Traffic is King!
That's what Margie and I learned very early on, without it you might
as well be the owner a brick and mortar 7-11 convenience store out
in the middle of the desert without a road in site. No visitors
(customers) to your site or blog means no business in which case
your web site is really just a big pretty business card for you to
be proud of and for your friends and your family to gawk at.... it's
that simple, no traffic, no business, no money. Uhhhh, you might as
well go send a tweet that you're broke again, go update your face
book page, and then go watch TV. Wait, don't do it... There is a
solution to changing your no traffic piece of web site art into a
traffic rich web site business that's earning you money day in and
day out - you just need to know what we did, what works and how you
can do it too.
There
are many ways to generate free traffic and visitors to your web site
or blog. Some of the methods we're going to tell you creates "highly
targeted" visitors (i.e. you sell affiliate books and they are
people looking for affiliate information), some are "general
traffic" methods which means they weren't initially looking for your
information but not that they're at your site they're interested
enough to poke around to see what you have.
And then there's what I call junk traffic, this traffic just
happened upon your site while they were doing something else such as
searching for information, or reading information somewhere else and
clicked out of curiosity. These visitors will most likely pop in
then pop out although they might "save" your site to their desktop
or their favorites folder and maybe come back on another day.
There's is no magic
button and you won't be able to click your heels three times and see
the traffic magically appear. The reality is that in order to get
free traffic you'll at least need to give up a little bit of your
time in order to get it. The good part is at least you won't be
paying for it (with money) so that's a big plus.
If you already have a site
or blog and you know you're not
getting the traffic that you should then its
time to get busy. In these very competitive
times you need to be a step ahead of your competition,
yep, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting
yesterday. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting
point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been
yesterday.
To assist you out in generating free visitors to your
site, here are our recommendations:
1.Invest in good content within your site or blog which will then
(with some tweaking on your part) bring in free "targeted" traffic
from the search engines
Many of the search engines to include the biggie Google will scour
your pages (generally called crawling or spidering via a "robot") to see what content you have so that when a person does a
search... if what you have matches what they're looking for then
your listing will be available on the search results page for them to click on and visit your
site. Yep, this sounds simple enough however it's much more
complicated then that and it's not quite that easy. The page that
you're listed on within the search results makes the biggest
difference in the overall amount of free traffic you'll receive.
Getting listed on the first page of
Google and you're assured a consistent stream of free traffic,
listed on the 437th page and you are not assured of anything. So how
do you get on the first page or as a minimum on one of the first
three pages, it takes time and effort however it'll be well worth it
when you do.
If you want the
"full meal deal" on how Google can directly help you as a webmaster
we highly recommend you visit their
Webmaster Central section where you can learn more in one hour
then you ever thought possible. We recommend you actually spend many
hours there whenever possible, remember it's the knowledge and
education you gain today that will ensure you have enough free
traffic inbound to your site that your affiliate marketing efforts
will be very well rewarded.
Hey, but don't forget to
come back here, we have much more to cover!
If you don't have time to check out the Google webmaster area above
(it is huge with information),
you can skip to the "meat and potatoes" through the hot webmaster
inks there on the right. These five areas will cover many of the
more important aspects of Google and you'll learn a bunch from each
area.
Each will open in a new
window so you don't actually leave our site (hey it's the smart
thing to do, remember to do the same on your site or blog whenever
possible!). We know it's customary to say "a new window for your
convenience" however we know you're much smarter then that.
Because the Google search
engine's primary goal is to get the person searching for information
the most "relevant" information they can... Google wants YOU to be
listed in their search engine, it's not a special club, they want
you.
If you'd prefer not to visit the Google webmaster section via the
links above but would rather get a better feel for the Google Webbmaster training via their series of video's, then click below. Note: There are a total of 9 videos's which run back to back, so watch the ones you'd like, or skip forward - enjoy.
Exchanging links with
the webmasters of other sites will benefit
you and the webmaster that you trade links with
since you'll both be moving traffic between your
sites, this is traffic that could have otherwise
clicked away from either of your sites into the
depths of the Internet. You
can trade links one on one by contacting the
webmaster of a similar content site to ask if he or she
would like to exchange links. Once
it's agreed upon you place a link to the other site
and then they link back to you, traffic sharing
at its finest, and if you'd like to
trade links with us we'd be happy to - it
would be good for both of us!
There's been much discussion on "one
way links" which is a way to increase your
page rank in Google. In this case you're not trading
links with another webmaster, you're having your
link placed on a web site without a
reciprocal link back to them on your site. This can be
worked out in different ways... A webmaster finds
your site of interest to his visitors and places
a link to it, you write an article and the link
in the article points to your site, or you make
a post to some of the thousands of blogs out
there. There are
many other ways to get your link out there such as through social
networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and
others.
As
you continue to trade links with other web sites
your traffic will gradually increase especially
if you sprinkle in some one way links along the
way. As your site gains popularity and increased
visitors you can also be assured that webmasters
will begin to email you requesting link trades.
