Welcome to Day 30 of 30 Days to More Traffic!
During these 30 days I’ve written in-depth about the top tactics for getting traffic. It’s essential to work at least the most important methods into your daily focus.
Quality of Traffic
Tons of website owners and bloggers think, “How am I going to get a lot of traffic?”
When really they should be asking themselves, “How am I going to get a lot of quality traffic?”
1 hit from a high source of traffic is often better than 100 hits from a low source. For instance, if a well-respected blogger such as Darren Rowse has provided a link to your site on blogging, he has given his internet stamp of approval for your website.
The visitor is likely to spend time reading what you have to say and he will also trust your products/advertisements. If Darren Rowse is raving about you, you don’t need to do much to sell yourself when that traffic comes through.
However, let’s say someone used a traffic exchange to get to your site. This is such a low quality source of traffic that the visitor may not stay but a few seconds, he immediately doesn’t have a lick of trust in your content or you, and he may have even stumbled upon your site looking for content outside of your niche.
Before you put together your strategy, ponder what I consider to be the highest to lowest quality sources of traffic in relation to the sections above.
Traffic Quality Chart
High:
- (Direct Links)
- Traffic from your email list
- Article Marketing
- Forum Marketing
- Guest Blogging
- Viral ebook
- Viral Video
- Search Engine Traffic
- Pay-Per-Click
Low:
- Social Bookmarking
- Traffic Exchanges
Your Focus
Unless you work 8-hours-per-day or hire help, it’s unlikely you can do all of these effectively. What we do know, however, is this. On a daily basis you should aim for generating traffic from at least one high quality source.
Objectives #1 and #2 are necessary for long-term traffic:
Your #1 objective should be linkbuilding.
Linkbuilding leads to both high quality direct traffic and long-term search engine traffic. Use all of the methods above, from viral linking campaigns, to guest blogging, to utilizing a blog roll in the right way, etc.
Your #2 objective should be either submitting search engine optimized articles to ezines (Article Marketing) or publishing them at your own website. Pros often do both.
Your #3 objective should be harnessing the traffic power of social bookmarking, creating viral media (ebooks and videos), forum marketing, Squidoo, and other things.
Goal Setting
As part of your strategy, set small goals. You can’t look at your traffic generation in absolutes. For example, vow to double your daily traffic each month instead of be upset that you’re not getting 10,000 visitors every day the second month your site’s up.
In other words, don’t expect these techniques to magically make your site as popular as an authority site that’s been on the net for 5 years over night. Although it’s possible if you generate enough incoming links.
Use these techniques. They work.
Hire Help
If you have the money, the best way to effortlessly drive traffic to your site by hiring help (outsourcing). There are skilled individuals on the net who provide services for building links, connecting you with JV partners… They’ll even write content for you for a low price. You can hire someone to do all the dirty work. I recommend Warrior Forum, an online marketing forum since 1997, for finding a contractor. Elance works well too.
Read more about hiring writers.
Warrior Forum is also a goldmine of knowledge. Talk to the members and use the search feature to find out anything you want to know about online business and generating traffic.
Traffic Building Checklist: Stage 1- Getting Started
- Have the right tools for the job (e.g. firefox browser, website stats, autoresponder, etc.)
- Pick a name for site & domain that is easy relatively short and is easy to spell & remember
- Pay for quality hosting
- Have really good content that others will find useful
- Have your email visible on your site so people can contact you and ask them for feedback
- Make a goal to add new content every so many day
- Navigating your site should be simple and straightforward. Ask a couple people not familiar with your site to test it out for you.
- Setup stat tracking. I recommend Google Analytics.
- Optimize your site for the search engines
- Setup an email list and make some sort of short special report to entice visitors to opt in to your list
Traffic Building Checklist: Stage 2- Getting Traffic
- Goal Setting- How much traffic do you have, how much do you really want, and how long will it take. A good goal is to have your traffic increase by 1.5 or 2 times each month
- Work on getting links to your site:
- Find a few reciprocal links. Make a goal to do 1 or 2 a day
- Find related blogs and forums and begin contributing to the community. Make a goal to leave 5 or more high quality posts a day.
- Using your website stat tracker to figure out what sites are sending you the most traffic.
Traffic Building Checklist: Stage 3- Taking things to the next level
- Goal Setting- Make a goal to contact 10-30 website owners in your niche and brainstorm together ways you can work together to get more traffic.
- Contact email list owners in your niche and suggest a cross promotional campaign to build both your lists.
If I had to do it all over again…
If I had to do it all over again I would do lots of things differently:
- I would start building an email list from day 1
- I would have started networking with others in my field from the start
- Read the whole list of things here
