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One of the real challenges in this business is how to get traffic to your site without the help of Google. I know that it's everyone's goal to get a good spot on Google for a variety of search terms but the number of sites that can actually fill spots one to ten on any Google results page is limited. There are always going to be 10 happy webmasters and, potentially, millions of very unhappy webmasters.

So what do you do if you're one of those millions of unhappy webmasters? Actually if you're site is appearing in any of one of the spots between four and ten you're not really going to be all that happy and you will want to know how to get traffic to your site too. Even if you make it to the first page of a Google results page you're not going to pick up much traffic unless you're in one of the top three spots. After position three the flow of traffic drops off incredibly.

So what can you do? Well a couple of big mainstream companies have used a novel approach at various times in the last year or so and there might be some lessons there for us to consider.

Between December 23, 2006 and around January 19 2007 Kellogs have been running a televison ad for Special K. At the end of the ad viewers were hit with a voice-over that urged them to go to Yahoo! and search for 'special k'. While the voice-over was running a screenshot of the Yahoo search box was displayed with the search term already entered into the search field.

Now you might think that few people who are watching television are going to bother listening to the ad and go to a search engine, any search engine, and follow those instructions and search on the Net for the term that was suggested. But guess what? They did!

Between December 23 and December 30 the search engine traffic to the Special K site soared dramatically. There was a slight dip between the end of December and January 6 and then it has continued to rise.

And there is something else interesting here too. You might think that most people would have just searched for the term on their favorite search engine and not bothered about the call to action to use Yahoo! but they didn't. Over half of the traffic that hit the Website came from Yahoo!

Not only did people listen to that voice but they also obeyed it completely. They didn't stop to think about using Google or any other search engine that they might have been comfortable with ... they used the one that they were told to use.

There certainly are some interesting marketing lessons to be learned in that example and they're lessons that can I'm sure we can apply here in adult just as easily as they might apply over in mainstream.

But there can be some hidden dangers in this type of advertising that may not be obvious until it's too late. Back in January last year Pontiac ran some television advertising that included a voice over urging people to type the word 'Pontiac' into Google to find out more about Pontiac's new models.

They even included a screenshot of the Google search box with the search term entered into the search field. Just as Kellogs would see 12 months later Pontiac saw a big surge in search traffic to their site. 69% of search traffic for the 'pontiac' term arrived at the Pontiac website.

But the site that was number two on the traffic list happened to be owned by Mazda who were suggesting on the site that before anyone bought a Pontiac they should drive the Mazda Miata because it was so much better than the Pontiac.

Oops!

Fortunately for Pontiac the big numbers all went to the Pontiac site but I'm sure that there are some Mazda Miata owners out there who have the Pontiac ad to thank for their purchase.

So there we see a different way of getting traffic to a website although this one was still closely tied into just where the advertisers ranked for those particular search terms. Would it still be possible to get the same result by simply mentioning an easily remembered URL and urging people to go to myurl.com?

There is also the question of whether or not Pontiac and Kellogs would have had the same result if their call to action had been much more passive? What if there had been no voice-over and the URL had been displayed on the screen instead; would there still have been such a surge in traffic?

Lots of businesses use a passive way of attracting traffic every day simply by displaying their URL on their vehicles, stationary and business cards but is that really effective? Is there some other way we could make it more aggressive?

And the other thing to think about is whether all those people who obeyed the call to action did so at some time after they saw the ads on television or are we seeing a huge slice of television viewing audiences watching television at the same time as they're surfing the Net?

So is there anything here that can be adapted to adult marketing?

Now that really is something to think about because whoever comes up with a way of getting their message across like Pontiac and Kellogs did will definitely see more traffic. And if you know what you're doing when it comes to marketing then more traffic will always equal more sales.