This morning I read an excellent post from Darren Rowse of problogger.net. It’s a video post and I recommend you check it out, good points. Darren gives some good solid guidelines that are pretty standard (or should be) when it comes to making money online. Particularly on what would be right for you, how to approach it.
One area I wanted to focus on is, once you’ve got your business or product online, the real key to making money is…
Traffic
(I know, I know, Duh! Gee, thanks Ted for that secret only known by web gurus and mystics!) Okay, no major mystery solved there, but do you get enough traffic to your website to make a sufficient amount of money from it? If you’re like most of us, you could always use more traffic. In fact, make that your mantra for this week: “More Traffic, More Traffic, More Traffic…”
How Do I Get More Traffic!?
Aw, the eternal question of the topic that flies in the face of the popular sentiment from the movie, Field of Dreams, “If build it, they will come.” Nope.
Each of these following sections could be (and should be) a course in itself, but I just want to give you a basic overview for you to followup with on your own.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine results pages can be a huge source of traffic if your site is optimized well. This can be a long and drawn out process. If you’re doing it right it won’t happen over night. SEO is making sure your site’s code is done well; your content is written well with well placed keywords; title tags provide strong keyword reference; image alt tags contain good, relevant keywords; and so on…
SEO doesn’t just happen on the pages of your website. It comes from link building campaigns, press release writing and more. For my clients who are looking to have productive SEO done professionally for their site, I recommend Advisemedia Group.
Social Media
By building up your presence on connections on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and others, you can start to direct traffic back to your site. Again this can take a little time and a lot of effort. The best part of using social media is that there generally is no financial costs. However there will be significant time costs, and we know how valuable time is. Generally, the amount of time you put in on each of these sites will determine how effective they will be in driving traffic to your site. By studying my site’s activity using Google Analytics I can see that I get almost half of my traffic from Twitter and Facebook alone. These are the two social network sites that I put the most time in on. Sometimes I’ll spend more time in the LinkedIn groups asking and answering questions. When I do that I see an increase in my traffic from LinkedIn. The time you spend counts.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
Google AdWords is a fantastic way to jump start your sites traffic. For the first couple years Image Perceptions was in business I relied on Google Adwords for probably about 80-90% of my business. AdWords was obviously very important to how well my site (and my business) did. Since then I’ve been able to discontinue that campaign and rely on mostly referrals, organic search results and social media activity to deliver new projects.
Standard, Traditional Branding
Make sure your web address is on everything you print or send out in email! I doubt most people would overlook this but it’s another important piece of the pie, so don’t forget it.
Okay, that should get you started with some direction on what to either study yourself, or hire someone else to take on these tasks for you or your business.
How About You?
What are other methods you use to drive traffic to your site? Are there any particular ways you’ve used some of the means mentioned above that worked well for you?
