In the world of brick-and-mortar business, you cannot afford to do too many ‘test markets’ unless you have a lot of initial capital.  This is because all of the offline means of advertising are expensive.  Testing too many markets could result in a loss of thousands of pounds, which is why most starter companies generally advertise to ‘everyone’, in the hopes that at least a few people are interested in what they have to offer.  Yet, what wins in the end is niche marketing, which is marketing to specific groups of customers.  How can you affordably take advantage of this concept?  The answer is through website traffic.

What is website traffic?  Website traffic refers to the number of visitors a site receives through various means of Internet marketing.  Specifically, the main venues of Internet marketing include: search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, email marketing and link exchanging.  Internet marketing through search engines involves obtaining free website traffic through keywords.  Keywords are the words or phrases entered into a search engine that relate to your business.  If your keyword is popular and your site lists high in search engine results, you’ll get a lot of website traffic.  If not, you’ll receive only minimal amounts of website traffic.  On the other hand, Internet marketing through pay-per-click advertisements, involve actual payment for keyword advertisements that list on the right side of search engine results.  The more money you have to bid, the more traffic you’ll receive.  Then, there’s email marketing, which acquires website traffic from advertisements sent to people’s email addresses.  Finally, there’s link exchanges, which is a form of tit-for-tat Internet marketing.  Through it you can take advantage of another webmaster’s website traffic, and visa-versa as each of you post links to the other on your websites. 

So how can you use these forms of Internet marketing to test drive advertising for your business?  It depends.  For instance, if you have just started with Internet marketing, you will want to test your markets through the cheapest method of Internet marketing possible: search engine marketing.  You can create a multiple number of sites and optimise them with keywords related to your business.  If you get a lot of website traffic, along with conversions to sales, that’s a sign that your test went well.  Alternatively, you could use pay-per-click marketing, if you have a little bit of money to spend.  You won’t have to worry as much about optimising your content since you’re paying for the top space associated with your keywords, but you still want to make sure that your content is written in such a way that it can still convert a large percentage of your website traffic into sales.  Once you have gotten an established source of website traffic, you should use email marketing to test out potential response to new products or services your company might be offering.  And as far as link exchanges, it doesn’t matter either way, since you don’t know what percentage of the other site’s traffic will be interested in your offer.  Still, when doing a link exchange try your best to work with a site that is ranked high in search engines and has keywords similar to yours.