Traffic is the key - but where's the lock?

So you've got your website all set up. You've optimized it for those few nice paying keyword phrases and you're even showing up in the top ten on MSN already. Google has indexed your site, and SERPS looks good across the big three. You've got your AdSense ads running, they're targeting great, and you've got them blended nicely. You read DP daily, actively soaking up all the secrets, tips and tricks that this wonderful forum has to offer.

But... you're barely getting any revenue off that site. You look at the stats, and there's a trickle of traffic.

I've learned that there are two big things you must have for your page to produce a nice AdSense profit are

1. Content is king, as hundreds of threads here say. Content is pretty easy to come up with, article directories, writing your own, or paying someone to write something. It's basically a no-brainer.

2. Traffic - Without it, you've got a fancy site that's doing nothing but sitting there, being fancy.

After nearly six months on DP, I've yet to come across the traffic secret. What is it that gives that great traffic boost to n00bs? Obviously I missed that thread.

Sure, I can write an article, submit it and get backlinks in short time. I can even add my site to hundreds of web directories. I could purchase some PR6 and PR7 backlinks. I could even try out linkmarket.net.

And I have, all of them. But they just don't come.

So its time to fess up, DPers. What's that big traffic secret that I've missed? Traffic Equaliser? I don't think so. There's something I'm missing, and believe me I've searched for it.

 

What you have mentioned are Link building techniques not traffic building .
When you try to buy PR links , try to get links from PR sites with good traffic stats . Instead of having a bunch of your keywords in anchor , have an ad instead with your keywords .
EX: "hosting fraud "
Replace to , "Save yourself from hosting fraud".

When you mention article submission , remember your article is just one of about 1000 submitted that day to only that site .
The title will get people read the article .
Instead of , "Save yourself from hosting fraud " , use
" 5 ways to detect hosting frauds ".
The author BIO will get traffic .
Instead of
"This article is copyright http:... bla bla "
USE
"Find similar techniques to prevent yourself from falling in a pit at http: before it's too late"

Then do your SEO which you look pretty good at .
Regards
Jeet

 

Nice tips Jeet. I could use some of them as you suggested.

I'm still wanting to know what's the secret to traffic? Is it simply a mixture of all these other items? How do these guys start a website and have 1000 uniques in a month?

 

Glad you liked the suggestion .
Sometimes even I wonder how do they get 1000K uniques a month with a very new site but then it must be advertising they do .

May be google adwords .
May be YPN .
May be MSN ad center .
May be targetting a nitch .
May be advertising in an email list .
May be their previous visitors from another site .
May be banner exchange .
May be POP up exchange .
May be Traffic exchange programs like traffic swarm.
May be ads on other sites .
May be contest announcement .
May be they run affiliate programs .
May be they pick ranks in search because of target nitch .
May be they rank for more than one term because they found variations to a high search term.
May be country specific .
May be offline advertising .
May be Joint ventures .
May be word of mouth referals .
May be mail groups like yahoo google .
May be Press release .
May be featured "site of the day" .
May be "email this page to friend"
May be free traffic from a popular site like "hotscripts.com" for a script they submitted as free .

It could be any of those or a combination ...
The master key is to keep track of what got you the most traffic and not just traffic but converting traffic . Then calculate if you made profits and if yes then do more of that .

"Whichever the lock is but the master key opens them all !"
Regards
Jeet

 

Nice SEO Slogan Traffic is the key - but where's the lock?

Seo locksmith opening the net...

Link trade with other webmasters or is that May be POP up exchange?

 

I don't know if I am right or not but I think you confused link exchange with pop up exchanges .
Tell me if I am wrong ?
Regards
Jeet

 

Well I would say:

Why are you different?
What is so special about your site?
Where is your link bait?

What special idea/promotion/event can you think of that can be viral and get people talking about you?

Sort that out and everything else will follow suit.

 

If you build it they will come.
You have to give people what they want, the term content is king is not quite complete. It should be Quality content is king. There are millions of sites with content, yet only few get any significant traffic. Find a void and fill it and they will come.

Then there's adwords...

 

I also am still searching for the traffic lock etc. My main CRYPTOZOOLOGY site has been up about a year, I even have a forum for it. I have tried adwords, emailing other webmaster with similiar sites about link exchanges, out of 30, 2 said yes.

