Attracting Traffic is the most difficult and more profitable secret on the net. Before you open a brick and mortar shop, you have the leisure of selecting the street, the corner, the very shop you intend to rent or buy. Sit in front of it and observe passers by, how many of them, what kind of population, at what times of the day they pass, etc.etc. it's there all in front of you, you just sit down for a week or two and you know who your potential customers are and what they look like. On the net you can open a shop, a blog, send ads etc. much more easily and for much less money than opening a brick and mortar shop. But in Cyberspace the passers by do not exist. They will not exist and you have to accept that for a fact. This of course unless YOU create a street, or many streets that will lead them to your location. Of course you may go the Adwords way and spend a few hundreds of thousands of $ and find out that it wasn't that cost effective after all. The point I am trying to make here is that what really attracts your potential customers is your content, your product, because that equates to the satisfaction of a need THEY have. The most important thing in the world is your customer satisfaction through the product you supply. Only the quality of your product - therefore the satisfaction of the customer need, will make you money, will generate traffic, will change your life. All the self proclaimed gurus I have read and spoken to treat Traffic as a mechanical problem. This is NOT so. They say you do this and then that in that order, you apply this method, and will have so many hits on your counter. Maybe, and then what ? Imagine that while walking in the street you are forced by some road works to pass in front of a shop, is it because of that that you will get in and spend your money ? Certainly not. A shop without traffic is a dead shop. A shop with lots of traffic will only be successful if it has something unique about it : products selection, price, convenience, quality, service and / or a unique mix of the above. You as a consumer - probably without consciously knowing it - operate the same choices every single day for your own purchasing ( online and offline ). You shop your clothes, your books, your food, your travels etc in certain places or web sites for a reason, as unconscious as it may be, but you choose each time at least one very precise reason. Now, when YOU are the seller, why would you expect the rules to be any different ? Why would you expect that some people on the web would click your affiliate link or you adsense AD, or even bother to visit your site or come and read your stuff on your blog at all unless THEY are finding through you the answer to their questions ? The solution to their problem ? The information they were eagerly seeking ? Unfortunately on the net there is too much scam, too many false promises whose only purpose is to make a quick buck hiding behind the anonimity and impersonality of the internet. This is NOT how you build a business, respect your customers interest and he will pay you back with his money, his loyalty. There is no quick buck to be made, building a business online and offline has got rules that you must understand and obey to. Put your customer interest before yours and you will make more money that you can count. I make money blogging simply because people come back for more information, not because I promise the earth. Keep on !
Well there are always 2 aspects of traffic - volume and quality. First of all, you need good quality that converts/sells and secondly you need volume. That's it, no rocket science
Great article, I feel that it really hits the nail on the head. You need to offer something worthwhile or else no one is going to pay much attention to your site.
Nice article. I have made an attractive sentence: Weee... "On the internet, you build you own street".
It`s almost impossible to get traffic from Google, Yahoo etc because there is too much sites like yours and their are indexed before. It`s easy to get traffic from forums, twitter, MSN, ICQ, Skype etc and then traffic from SE will come...