for obtaining inbound links goes far deeperthan that.

In my opinion, the targeted traffic that relevant links pointing to your site will bring can be as important as the traffic thatcomes to your website from people using search engines. This iswhere linking philosophy comes in. If you limit yourself to exchanging links only with websites that have a theme highlyrelevant to your own, the traffic you receive from those linkswill be far more targeted (valuable) than traffic you mightreceive from links with websites that have nothing to do withyour theme.

Not only do highly relevant links bring you more highly targeted traffic, but they also play a customer satisfaction role for visitors to your website who arrived there as a result of a search engine query. If someone arrives at your website afterperforming a search for, lets say work at home and then findsyour website full of links to a bunch of off topic sites (Viagra,online casinos, hotel reservations, sports betting, etc, etc)the impression is often not favorable and may actually driveyour visitor away before they consider whatever it is that yourwebsite itself is offering.

Keep your eye on the bullseye and develop highly targeted trafficby having good content on your website and exchanging links withhighly relevant sites that also offer good content. Remember,traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and coaches others seeking to start their own home based business. Visit his website at Legitimate Home Based Business for more details.