So... one way links are more valuable to
you then reciprocal links, however even
reciprocal links with other web sites are better then no links at
all.
3. Tap into the Power of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and
product without any costs or if ever anything very low costs only. This is a
marketing method that can be quite sneaky sometimes but it does work
well. You can include your web site URL on a funny
video (uh-hem, YouTube), to an entertaining flash game, at the
bottom of an interesting article or a gossip or
buzz, or even an interesting quote, or even a unique, beautiful or
funny picture. For the most part people want to
share the love and pass these things on to their
friends, family members and even people at work.
Something else that's also good to do is to
create a page on your web site that has
something unique like what I received in the
mail months ago. It's called
Bubble Girl (rated a low R) - notice that
there's an "Email this to a friend" button below
the flash animation... smart, combined with an
advertiser banner at the top and at the bottom
of the page, this is the kind of viral marketing
ideas you need to come up with too.
Before I forget... as far as that "email to a
friend button" we just talked about, it's
actually an old school viral marketing method
(the only option being the sending out of an
email) however in this case as long as it's
spreading the word and creating free traffic
that's perfectly fine.
With the popularity explosion of social
networking sites there have been many other ways to go viral.
Something we've started to use over the last couple of years
are third party "widgets". This is where the majority of the
working code is hosted on the widget companies server yet you
receive the benefit of using the widget on your web site.
An example is the "Lokerz Share" widget
which we use on our home page [preview].
This nice little widget makes it very easy for
your visitors to save your web site URL
to their favorites, email it to a friend, or
add/save it to their favorite social network.
It's also fully customizable so you can easily
match it up nicely to your sites theme and
colors.
The best part is that Lokerz Share is 100% free, in
fact it's so free that you don't even have to
create an account, or login, or even (drum roll
please) hand over your email address. You can
get the free Lokerz Share here.
Another free
widget is the green box on the right. It's from an online
marketing company called "Pay Dot Com". They serve as the
go-between similar to an affiliate management company. Most of their advertisers sell items that are
zero inventory
products and easy to get to the customer such as software,
training courses and e-books. Pay Dot Com also provides the
required marketing tools so you can better sell the products
and services through your web site. It's also free to join,
and we're also an affiliate with them. You can
get the free Pay Dot Com widget code here.
You can choose
your product category (we chose marketing for this one), and
each can be customized to fit the colors of your web site.
Your commissions are up to 80% of the selling price. Yea, this
is sounding like a sell so we're going to let this rest and
move on...
4. Offer your visitors a newsletter
Offering your visitors a monthly newsletter is
one of the best ways to keep your visitors
coming back to your site as you entertain them
with your newsletter. I mention a "monthly"
newsletter,
however you can send it out to your
subscribers once every two weeks as
long as you realize that some people will not
want a newsletter that often. Nothing against
you, it's just that some people already have
subscriptions to other newsletters and can only
read so many in one sitting, or... they receive so
much other mail (and spam) that a newsletter
that shows up too often might feel more like
"spam" to them.
So
what the heck do you talk about in your
newsletter? What your targeted audience wants to
hear about, subjects similar to what your site
content is about, that's what. I used a pet site
as an example in the article writing section, so
lets stick with that type of a site for our
example here. Your "pet" newsletter in this
caters to a large diverse pet audience, so your
newsletter will need to appeal to most of the
types of pets that they have.
You'll know that the majority are dog and cat
owners because you
did your research so you'd want to talked
about both dogs "and" cats in each issue, maybe
include reptiles, birds etc,. once in a while along with
your standard dog and cat information.
You'll want to include other tidbits of
information that your audience wouldn't likely
read about unless they searched for it such as a
funny pet story, funny pet picture, pet facts and figures,
hints about pet care, pet psychology
information, your new pet picture contest, your
free pet e-book, favorite pet site links, this
months pet "best deal" (possibly an affiliate
link of yours), and any updates to your web
site, new article posted to your site etc.
Whatever you do just make it's interesting, make
it the kind of newsletter that YOU would like to
receive as a pet owner.
We
recommend you include a short statement on the
bottom of your newsletter and ask your
subscribers what you can do to improve the
newsletter for them, what do they want to know
more about, what they like or dislike about the
newsletter. You'd be surprised at how many
people will email you and tell YOU exactly how
you can make your newsletter even better for
them. Maybe the top header graphic you're using
in your newsletter is too large and it messes up
the experience for someone that accesses your
newsletter from their cell phone, possibly your
free pet care e-book is far too heavy on cat
information (because you're a cat lover?) and
needs more information on dogs, or who knows
your newsletter could be too short, or even too
long. The point here is to ask your subscribers
what they really want... and then by golly give
it to them!
),
you can skip to the "meat and potatoes" through the hot webmaster
inks there on the right. These five areas will cover many of the
more important aspects of Google and you'll learn a bunch from each
area.
