There are as many ways to make money online as there are ideas. Now, not all of these ideas will work, but all of the ideas revolve around getting traffic to your website. Nothing happens until you get someone to visit your site. There are a lot of ways to monetize your traffic once you get it, but you have to get the traffic first. This should be the focus of any internet marketing plan you undertake.
Buying traffic may be the quickest way to get started, but is not necessarily the most cost effective. Depending on the market you’re going after, you may find that the market supply and demand evens out to where if you’re just getting started, purchasing traffic is a losing battle initially. Those that succeed with pay per click or traffic purchasing are usually those that have enough budget to stick with it to find out what works and what doesn’t work.
Search engine optimization can be one of the largest sources of traffic, but can be very difficult and time consuming to get your site ranked. I’m not discouraging this at all, in fact, it’s one of the methods that I use most frequently. However, the concept that I’d encourage you to pursue is that of targeting keyword phrases that have little competition and build up your site based on these types of phrases. If you’re able to do this, you’ll have the chance to build up trust with the search engines. Once the search engines consider your site an “authority” site, it becomes much easier to rank for keyword phrases that you’d normally never be able to get. This is a time consuming process and requires patience, but establishing a site like this will surely bring you solid traffic over time.
There are options of getting traffic through social media outlets. There are any number of “conversations” going on in the niche you’re choosing to pursue assuming it isn’t too obscure. This type of traffic does require you to inject yourself into these conversations and contribute value. There are probably a lot of “tricks” that you could employ that would shortcut you to additional traffic, however, these are short term only and won’t create an ongoing relationship with customers, especially those that may have been tricked into visiting your site.
If you’re familiar with pay per click, especially using something like Google, you are aware of their content network. This is an option that allows you to put your advertisement on hundreds if not thousands of different websites. This method of purchasing through both Adwords as well as a number of other agencies. It’s about purchasing advertising space from sites that get millions of visitors. This traffic gets to you at a click thru rate of about .03 to 3% depending on your ad and the nature of the site visitor.
Video and audio using existing video sites and other podcast type sites can be a great way to get additional traffic back to your site. There is still work involved in getting views and downloads of your audio, but a strong call to action and offering additional value on your website. Of course, there are also options to share revenue as a partner with some of these video sites. The traffic itself can be leveraged through the fact that there is already a high level of trust with these video sites and there are also instances where the search engines want to include more than just website listings and would like to also include rich media. Think of online videos as a shortcut to getting rankings and traffic.
Getting traffic is really what takes any idea from zero revenue to a profitable business. Without traffic, you don’t have the ability to sell. Of course it takes customers to buy. Traffic also allows you to test offers to see what the best options are for monetizing your website. Too many people go after the perfect site first and think about traffic only as an after-thought. Don’t make this mistake.
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