Aim At The Bullseye And Your Online Home Business Will Prosper by: Kirk Bannerman

Traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything. 

You have no doubt seen dozens of offers similar to "10,000 hits 
per hour driven to your website!". This type of website traffic 
is completely untargeted and will undoubtedly result in a very 
low conversion ratio. It's basically "throw it up against the 
wall and hope something sticks". The big incoming numbers give 
the illusion of progress, but you will achieve better results 
with a lower volume of highly targeted traffic. 

I speak from experience because in the early days of developing 
my home business, I went for the big numbers instead of focusing 
on targeting 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 website 
traffic for quite some time, but the vast majority of people 
looking to trade links don't understand that just wildly swapping 
links with any willing webmaster is not the way to go. 

For the last few years, most webmasters have been in a "pleasing 
Google" mode since Google had such a dominant position. Now that 
challengers are emerging, most notably Yahoo, MSN, and Ask 
Jeeves, the search engine ranking landscape is becoming much more 
complicated 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 that 
links pointing to your website can help your search engine 
ranking, the reason for obtaining inbound links goes far deeper 
than that. 

In my opinion, the targeted traffic that relevant links pointing 
to your site will bring can be as important as the traffic that 
comes to your website from people using search engines. This is 
where linking philosophy comes in. If you limit yourself to 
exchanging links only with websites that have a theme highly 
relevant to your own, the traffic you receive from those links 
will be far more targeted (valuable) than traffic you might 
receive from links with websites that have nothing to do with 
your 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 after 
performing a search for, lets say "work at home" and then finds 
your 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 drive 
your visitor away before they consider whatever it is that your 
website itself is offering. 

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



About the author:
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.