Traffic building is the process of directing visitors to your website to generate traffic
As I have said earlier, your website must be visible to the world before you can expect to build your list or sell your product.
Whether you build your site for fun or for business, it remains visible to you alone until you make some effort to show the world what your site is made of.
The best way to highlight your website is to expose your site through search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads, writing and submitting articles to directories participation in blogging or contributing your skills and expertise to major forums in your niche area.
You can also arrange with your JVs and affiliates to sell your product for a commission.
3 Distinct Ways To Generate Traffic To Your Website
Buy Traffic. Borrow Traffic. Build Traffic.
Way #1 – Buy Traffic
You can buy traffic through paid advertisements like Pay-Per-Click, Ezines and paid directories. Buying traffic is known to be the fastest way to generate traffic but will cost you tons of money.
You can get burnt; or even waste money if you do not know how to really go about it or if you have not mastered how it works.
As you can see, this way is what we want to avoid in this e-book and that is why you want a way around it.
Way #2 – Borrow Traffic
You can Borrow traffic through Joint Ventures (JV) and affiliates programs. While this type of traffic may not cost you out of pocket cash, it will still cost you because your JV partners and/or affiliates are not driving traffic to your site for free. They are also doing it for their own selfish ends ‘what’s in it for me.’
The best way to look at this is that they are giving you sales and traffic that you will not have had on your own anyway – if you look at it this way, parting with 50% or more of the commission will not be important to you.
Your JVs get paid through reciprocal links and/or a commission for giving you the traffic, and your affiliate partners want hefty commission to justify their time and effort.
If you are a newbie, the drawback to this is the fact that you do not have a product of your own that you can ask your JVs and/or affiliates to participate in.
So even if you do not mind using this type of method of traffic generation to generate traffic to your site, it would be impossible.
Do not worry if you are a newbie – it will only be a matter of time before you have a product of your own and make use of JVs and affiliates to direct traffic to your site.
We all must start from somewhere and the best way to learn is to first be an affiliate, learn the process and then build your product.
Even after you build your products, you will still help others to sell their products in one way or the other. So being an affiliate is not a terrible thing, it is part of the way you market online.
Way #3 – Build traffic.
You can build traffic through writing articles, writing reviews, participating in Social Media sites, creating blogs and forums and much more, which we will cover in this book. We will reveal many ways that you can use to get targeted traffic to your website without emptying your bank account running ads.
To help jump-start your writing career, I have a Netwriting Master Course free e-book for you to read.
Building traffic is the way we want to go!
And if your products of your own, you borrow and build traffic.
The good thing is…
Building traffic is perfect for a newbie who is operating on a tiny budget, as well as gurus who would like to cut their advertisement budget.
In either case, having targeted traffic to your site is the best thing that can happen to your business.
The secrets we expose in the ‘How-To Get Organic Traffic’ e-Book could give you the traffic you need to build your targeted list.
For this method to work for you, you will need to use your time and energy to implement the processes and techniques revealed in this e-book so that you can get your desired end result, which is to drive targeted traffic to your website, build your list and increase your sales.
I want you to look at this as an investment, and it gets even better – you only need to set up your account once, draft your article once and submit it repeatedly. Of course, you may want to update your article from time to time and tweak it around a little bit here and there, but the point is, once you master a particular process, the bulk of the job is done; all you do is to repeat the same process over and over again to get the same result or even better.
When you put your plan into motion and get somethings done, you will get the following:
More Traffic. More Robust List. More Profit.
What Does Quality Content Have To Do With Traffic Building?
Everything! Quality content is everything to traffic building and the continuity of your online business. It is the quality of your content that makes your visitors come back again and again and again on a daily basis for more fresh articles and updates.
Search engine love sites with great content that are relevant to what their visitors are searching for. The more relevant your content, the better ranking you get on the search engine and the better ranking means more visibility, so the more visitors you get.
You might be wondering… if quality content is this important, so what exactly is ‘content’ and what makes content to be good or of higher quality?
Great content means different things to different people. The way I see it, quality content can only be relevant to the product you are presenting and what it means to the person reading it.
