Traffic generation is the 3rd article in this series of setting up a profitable blog or mini site. We want to look at how to drive traffic to your blog or mini site – the element of online marketing that most people get stuck at.
Here we’ll look at some primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind the phrase QUALITY traffic is important – we only want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money – we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.
The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the built in pinging function to notify other websites of your new content – you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.
After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.
1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.
2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.
Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.
3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SEO rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you – or even if not in your niche, sites that could send you relevant visitors.
4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc. can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.
Finally, remember when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.
The 4th and final article in this series of setting up a profitable blog or mini site we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.
Joyce Jacobsen
Are You Making the Most Out of Social Networking Websites? With their recent rise in popularity there is a good chance you belong to several social networking websites. However, it is one thing to be a community member and another to actually participate in online discussions, as well as the many other network features. It is advised you learn how to make the most out of your social networking experience and in some cases it will even be life changing.
Many internet users think they know everything they need to know about their social networking community. Unfortunately, not everyone does. I am discovering something new almost every time I login. In fact, you can find numerous posts online of people ranting or stating they wish their social networking website, such as Yahoo! 360, MySpace, Orkut, FriendWise, or FriendFinder, has a particular service and feature. Too many times, we don’t look before speaking because, as it turns out, many social networking websites have what people want, we just don’t know about it or where to find it.
The first step, in making the most out of your social networking experience, is to familiarize yourself to the online community or communities you belong to. This can easily be done by closely examining the website. There are too many internet users who are just focused on meeting new friends and they get started right away. While it is nice to start meeting new people right away, it is also nice to know what your social networking site has to offer. This can only be done by closely examining the website. Whether you take one hour or one day examining the website, you will likely be pleased you took the time.
When examining the website of the online community you belong to, you should examine the terms of use agreement. This agreement often outlines what you can and cannot do online. Despite the fact a large number of online networking sites, such as MySpace, have little rules, there are other websites that have them. These rules and restrictions may limit the content you can have on your site, as well as your pictures, videos, and other media. Many websites, including social networking websites, will terminate your membership if you are found violating these agreements. By reading all of the rules and restrictions of the social networking website you belong to, you should be able to ensure you can continue to use and enjoy the site.
One of the many benefits to fully examining the social network you belong to is you could be alerted to network benefits, features, or services you were previously unaware of. In addition to having your own profile page and allowing you to invite other internet users into your network, there are a number of other things you can do with online social networking websites. A large number of websites have created features and sections including horoscopes, quizzes, polls, instant massaging, chat rooms, and much more. However, before you make use of these member benefits, you must know they exist.
If you are interested in making new online friends, it is likely you have already joined an online social networking community. Whether you are interested in joining more or you are a first time user, you should carefully choose your networks. By researching each social networking website online, you should easily be able to famialrize yourself with the advantages and disadvantages of each. And, since most social networking websites are free to use, there are no risks associated with giving the network a try. If you happen to come across a website requiring a paid membership and you would like to try it, you are advised to lookout for free membership plans or free trial periods. They may be able to help you determine whether or not the social networking website you are interested in joining is worth the cost.
As you can easily see, there are a number of different ways to go about making the most out of your social networking experience. The control is in your hands. It is your decision as to whether or not you want to spend a small amount of time researching your network and everything it has to offer. However, it is important to note not doing so may literally mean you are missing out on all of the fun.
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