People have many different ideas on what the purpose of advertising is.

Some say it is to get noticed, get signups, or make sales, and while these are correct answers, I would like to suggest another, perhaps more important reason as to what the purpose of advertising is, and that is -

To get on your target prospect's shopping list.

Many years ago, long before they became famous, Knott's Berry Farm paid a ton of money to get billboards created that dotted the main freeways into Buena Park, southern Califonia.

These billboards said...

3 Things to do in Southern California.

1. Go to the beach.

2. Go to Disneyland

3. Go to Knott's Berry Farm.

They spent tens of thousands of dollars on these billboards, so it begs why they put themselves at the bottom instead of the top of the billboards?

The answer was surprisingly simple and extremely clever.

When people visited southern Califonia, they knew that a visit to Knott's Berry Farm would not be on their radar.

They came to go to the beach or Disneyland.

All Knott's Berry Farm had to do was to create a way to get on their prospect's shopping list, and what better shopping list to get on than one with the beach and Disneyworld on it.

Was this campaign successful?

You could say it was.

Since the 1940s, Knott's Berry Farm has grown into a 57-acre theme park located in Buena Park, California; in 2018, it was the 12th-most-visited theme park in North America. It averaged approximately 4 million visitors per year.

So advertising has 3 primary purposes, and each purpose requires a different approach.

Purpose 1 - Get signups and build a list. Here you offer a powerful incentive to encourage people to signup to your list. It needs to be exceptionally powerful because you are competing with hundreds of thousands of other lists.

Purpose 2 - Make sales, and you measure this by a sales to views ratio. How many times was your ad seen, and how many sales did you make?

Purpose 3 - Get on your prospect's shopping list, and to do that, you need to advertise everywhere you can, using every marketing method you can, and you need to write your ads, so they target the people you want as customers.

If you are new to the internet, you might want to start with some free advertising or buy a lifetime founder membership at a site like Profit From Free Ads, and after the initial membership fee, your advertising is free for life. You can join Profit From Free Ads here.

Phil Basten
JAM Marketing, Inc.

You have a website that does okay, but you want to increase traffic to your site and you want to start with  free traffic. Now you are wondering what you can do to achieve your goal.

There are many different things you can do. One of them is to build a community via a blog, an article, a web page, social media, or your own list.  

Increasing your website traffic can be done simply by answering questions that your community finds important. You must take the time to become the authority in your niche and involves reading all you can on the topic so you increase your expertise.

Have the community ask you questions. This will help you to provide useful, valuable, high quality content. That’s what search engines really care about. When you provide answers to questions asked by your community, your website should rank well for the keyword terms you use, but may not have come up with on your own. These keywords will show up in your answers to questions.  

You create loyalty among your community members and you rank well with Google at the same time. You could say that is a win-win! Now you have members in your community that are going to share and tell others about it, which will increase your traffic flow. That will multiply and continue to grow as more visitors show up and like what you have to offer.

In addition, Google will rank you well so you will place better in the search engines. Doing so means that more surfers will find you and come visit your page increasing the traffic to your site. If these people are happy with what they find they will invite others.  

So when you are looking for proven ways to increase traffic to your website make sure that you do not overlook the power of community – build a strong niche community and they will follow you.