If your visitor is gaining from your content, then it has some quality built into it and you can rest assured that your visitor will come back for more or respond to your call to action.
Tips on what makes quality content.
- Make sure your content identifies your product or service’s major points.
- Focus on one product or service and pinpoint the solution(s) it provides.
- Identify the most frequent questions that your visitors are likely to have including their fears and concerns.
- The easiest way to identify with your visitor is to put yourself into your visitor’s shoes and think about what objections or requirements you would have if someone were presenting your product to you.
- Organize your content into primary information categories and then break each category into smaller sub-categories to make it easy to digest – put these sub-categories into bullet points.
Having great content is not enough – it must be structured and positioned in a way that the search engine can find it. This process is called web site optimization for search engines (search engine optimization – SEO).
There is no standard process, procedure, or method for producing great content, but there are some factors that will make it to be relevant to your visitors and makes them come back for more.
Quality Content Factors you should consider.
- How helpful is your article to the reader?
- Is the content relevant to your ad or what the reader is looking for?
- Is your content original – are you the first to post the topic or is your topic an old issue all over the net?
- Is your article easy to read and digest – do you make use of white space, paragraphs, and sub-paragraphs?
- Do you take the time to check your punctuation and grammatical errors?
- Does your article show any emotional factor – something to connect you with the reader?
3 Ways To Add Content To Your Sites
- Contents created by your visitors.
- Contents created by You, Your Ghost Writer, or Private Label Rights (PLR).
- Content created through Testimonials.
Contents can be created by your visitors.
You can add content from other people to your sites automatically when you create a forum posts with a topic that people are interested in contributing their opinion about.
Content can be created through blog comments. Your visitors can post comments in response to your article, and you can attract their attention by placing a sign that says, ‘click here to have someone talk to you.’
To make sure that your blogs are being responded to by human and not a robotic machine, you need to request image verification and make sure you have the ability to filter comments to maintain quality content on your site.
You can have a product review site set-up that will allow people to review various articles and contribute their genuine opinion.
You can ask Public Opinions on controversial issues that cut across most people and that will be interesting enough for people to want to contribute their opinion. An example would be ‘How to raise your child: spank or not.’
You can have a Content Contribution on any type of specialized topic. An example would be a favorite diet plan or recipes.
Contents created by you, your ghost writer, or Private Label Rights (PLR)
You can create content yourself or you can pay someone to create content for you. Elance.com or Guru.com is a great place to find professionals that will help to create your content.
You can legally borrow contents through resale rights and/or expert resale rights and private label rights (PLR). One of the best packages of e-book collections and resale rights packages that I’ve bought is Best Deal Ever by Mike Filsaime. It allows me to have a free resale rights article on my resource website.
The only caveat with resale rights is that whatever you do to the content must not violate any specific conditions or restrictions given by the original owner. An example would be where the owner specifies that you can use the content yourself but cannot give it away for free.
One of the best ways to use borrowed content is to use it as a research tool to gain insight into your subject matter and then use it as a base to produce your own content.
Whichever method you use to get your content, besides writing it yourself, you do not want to just copy and paste because you do not know how many people have the same information. You want to be unique and produce your own articles – this is what will make you unique and stand out from the crowd.
The problem with posting articles is the fact that it is hard to keep up with daily content or updates because you are busy building other areas of your business. This is one of the reasons why people buy private label rights (PLR) articles or hire ghost writers to write their articles and they make some changes to it so that the article can have their own voice in it.
Shhhh… I hope you can keep a secret…
I hired a ghost writer to do some research for me while I was putting this e-book together. I later picked up some of his points and developed them.
If you decide to keep my secret, I will teach you how to use ghost writer to get more content in your e-book or article – I will send this to your e-mail box.
Content created through testimonial.
The Testimonial Method is another great way to create content for your website. You can ask people to share their success story. This will work well if you have a product that people have used, and they are willing to let you know how it has helped them.
On the other hand, if you don’t have a product yet, you can create a content-based website or e-book and ask people for their opinion on it.
