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Day 1: Introduction to Traffic Generation
Welcome to the
first installment of the five part series Traffic Generation Course. Today, I want to discuss the various things that you
need to check to ensure that your site is ready to receive traffic.
Think of
this: If you were expecting company at your home, there are certain things you might do in advance. You would make
sure your home was clean, that there was fresh soap and clean hand towels in the bathroom, and you might prepare some snacks,
or even an entire meal.
Preparing your
website follows the same concept. You want to make sure that things are neat and tidy. Make sure that your navigation follows
a logical sequence. Make sure that you have plenty of good content, and that everything is spelled correctly.
You also want your
visitors to be able to participate in your site – to take action. Look at each page, and determine what type of action
your visitors can take. Do you have a forum or blog? Do you conduct polls or surveys? Do you have a subscribe box for your
opt-in list on every page of your site? Make absolutely sure that your website is ready for company! Also make sure that your
pages lead your visitors to take the action that you want them to take, no matter what that action may be.
That is the first
and most essential step of traffic generation. If your site isn’t pleasing and welcoming, any traffic generation activities
you do from this point on are wasted! Take the time, and put forth the effort to make your site as good as possible –
and learn to look at it from your visitor’s point of view!
After you do this,
make sure that you are using all of the best known Search Engine Optimization techniques, such as making sure that you have
clean HTML code, that you’ve used your keyword effectively, that you have keyword rich text links and alt tags, and
that the title of your website, in your HTML code, has your main keyword or phrase as well. Take some time to explore SEO
techniques, so that you can draw natural search traffic as well.
Once your website
is ready for company, you are ready to start inviting that company. You do not need any special tools for traffic generation.
What you need is your computer, an Internet connection, your mind, a willingness to do the work, and knowledge. That’s
all it takes.
Homework Assignment: Make absolutely sure
that your website is ready to receive traffic. Do you have an opt-in page? Do you have a subscribe box on every page of your
site? Look at each page, and determine whether there is enough content, and if there is an action for your visitors to take
on each page. Make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines.
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Day 2: Article Marketing and Forum Marketing
You’ve probably
heard about Article Marketing and Forum Marketing. In fact, you may even be sick of hearing about it. But are you doing it?
The reason that you hear so much about these two marketing techniques is that they work!
Yes, article marketing
and forum marketing builds traffic slowly. There are faster ways to get traffic. But, when you build traffic using these methods
as well, you are also building your credibility. You are drawing responsive people to your site, and if your site is doing
its job as well, and you get those people on your list, you can draw them back time and time again.
Note: If you are
not collecting email addresses at your website, the traffic that you bring there is essentially wasted. By building an opt-in
list, you can bring traffic back to your site over and over again, and this is essential to online businesses. Email addresses
and first names should be collected with an opt-in page, or with subscribe boxes located on every single page of your website!
Now, let’s
start generating some traffic with articles. The concept is that you write an article, which should be anywhere from 350 to
750 words in length. You include an author’s resource box at the bottom of your article, and your website link is included
in that resource box. You submit the article to article directories and ezine publishers.
If you can’t
write, you can get article written for less than $10 each by a ghostwriter. If you don’t have the time it takes to submit
articles, you can hire a service to do that for you as well. It is essential that you do article marketing, because it is
viral. Your articles will be used on other people’s websites, blogs, and in their ezines – spreading the word
about your site.
Forum marketing
is also important. To do forum marketing, you find good, well populated forums that relate to your niche. You simply participate
in those forums, and include a signature file at the bottom of all of your posts, that lead people to your website. Forum
marketing does not take much time at all, once you’ve found the forums that you want to participate in.
Again,
these are slow, but effective (and free) ways to generate traffic. But no matter how slow they are, they are essential to
your overall online business because of the virility of these techniques, and the credibility that it gives you.
Homework Assignment: Write and submit
one article, each week. Participate in your niche forums on a daily basis, posting one message in each forum per day, using
a signature file that brings people to your website.
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Day 3: Joint Venture
Giveaways
In this, day three
of the five part traffic generation course, we are going to discuss how joint venture giveaways will help you generate traffic
to your site. In fact, they do more than generate traffic. Joint venture giveaways will also help you build a large opt-in
list, in a very short period of time, and you can bring those visitors back to your site time and time again.
Joining a joint
venture giveaway is easy and free. You just need to find a giveaway, and these can be found through joint venture related
forums, or through the search engines. Once you’ve found a giveaway, you need a free gift to give away.
This can be something
that you create yourself, or have created for you, such as a free report, an audio, a video, or an ebook – or even a
piece of software. It can also be a Private Label Rights product that you have. The important thing is that your gift has
value to the people that will be downloading it.
You need an autoresponder
and a website. Set up an opt-in page, which is often called a squeeze page or a capture page, on your site. Connect it to
your autoresponder, and in your autoresponder, set up a list for the giveaway. Create your confirmation email and download
for the gift email in your autoresponder.
Determine where
the visitor will go, once they hit the submit button on your opt-in page. They can go to the first page of your site. They
could be sent to a sales page for an affiliate product that you sell. You could set up a One Time Offer, or OTO, where they
have one chance to purchase a product from you, at a special price.