With the forum and the main site, I average 20 visitors a day total

I also have a nice free flash games site with a dedicated domain name etc, it's been up for a year, has over 300 different free games, etc.... it averages 40 visitors a day.

Maybe the markets are just too flooded now days, I don't understand it either, traffic is very very hard to get. I even write and submit at least 4 articles a mont to numerous article sites, still a low traffic trickle......

 

Half of the secret to lots of traffic is how much is available in the first place.

If you have a ringtone site, there is tons and tons of traffic out there for it. tens of millions of people, get a fraction of that traffic and you are doing nicely. If you have a site on gastric bypass surgery, good luck getting a million uniques a month.

If you want to get lots of traffic be prepared to work hard and long and learn everything you possibly can not only about websites but also the niches your operating in. Nothing but tons of work (or tons of money) will get you there. If there was a "holy grail" everyone would have it and the effect would cancel everyone out. It doesn't exist.

 

I know there isn't a holy grail, but I do hope for shortcuts... I'm averaging 20 impressions per day (true, my website is only two weeks old).. hope google indexing will bring me more

 

There was kid on DP back in April or May (I think), and he had a massive site. It had a forum with tens of thousands of members, among other things. I know a few people on DP with big forums, so that wasn't unusual. What flipped me out was that he'd got it to that point in just 3 or 4 months.

Now, I don't understand all of his tactics, but he was up front about one thing in particular. And that was that he was pretty brazenly going where the eyeballs were... as opposed to me, doing what I know & love. (When I made Publisher Database, I had no idea how many people were trying to get published. I catered to nothing but my own interest in the topic. And that's done OK for me, but not spectacular.)

This kid, on the other hand, ripped me a new one. He said he would never even start such an endeavor, because the number of searches for it vs. number of results was just a bad, bad ratio. He deliberately used tools like this:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

...to find search terms that had tons of searches. He wouldn't bother with anything less than 10,000. But then he'd double-qualify it by looking at how many results came up for the keywords he found. Too much competition, he bailed. In the end, he found a few search terms that had massive numbers, and almost no one fufilling the need.

So for him, he was "front-loading" the process I guess. He just wouldn't even start something unless the numbers were right. Me? I'm just struggling along, still trying to build sites that interest me, and if others like it too, good.

-Tony

 

i thought i was in the same boat as you techlh, i started a site called SuperCarNews about a year ago, i thought it was going to be huge, as i had thousands of specifications of cars (ie many content pages). After a year reading up on DP and NP, i learnt so much about SEO and traffic building techniques. I rebuilt the site about 6 months ago and tried again with a lot of newfound knowledge. I am now starting to build up traffic considerably, last months average was 200 visits a day and im having a strong start to this month with an average of 300 visits a day, and hopeully that will continue to grow strong. Some main things i have done, is RSS for all my news and submitted that to many RSS directories. I looked at my AWStats page and looked through all the search phrases that i was getting visits to my site from SE's, then making content based on those searches, that helped traffic.

As my car is specific to cars, i will be trying a new offline approach to marketing this weekend, there is a massive car show (Melbourne, Australia) and i will get a window length sticker with the URL of the site, hopefully this will bring some visitors, but who knows, worth a try. and i do have a nice car to put it on, dont worry about that. ill post some pics once the event is done.

 

Be diverse. It's a master key, and you have to use it on several locks....

 

agreed. nobody likes a page with bad contents.

 

IF you have good content and can get some kind of coverage for your site, however small, then you should be able to start out on a roll which results in your traffic increasing over time:

- People who come to your site email the link to their friends - you get new visitors.
- People come to your site, bookmark it and come back again for more - repeat visitors.
- People come to your site, and then link to it from their site or blog because they like it - you get more direct visitors and better rankings.

In other words, as long as you can get some people coming to your site in the first place - even if it is just a few hundred a week - with good, well-targetted content, you can then leverage this into more visitors later.

Paying to get these initial visitors is one way to go. Another is to be listed on a high-traffic site like about.com. I have a site listed in several places there (due to the great content), and it is one of my top traffic providers. Ironically, due to how they redirect from their site, I get no link benefit - but I don't care. I have real people really visiting my site for free, some of whom buy, and many others who do one of the three things listed above.

The key, therefore, is the content and then having a good avenue (like about.com) to get that content out there in front of those eyeballs. After that, a normal link building campaign can assure growth with the initial kick-start having already been achieved.