There has to be something to talk about, especially a product or service that people have actually benefited from.
An example of something you’ve benefited from would give feedback after reading this e-book and apply some or all of the suggestions into your business and you are able to double or triple your targeted traffic and increase your conversion rate.
I am sure you will be willing to give us a testimonial about how the e-book has helped your business to grow – that is the point of getting a unique testimonial from an actual user.
How to use testimonial method
For you to be able to meet your desired testimonial response rate, you will need to promise something of value in exchange for information (this is called an ‘ethical bribe’).
Depending on what you intend to get out of your visitors, testimonial methods vary. It can be complicated by using various testimonial tool methods that can help you to put all the variations and statistics together; you can also use a simple form with 2 fields with a free format comment or you can use ordinary e-mail to ask your visitors or customers to give you a response to your product or service.
An example could be – after a webinar, you could set-up a follow-up e-mail or a simple form to know how people feel about the presentation and use the response to encourage other people to listen to the next webinar or buy the product you are using the webinar to promote.
If you want to set up a poll, the form you will use to gather testimonials needs to have specific questions with drop down selectable answers and a comment box that will allow more information. This is important, because it will take the guesswork out of the question and your visitors will not have to read your mind about what you want them to do. The drop down will let them know what you want.
If you make your questionnaire complicated, users will be confused. Instead of trying to read your mind, they will just ignore your request altogether.
The most important thing about this type of testimonial is that it will allow you to follow-up on the product and or improve your future product, plus give you an idea about what people are actually looking for – You can use it for your future product development ideas.
Some hosting companies have the survey forms as part of their package for you to use free of charge, but if your hosting company doesn’t provide this service, one of the best and cheapest software out there is One Minute Poll. You can also search on Google for more survey software and services you can use.
Now That I Know What Quality Content Is – What’s Next?
After you have created your great content, you are halfway to your goal of attracting huge, natural traffic to your site.
While it is true that ‘Content is King’ and if you don’t have quality content, all your efforts to draw the crowds to your site will be in vain, very often having great content only is not enough to have a lot of organic traffic…
To some extent the situation in online marketing is similar to that in offline marketing – having a great product is a prerequisite for success, but success comes only after you actively start promoting your product.
However, the good news about internet marketing is that unlike offline marketing, you can achieve high volumes of natural traffic without spending a dime on advertising or any other types of paid promotion.
Of course, if you want to launch a paid ad campaign, you can always resort to PPC, such as Google Adsense, or other types of online advertising, but since there are so many ways to build traffic naturally, you can safely bypass paid alternatives.
The tools you can use for organic traffic building are many and diverse. Most of these tools are universal (i.e., Search Engine Optimization) and you can apply them to any kind of site from any niche.
Some of these tools produce their best results for particular types of sites only. For instance, submission to ezines is best if your blog is text-based but even if you have an image gallery or a video blog, submitting articles to article directories is still to be considered because even if you don’t get many visitors from the article directory, you are getting a backlink, which is also good.
So, even for a video blog, article directories still work, and you shouldn’t skip them because they are one more way to bypass PPC and paid advertising and still bring natural traffic to your site.
When you look at the list of organic traffic building tools, you might feel that it will take you ages to apply them all.
The truth is – you don’t have to apply them all. What you need to do is try them and see what works for you. There are no universal recipes and unless you try it personally, you will not be able to know in advance which techniques are best for you.
If you see that some of the organic traffic building strategies do not produce the desired results, there are two possibilities – either this particular traffic building strategy is not working for you, or you are not applying it properly.
In the first case you’d better switch to a different strategy, while in the second the only recommendation we can make is to try to discover your mistakes and fix them.
Turn Words Into Traffic
Another way of building traffic is article marketing.
Remember all the great talk about content, quality content and the fact that content is king!
The reason why I take you through that route is because they are the prerequisite skills you’ll need to write your great article – they are your must-have skills for this topic.
So, you ask why I should care about article marketing…
The reason to care about article marketing is because of the benefits you and your business would gain from it. Some of the benefits of great articles and contents are credibility, trust, and multiple referral sources to your website.
