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Traffic Generation Course
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
