The success of any site is gauged by the conversion ratio. This is nothing but the number of visitors to the site divided by the number of actual paying customers. However, this information is not public but for the eyes of the site administration only. Since the ultimate goal of any ecommerce site is to maximize the conversion of their visitors to paying customers they must drive traffic to their site. The only way to raise the conversion ratio, however, is to drive highly targeted traffic to your site.

Traffic versus targeted traffic: In just a few words we will differentiate between targeted visitors and general visitors. Targeted visitors are visitors who are actually looking for the kind of services or products you are selling on the net and general traffic is nothing but traffic that lands at your page through search engine results without any intention to buy.

How to get highly targeted traffic: There are many ways to achieve a high targeted traffic rate to your site. Some are easier than the others. The first technique of generating traffic to a site is naturally paid advertising through pay per click campaigns and banner advertisements on the net.

The second most popular way is article marketing. However, the fast emerging ‘most popular’ way is podcasting.

How can podcasting increase traffic to your site? People get their videos and radio programs through podcast downloaded from the net. There are over one hundred million iPod owners out there all accessing the net and searching for free stuff for their iPods. If you create great videos and upload them with the proper tags that will make your podcast show up on the searches of YouTube you will be able to attract visitors to your site with cleverly created videos and sound files that can include an ad in between the video or sound file. Let us say that someone looking for free videos on a popular singer will search YouTube for it and if your podcast video has the relevant search tags it will show up in the search results.

Now, all you do is be a bit smart and include something about your online business that will direct the visitor to your site. You should also insert a short line in the video directing the visitor to your site. Do the math 100 million iPod users out there, one percent get a hold of your podcast, that works out to one million downloads and if you get even half a percent of that visiting your site you have 5000 visitors, and that is cutting this mode of marketing a lot slack. So OK, upload 20 podcasts – NOW do the math.