The biggest reason why an article works is because it gives you credibility and builds trust, because your visitors can see you as someone who is capable of providing value through valuable information – and it presents you as the expert in your field.
Quality content gives your visitors what they need to know at that particular moment and make them know you as a go-to person.
You can use article to build your list when you offer mini courses or reports that you can use as bait to get people to sign on to your newsletter.
Great articles help you to build real estate around the internet as people link to your websites to provide their own visitors with qualified content from your site. This type of referral can come from article linking sites, directories, and others linking to you in their newsletter.
Each place you post your article is going to send you some visitors at a different rate. The thing is, you never know which publication is going to give you the biggest traffic until you’ve tried it out and tracked your result.
Articles are a great way of diversifying your source of traffic. For example, if you have your article posted in 5 different directories and one of them decided to pack up or died, you still have 4 different directories referring traffic to your site.
Now imagine if all you have is only one source of traffic supply and that one decides to pack up or die. The chance of your website traffic dying with it is very high. This is why article publication is a better choice for your business.
As you know, if your source of traffic is through paid advertisement, once your money runs out, your ad stops running – this is not good enough for your business.
The best thing is that good articles seem to stay on the internet for a long time and the search engine will continue to direct non-stop free marketing traffic to your site daily. As a result, you’ll get more passive income provided you include necessary monetization options like Google AdSense ads.
How To Write And Submit Articles And Press Releases
Now, I will show you how to write your article, and give you some free directories you can submit it to. I will also give you a couple of paid directories you can pay to submit your articles.
You see, I don’t want to be a hypocrite; the reason why I think you should know about the paid directory is because I submit my articles to both free and paid article submission.
The decision to use just the free or both is up to you.
One quick note before we start with the step-by-step…
If you submit your articles to multiple FREE submission services, you get almost the same result as submitting to paid services.
Article Creation Step #1 – Your mindset
An article is always better if you put it in the form of a review, telling a story about what you get out of a particular product or services you’ve used.
You can think about it as if you’re trying to give a testimonial.
One major point about an article is concentration and focus. What I mean by concentration is that your article has to be about one particular product or service.
The reason why you want to write your article to be about a particular product is because you don’t want to put your reader in a situation where they have to make a decision about which one is most important to them– the problem with this is, your reader will not do anything.
Believe me; I hate choices as well.
If you want to get your reader’s attention and make them keep reading your article, you must make your article as believable as possible and always leave your readers wanting more of your information so that they can click your call to action.
Article Creation Step #2 – Write your article correctly.
Write basic articles and press release based on step #1’s mindset. Include the following in your article:
Explain the power of the product and how it has been beneficial to you.
Also include why you think the product would be a great product that every business can benefit from it.
Social proof is a big deal in convincing your reader about the product. If you have a print screen of the PayPal or ClickBank commission you’ve received as a result of the product, you can include it in your article. Any other proven statistics from respected sources like Business News can be included as well.
Whatever you do, don’t write more than a page and a half or more than 800 words – your readers will lose concentration if your article is too long.
Keep your lines short and your paragraphs to no more than four sentences. Make use of white space for easy readability – have in mind that people skim in most cases and short paragraphs will force them to read your lines even when they intend to just skim.
To make your article more believable, you should include one thing that you don’t like about the product. An example would be that the product does not include free software, or it is a bit pricy but worth the price – something that can pre-warn the reader about the product or service and yet does not have a damaging effect.
Include your call to action. Example – Click Here To Learn More…
Last but not the least – include your name and URL. This will help to brand your name and product.
Article Creation Step #3 – Submit Your article.
Submit your article-to-article directories to ensure that you get your information seen in a natural search.
Find 3 to 5 submission services to submit your articles to. Here are some examples:
- GoArticles.com
- ArticleCity.com
- PRWeb.com
- 24-7PressRelease.com
- I-Newswire.com
- trafficonomy.com/
Another great way to find specific articles and press release submission services is to do a search for ‘free article submission’ or ‘free press releases’ on Google.
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