IV. Generating Traffic to Your Website

Driving traffic to your website is the key to monetizing it. If you don’t have any visitors, you won’t be able to capitalize on it.

Generating Traffic Tip #1: Organic SEO

Organic traffic is great for one primary reason – it is FREE! Organic traffic comes from high quality content. As a result of having great content that the search engines feel is relevant to a users search query, they place your site at the head of the results for their users. This can generate a tremendous amount of traffic for the right keywords and may convert very well.

Generating Traffic Tip #2: Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is great because you can identify your costs and you can scale it indefinitely. Do not pay for a company to send your website traffic however. That is not the type of traffic I am referring to. I am referring to traffic from search engines where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is called cost per click advertising and allows you to reach highly targeted prospective customers. However, you do not want to pay for traffic if you are relying on content ads to generate revenue for you. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to pay for traffic cheaply enough to be able to make enough money by people clicking on content ads (and do not try it yourself or you will quickly be black listed).

Generating Traffic Tip #3: Forums

Forums are a great way to interact with highly targeted prospective customers. The key is to find highly trafficked forum and consistently add value to conversations in those forums. Do not go in ‘blasting’ product or service offers. That will only alienate potential customers and it is a practice that is highly frowned upon in the forum world.

Generating Traffic Tip #4:Press Releases

Press releases can be a good way to reach customers that do not necessarily spend a lot of time on the internet but do read the news online. I would only recommend this strategy for unique membership sites (free or paid), products, or services. If you can tap into the right time period, you can generate a lot of free publicity. This is an ideal thing to do when you first launch your website as people love reading about things that are new.

Generating Traffic Tip #5: Video Distribution

Video distribution is the process of posting unique, keyword rich videos on sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, and others. Posting videos on these sites creates back links to your website and can generate traffic from the individuals that watch them. Keep in mind that you want to keep it entertaining and valuable. Don’t spend time trying to pitch your product. A perfect example of a company that did a great job with this is Blend Tech. They launched a series of videos for their blender called, “Will it Blend” in which they proceeded to blend everything from iphones to crow bars. The advertising generated a tremendous amount of free publicity for them.

Generating Traffic Tip #6:Article Distribution

Distributing articles is a fantastic way to reach users who are looking for what you have to offer. Articles should be well written and only submitted to one site each to avoid being flagged for duplicate content. You want the article to focus on an issue that your product or service solves (or tutorial) and simply list your information and website at the bottom of the article (often times referred to as a ‘boilerplate’).