If you want to make money from your website, you need traffic. No exceptions.
The first step to attaining traffic is to build a traffic worthy website. If you have followed the steps in our previous articles then you should have a pretty solid website in place. Only once you have a solid foundation (website) should you begin building traffic.
There are two main types of traffic: Search and Social Traffic.
Search Traffic is literally traffic from search engines, mainly Google but sometimes also Yahoo and Bing. The great thing about Search Traffic is that people who use search engines are usually searching for answers, which makes them perfect to advertise your product too.
Social Traffic is a whole other beast. A beast that comes in many forms. Social traffic comes from all different sources, links in emails, social networks, ect. Social traffic is often less interested in finding answers and is only visiting your site for a quick fix of knowledge, entertainment or humour. It is much harder to convert social traffic into loyal readers, let alone sell them anything. We’re not saying it’s impossible, however the conversion rates will be a lot lower.
We will be focusing on building Search Traffic throughout this lesson. Search traffic is much more likely to buy your product, browse your site, ect. So it makes sense really.
To receive traffic from the search engines you must rank highly for search terms people are searching for. Billions of terms are being searched for every month, so there is no shortage of traffic potential there. To find out what people are searching for you must invest some time into keyword research. Luckily we have a excellent post on keyword research , so you should have no problems with that.
Once you know what people are searching for you can begin creating content to match their needs. This content must also be optimised for the search engines, this is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Here’s a link to our guide to writing SEO friendly content – SEO Copywriting
Okay you now have SEO content targeting a specific keyword but unfortunately you are not ranking for the term. This probably means you will need to do some link building. Link building is the art of getting other webmasters to place a hyperlink on their website to yours. The links result in traffic from their website and also boost your authority on the search engines, meaning higher rankings.
There are literally hundreds of different ways to build links, and we will probably cover a lot of them in the future. However in this article I just want to look at one which way builds traffic and links simulatenously while also building you a network of connections: guest posting.
Guest Posting is the art of writing articles and getting them published on other websites citing you as the source of the information. Guest posts are great for three reasons:
- Build Traffic – By guest posting on a blog in a similar niche to yours you are putting yourself in front of the other blogs audience, this is a great way to find new readers who are interested in your subject.
- Build High Quality Links – The search engines judge a links relevancy from the content surrounding it, in the case of guest posts you are writing the content surrounding your link so you can be sure it is relevant to your site!
- Build Connections – Your blog is much more likely to be a success if you have connections with other bloggers in your niche, guest posts are a great way to start connecting and also proving your knowledge to the people in your niche.
A good way of increasing your chances of getting your guest post published is to email the website owner first and agreeing on a topic for you to write on, that way you are sure your work is going to get published before you spend writing it.
