How to drive targeted traffic to your blog or website?

This post is to show you how to promote your website in order to obtain more traffic, generate conversions or build your brand.

I have recently tested several site promotion methods. I will report here on some of them. I will also report on the unsuccessful campaigns since this can also give lessons.

Facebook ads :
With Facebook ads, you can promote your website to generate visits or an associated page to generate Likes. Recently, Facebook added also the possibility to promote the Action button.



Google Adwords:
With Google Adwords you can promote your site in different ways:
- You pay to see a link to your website appears in top of the search page for given keyword. Google indicates that this is a sponsored listing since the search result itself cannot be changed.
- You pay to show your ad on Google ad network websites including third party sites.

Adf.ly
Adfly is an url shortener, that is, people use this service to transform long urls to short ones before they share them on social networks for instance. Adfly shows ads before the user is redirected to the target url. The ads can be interstitial, banner or popups.

I tried two advertisement methods proposed by Adfly. Basically, you can target users only by country. The available stock of ads as well as the cost per mille CPM depends on the targeted geographical location. It can be very cheap but the quality suffers drastically.