The key to success in making money online is simply traffic. However attracting traffic is not as easy as you may think and in fact only some people are successful in acquiring enough traffic that make good money online whereas the rest of us are failing desperately. Even though there are many ways you can acquire traffic but none of them is given for granted as you have to spend some amount of money, time, and efforts to work on it. The following lists are ways to attract traffic. Search Engines Listing your websites or blogs in the search engine is the most basic and a must way to attract traffic. This is the first gateway how people find your websites/blogs before putting them in their bookmarks. However in order for them to find it, your sites should contains the right keywords they are searching for. Having popular keywords will give your sites the advantage to be found more often as many people are searching for them for example Britney Spears, American Idols, Blogging, etc. You can use free Wordtracker Tools (download guide here), Google Adwords, and Overture to help you identify the most searched keywords on the internet. Although popular keywords may help people find your site easily but it is not enough to hold them stay at least of a while and read all the pages of your sites/blogs. People will not read something which is not informative and unrelated to their interest instead they will go away quickly and never return. So by providing quality, informative, and related interest contents they will stay and may even bookmark it for future reference. So if you want to success in search engines get the right keywords and provide quality contents to solve people's problems. Directories Submitting your sites/blogs to directories will increase the possibility of people finding your website through the directory. In addition by adding your site to popular directories can also increase your sites' page rank because of the directory popularity. Thus this will help to increase visibility of your site on the search engines. There are plenty of directories for blogs and websites on the internet you can search in My Home Page Friend (you get paid to search with them). Forums By placing a link on your forum signatures you are helping your sites/blogs highly visible to the forums communities. This signature will appear automatically in every time you participate in discussion activities. Therefore the more active you participate in the forums the more visible your site/blog links are to the communities. Acquiring new friends in the forums enable you to share with them your sites/blogs can also help increase traffic to your site. Especially friends are very loyal to visit other friend's sites. Social Network Very similar to forums where you can increase publicity of yourself and people know what you are good at and they will come to your site. Making new friends sharing your site with them also increase your site visitors. Popular social network are Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Mylot, Apsense, Yuwie. There are many more you can search them in My Home Page Friend (you get paid to search with them).. Social Bookmarking sites This is the new ways of bookmarking a site instead of using the traditional bookmark on our browser. Social bookmarking sites allow us to share our bookmarks with others or friends within the same bookmarking sites. As a result the sharing process somehow can help your site attract traffic. Among the most popular social bookmarking site include Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Del.Icio.US. More list on Wikipedia here… Link Exchanges Having link exchange to other websites with similar interest can increase your page rank in the search engine. Especially websites that is already having higher page rank, that certainly make yours go higher quickly according to their page rank. Beside it also bring you traffic as people who visited their site might click on your link. So ask for link exchange with others who have similar topic as yours. Here is the list of link exchanges that I used Back link, Link Machine, Ad-Network, Receive Links, Build Reciprocal Links, Link Wizard, etc... Paid Advertising (PPC, CPM) Most professional bloggers actually do not make traffic for granted just by writing anything they like on their blogs. But rather through various ways of paid advertising such as paid per click or banner advertising in Google Adwords, popular websites, popular directories, advertising websites. I recommend joining some forums or social network where traffic are based on friendship loyalty, therefore the likely hood for them to visit your site are more frequent because they feel connected to you.
Unless you are a maestro at viral marketing then over 90% of your traffic will come from Google, all the other search engines are lame in comparison. I agree that good content is important in your point about the search engines, but you can have all the keywords and key phrases in the world and this wont guarantee you a listing on page one of Google. At the end of the day, backlinks and Page Rank should be discussed. To be honest, even good content doesn't seem enough these days, as when you check out rival sites who are charting Google (where most searches will click through), these sites have tens of thousands of backlinks and Juicy PR - obv relevant backlinks will count much more with G. You actually need to match (or beat) these sites in these areas if you wanna replace them and this should really be mentioned. How are web users gonna bookmark you if they can't find you in the first place?
yes, thats very true... Unique content helps a lot but how people would get to know about your fresh contents its all from links and relevant backlinks for your website.
Unique content and useful and search able keywords are the very important part of your traffic plan. Very Good ideas Karlu... thanks for sharing helpful info
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Greate tips, but it's also important to keep in mind the type/quality of the traffic and/or why the visitors are coming.. For example (all from my actual experiences): Front page of Digg will get you a load of immediate traffic, and steady traffic for years after that; but Digg'ers dont click ads! A big Stumbleupon storm can get you thousands of visitors, but like Digg'ers, Stumblers don't click - no $$ Ranking for a popular term may or may not generate income: 10 days or so ago my site was ranking #2 for "mybrute", and #1 several "mybrute" related terms (Mybrute is a viral game that's very popular right now); i was getting thousands of visitors from these keywords per day, but total earnings were only $2 or $3 However, well-targeted traffic of the right type (of people) can do wonders; My site, which is for computer/technology "beginners" was talked about on a popular radio show also for 'beginners' (Leo Laporte).. It drove almost the same amount of visitors that being on the front page of Digg did (around 40,000/day for a day or so) - but this traffic generated hundreds of $$ .. Point is: any traffic is good, but the right traffic can generate better income..
Traffic quality is of utmost importance if you re looking to monetize them. Traffic from social bookmarking sites are similar to traffic from exchange traffic programs and they do not give you good clicks/conversions. It is best to concentrate on search engines and your niche specific areas for getting good revenue generating traffic. Regards, RightMan
Great list. Thanks for the info. It needs discipline too. Even if we have the list and we won't work for it, nothing will happen. Earning money online is not easy. We just have to work harder and post quality content.