How To Start Generating Traffic and Revenue To Your Website
Last week we talked about how to create A website and what are the must-haves for your small business website. This week we will get you started on how to start generating traffic and revenue to your website.
Let’s dive right in.
The Ultimate & Most Important Goal is the Traffic!
The most important part of generating revenue is getting traffic to you website. Your website could have the best content online but without traffic coming in, no one knows about it. For those who are not familiar with what web traffic is, web traffic refers to the number of unique visitors a website receives. Typically, this is determined on a monthly basis although many tools allow website owners to view daily statistics. This is helpful when you post new content and want to monitor how many people view your recent postings.
There are so many methods to generate traffic to your site but here are some of the most popular methods we use:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO allows you to optimize your website and it’s content for major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo to name a few. To successfully earn revenue from your website, you need to tailor your website to search engines. This allows readers to find your content amongst thousands or even millions of other websites.
Some basic SEO practices include a well designed and easily navigable website with fresh content that is valuable, fresh, and has an active group of participants that contribute to discussions on your website.
Social Media
Having content on your website is great but once you create it you have to be proactive and let your potential readers know where to find it. One way to do that is to use social media to promote your content.
Twitter is ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Google+ promotion can help your site show up in personalized search results and seems especially effective in B2B niches.
If you’re a B2C product company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram
YouTube
YouTube gets about 3 billion daily views, and is the 2nd largest search engine right behind Google and is the third most viewed website in the world. YouTube allows you to create compelling videos that catch your potential customers eye.
Once on your channel or video, you want to be sure you tell your views what to do and how to do it. In this instance, you want to communicate your compelling call to action and tell people exactly how to get to your website.
An example of a call to action would be: “Thank you for watching my video! To discover 28 more tips on how to generate traffic to your website, head on over to www.8393creative.com to get your hands on this powerful, 3-part video series right now.”
Another sweet feature that YouTube has that helps is every time you upload a video to YouTube, it allows you to add a description of content of the video. There are a lot of people missing out on this feature.
Here is an example of what that would look like: Start with a call to action that says something along these lines “Get More YouTube Traffic: http://www.8393creative.com”
Next add a paragraph or two of content about the video you posted.
Email Lists
Have you ever visited a site and as soon as you’re on the site a few seconds later a box pops up with either an offer of a free eBook, product in exchange for your email address. This is a very effective technique to generate not only traffic but sales to your website.
Once someone opts into your email list, this your opportunity to educate and drive people that have in interest in your site, and or product. These are your potential customers. You can share new content with your email list or provide them with special deals only available to email subscribers.
The Revenue
Once you’ve applied these techniques and you’ve started generating traffic to your website, you can now start to make some money. One of the best ways to start generating revenue is through advertising.
There are some ad campaigns that pay you just for the number of visitors you have coming to your website. On the other hand there are ad campaigns that only pay you if a visitor performs some type of action such as click on a link or make a purchase.
Selling Your Own Product
Now that you have built up a strong readership and traffic to your site, you can create your own informative items such as eBooks, checklist, webinars etc as a way to bring in some passive income.
To do this you can offer your visitors a small one-time fee to download your how to guide and you can instantly reap the benefits from that. Of course to do this, you have to love to write, and have a deep understanding of the topics you’re writing about. If writing is not what you do, you can always outsource the writing.
Google Adsense
This is a great place to start earning money from your website. It’s free to join and places advertisements on your website based on the type of content you provide. When users click on these links, you are paid. This is known as a pay-per-click or PPC campaign. Although the amount you get paid for each click may only be a few cents, if you have a large amount of traffic coming to your website, these clicks quickly add up to a respectable paycheck.
Your website must have valuable content and not be spammy or Google will deny your request.
There are so many more methods to generate traffic to your website and there are many websites out there now that use the techniques described above to generate traffic and revenue for their website.
The key is to create unique and valuable content. As long as you stay focused and do that, traffic will come to your site. What you waiting on…let’s go make some money!
Thanks for reading. Be sure to leave your comments or questions below.
