I'd like to talk to you today about some of the best ways to drive traffic for business lead generation. Generating traffic is about more than simply getting visitors to your site. You want visitors who are likely to make or have influence over buying for their companies or departments; this is why traffic driving strategies for business lead generation work quite a bit differently than do other methods of traffic generation.



There are techniques that can drive hundreds or thousands of visitors a month from social networking sites for example. But if you're selling high-end software to business executives or carpet cleaning services to busy professionals, it's unlikely your target customer is going to be among the traffic you generate via these methods. There's also the problem of the rapidly changing internet landscape.

Traffic generation methods change almost as often as do the algorithms used by search engines. When Google and other important companies make changes to the way they do things, effective traffic generation strategies can change at a moment's notice. For this reason, we're going to look at traffic generation methods which will keep being effective for the long run. Now, let's have a brief look at the strategies we'll be going into more deeply another time.

Local Search - advertising in a local market on the internet

Pay Per Click Advertising, or paying for every visitor that comes to your website

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) - getting your site ranked higher by search engines using keywords

Blogging - publishing an online journal of sorts

Social Networking and Web 2.0 - using social networks such as Myspace, Facebook and other sites to reach different communities and convince people to visit your site

Offline Traffic Generation - using traditional media like print, radio, TV and others to get visitors to your website

Name Capture and Follow-up - getting contact information from visitors and keeping in touch to encourage them to visit again

I want to talk about some of the key distinctions that make the difference between average and outstanding performance, for each strategy. Let's start with 'Local Search'

Local search is web based advertising targeted towards people in your area. If your business has historically done well with the Yellow Pages, this can be a great way to get traffic to your site.

Google Local is one of the best of these services; a part of the Google AdWords program, this service allows you to advertise with local keywords - "pest control Melbourne", for example. When a web user does a search using these terms, a map showing the location of your business will be displayed, along with a link to your site.

One of the things with local search is that in Google, especially, it's extremely prominent. The local result is much more prominent than the normal results, so if you do advertise in a local area, I recommend that you research and get into local search on Google.

There are other local search services you can use as well. City Search, True Local and Yellow Pages Online are some of your other options. Evaluate the conversion rates and potential traffic generation of each to ensure your advertising budget is being well spent.