Finally, when you
are all set up on your end; submit your information to the host of the joint venture giveaway event. They will typically want
the name of your gift, the URL of your opt-in page, a description of that gift, and the link to the graphic that represents
your gift, such as a graphical ebook cover or CD cover.
While you will
build a nice big list with the joint venture giveaway, remember that your purpose is to generate traffic as well. You don’t
want people showing up, getting their gift, and leaving – never to be seen or heard from again. Your list resolves a
lot of this, because you can use it to bring them back.
But at the same
time, when your visitor is redirected after submitting the form, try to have them redirected to a page on your site that will
immediately capture their attention, and keep them there for a while, even after they have been given their free gift.
Homework Assignment: Visit some joint venture
related forums, and find at least one joint venture giveaway to participate in. Create your gift, create your opt-in page,
and any other pages that you need for the giveaway, and watch the traffic roll in!
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Day 4: Social
Bookmarking
Today, we are going
to look at something that is still relatively new in the Internet Marketing arena: Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking
is essentially using a social bookmarking service to bookmark your webpages or blog posts, so that other users of the bookmarking
site can visit. When you bookmark a site, you tag it with keywords, and people can search for the keywords that reflect their
interests at the social bookmarking site.
Does it work? Absolutely!
In fact, this is a very fast way to generate really good traffic to your site – for free. Again, you will want to try
to get them on your opt-in list, once they arrive at your site, so that you can bring them back again and again. Notice that
I said ‘really good traffic.’ This is good traffic because the visitor finds your site by searching for the keywords
that you’ve used when you bookmarked it. They are essentially looking for you. For this reason, it is important to use
keyword tags, for each page, that are absolutely relevant to the content on that page. Don’t try to use unrelated keywords,
this tactic simply won’t work.
There are numerous
social bookmarking sites out there, and hitting them all, to bookmark each page of your website, could literally take days,
if not weeks. Fortunately, there are social bookmarking services that will send your bookmarks and tags to numerous social
bookmarking sites in one fell swoop.
You want a service
that targets the best social bookmarking sites, and that service is Only Wire, at http://www.onlywire.com. Only Wire is free to use (another bonus). Getting set up with Only Wire takes a couple of hours, because you will need to
go to each of the social bookmarking sites that it lists, register, and then put your username and password for each site
into the list at Only Wire.
Once that is done,
you will add the Only Wire icon to your browser toolbar (very easy to do – you just click, hold the mouse button down,
and drag and drop it up there). Now, you are all set up. When you are ready to bookmark your pages, first go to the Only Wire
site and login. Leave that window open. Open another window (tabbed browsers work great for this), go to your site, go to
a page that you want to bookmark, and hit the icon.
You will be taken
to the Only Wire add a bookmark page. Here, everything is filled in, except your keyword tags. List the keywords that are
associated with the page you are bookmarking, and hit submit. You’re done with that page – move on to the next
one. Nothing could be easier, and again, it is very effective.
Homework Assignment: Join Only Wire at http://www.onlywire.com . Register for each site on the list, and get Only Wire all set up. Add the bookmark icon to your browser toolbar,
and go to each page of your website, click the icon, and add it to the social bookmarks and tag each page with keywords.
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Day 5: Purchasing
Traffic
There is a right
way, and a wrong way to purchase traffic. You can use a service that guarantees you traffic (wrong way) or you can use a pay-per-click
service (right way). Whatever you do, don’t fall for those websites that promise to deliver you thousands of hits in
a twenty four hour period.
Let’s take
a look at those services. First, you don’t know where or how they are generating the traffic. In most cases, the traffic
is not targeted, meaning that it is possible that not a single one of those thousands of visitors has any interest in the
topic of your niche. Finally, you can’t really be sure that the traffic is ‘real.’
But, there is a
way to purchase real, targeted traffic. You can use Pay-Per-Click advertising, through a service such as Google AdWords. When
you purchase traffic using this method, the traffic is targeted – and real. You don’t pay for a certain number
of traffic, you pay for each click, as the name, pay-per-click, indicates.
Now, if you don’t
know what you are doing, Pay-Per-Click can be expensive, and ineffective. It is important that you make sure that you write
a targeted ad, first and foremost. It is also essential that you select the right keywords, and that you bid the right amount
on those keywords.
Google AdWords
really makes this very easy. You can type in your main keyword, and they will give you a list of other related keywords that
apply as well. Next, when you set the amount you are willing to pay, per click, for each keyword, you can use the traffic
analysis tools in Google AdWords to see where your ad will be listed, based on what you are paying per click, and how much
traffic you can expect from it.
Raise your bid
price until you see that you will be listed where you want to be (preferably the first page of search results). Again, PPC
can be very expensive. Make sure that you know how much you can afford to spend on these ads each week, divide it by seven,
and set a daily budget up in your AdWords account. Also specify how you want those funds spread out through the day.
There are entire
courses written on the topic of Google AdWords. I advise that you take one, because there are a lot of elements and tricks
that need to be learned to make AdWords work out well for you.
Again, don’t
waste your traffic! Make sure that you are capturing first names and email addresses from the people that arrive at your website
through PPC advertising!
Homework Assignment: Determine whether or not
you want to purchase traffic or not, and if you do, find a good pay-per-click service, such as Google AdWords, and get set
up.
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