Step 5 – Getting Traffic

There are so many ways of getting traffic to your website that a 100 page guide would not be able to list them all! This is probably the question I get asked the most, so I will cover the 3 main ways that I generate traffic and mention a few more.

Free Search Engine Traffic

Search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc) are my preferred traffic source. Why? Because it is free and with the right strategy and a bit of work you can receive tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Search engine optimization (SEO) deals with getting your site ranked on the first page of the search engines – preferably at the top spot! Each search engine uses slightly different ranking criteria, but as Google is the 800 lb gorilla of the search engine world, let’s see how we can rank on them.

There is a lot of incorrect information online about SEO, so forget everything you have been told and remember only this: Google ranks according to on-page factors and off-page factors. That’s it! Nothing complicated about it!

On-page Factors

These change all the time, but I generally do the following: your keyword should appear in your page title, in a H1 header, at the beginning and the end of the page. If you can add it to the alt text of an image of the page, brilliant. Don’t stuff your page with keywords. It does not work and can get your site banned.

Off-page Factors

Links, links and more links. That’s it! Get links to your site from wherever you can. One way links are best (one way links are where you don’t have to link back to the site linking to you). Another important point is to change the anchor text of the link to your keyword (the anchor text are the words forming the link).

Let’s look at an example:If you have a web page about “blue widgets” the anchor text of your link should be blue widgets, not click here. It is unbelievable how many people make this mistake. Don’t be one of them!

Where can you get links to your site? Loads of places. I use Article Marketing Automation and 3WayLinks. They work differently, but compliment each other well. I will do a case study in the future to show exactly how I use them. If I need more links, I will distribute articles, submit RSS feeds, etc.

Pay Per Click
I will be completely honest here. I have dabbled with PPC for 5 years (since reading Google Cash in 2004) but have never really built my websites or business around it. I am NOT a PPC expert, so I would suggest getting Google Cash, PPC Classroom or any of the dozens of PPC products being launched each year.

PPC is good for getting immediate traffic to a product or affiliate offer with very little effort. The problem is that it costs money and if you are not that good at it you can lose your shirt. I have a few times, so I know

Google Adwords is definitely king of PPC marketing, but don’t forget the second tier PPC markets like Yahoo, MSN, etc. Clicks are normally a lot cheaper through them than Adwords and I have had a few campaigns where traffic converted a lot more using MSN than Adwords. However, the amount of traffic from MSN was around 10% of the Google traffic.

My most successful PPC campaign is one I started a couple of weeks ago. Fuelled by the enthusiasm surrounding the launch of Google Cash Detective 2. Through more luck than skill I started a campaign that made me $30 profit per day for only one keyword. It took me all of 10 minutes to set up. With a bit of testing I got that up to $80 per day. The next step is to add more keywords and see what happens

Article Marketing

I am not a big article marketer, but I do incorporate writing and submitting articles into my marketing plan for two reasons: visitors and getting links to my website (remember the SEO section above?). Some people, like people following the Bum Marketing method generates a lot of traffic from articles and it works. 

You write a keyword optimized article, submit it to Ezine Articles and a few more (I submit to around 20) and voila. You have back links to your site and if you did a good job on optimizing the article you can get a lot of search engine traffic to the article, and hopefully to your site if they click on your links.

Which brings us to the two most important parts of article marketing:

Firstly, the title. Get your keyword in there. Also, make the title interesting. Entice people to click on it and read further. If your keyword is “losing weight” don’t use a title like “Losing Weight By Exercising”. Rather use something like “3 Exercises That Will Make Losing Weight Easy”.

Secondly, your resource box is where you can convince the reader to visit your site. Don’t write about you or what you do. Rather mention what benefits they will receive when they visit your site. And try and include your keyword in the anchor text.

Squidoo Lenses, Hubpages and Blogger Blogs

There are a lot of social networking places where you can create a web page (or similar) for free. The above 3 are probably the most widely used. Think of little feeder pages on different social networks feeding traffic to your main site.

I create these pages only after a niche or website has proven that it makes money and I want to increase my visitors. No point going through all the effort if your main site is not profitable, no?