Archive for the ‘Tools of the Trade’ Category

Obtaining traffic through organic search engine listings is the highest goal of a traffic building campaign.  Why?  Because organic searches that list your website near the top (page 1 or 2) allows you to reach visitors with ZERO cost to you.  Unlike Pay-Per-Click advertising, you have a chance that the browser looking up one of your keywords will see your site listed, visit and purchase your product.  All without paying for that visitor’s click.

Because this is the Holy Grail of traffic building, this goal does take time and effort to achieve.  But think of it as “sweat equity” instead of hard dollars invested.  You will spend time making sure the search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) see you as relevant to your chosen keywords.  But starting an online business is not a get rich quick scheme, it is a legitimate business that you must nurture and support.

The algorithms used by the search engines are constantly changing and evolving.  But one main ingredient exists for all of them.  The search engine spiders crawl millions of websites everyday looking for links (primarily anchor text)  to other sites, then they crawl those sites looking for content relevant to the anchor they followed.  You can gleam two ideas from this information:

1.  You need to have a lot of backlinks on other websites, preferably using anchor text links composed of your keywords.

2.  You need to have content on your site that is relevant to the anchor text you used.  For example, an anchor text link of  “how to make money from home” should link to a website that is legitimately selling a product or talking about making money from home.  Not to a site that sells a book on rehabbing shoulder injuries.

Before you start a backlink campaign read through your website content and study your keywords again.  Be sure that the keywords you will be using in your campaign are relevant to your website.

There are several methods to creating backlinks on popular sites.  Here are the ones I use:

1.  Become a member of several forums that are relevant to your products.  In your forum profile be sure to use every method to post your anchor text backlinks and your website.  This is important as your posts will either give you a signature block to use for advertising or they will allow the post readers to see your profile and perhaps follow your links.

Scroll through the different subjects and choose posts that are asking a questions or have a problem to solve.  Remember in forums you want to give more than you take so be helpful and considerate – the readers are real people and could become future customers.

Choose 3 to 5 forums total so you have time to become a valuable member of the posting community.

2.  Create an account with Yahoo Answers and Ask Yedda.  Both of these sites allow you to post answers to a wide variety of questions.  There is a qualifying period but eventually you will be able to advertise under your posts.

3.  There are many opinions on this subject but the rule of thumb is the higher the website Page Rank the better your backlink will be weighted by the search engines.  I subscribe to a service that provides the location of these high page rank sites.  I use this information to create my backlinks.  Each month I get a total of 50 backlinks on page rank 4 or higher sites.  It takes about 3 hours to complete all 50 but I have really seen some progress using this method.   For less that $10 per month, this is definitely worth the money.  Try it, I think you will like it!  High Page Rank Backlink Program

Building traffic is a never ending story.   You can always buy your traffic but FREE traffic is always best.

There are days when you sit down at your computer and you feel like a savant, where everything you touch turns to gold.  Your blog posts get listed, your PPC campaign is fine tuned and making conversions, your search engine rankings are rising and your customer emails are glorious.

Then there are days when you think you just can’t make one more post, you don’t even know if anyone knows you are out there, you just can’t imagine why this is so hard when it sounds so easy.

You’re not alone, every other person that has decided to blaze a new trail and start a new business has had both of these days, sometimes one right after another.  There are no guarantees in starting online business anymore than there are in a retail or service business.  As the owner you need to do your very best every day, even when it does not look like what you are doing is making any difference at all.  This is where goal setting, determination and believing in yourself comes together.

On your most frustrating days it may seem that it comes easy for everyone else but you.  But it only “seems” that way, learning how to make money from home is not about a get rich quick scheme – it is about choosing a lifestyle of independence and taking advantage of the very latest technology available, the Internet.

The one big difference between an online business and other “bricks and mortar” businesses is that there is the unique opportunity to make a small investment over a period of time and to truly use sweat equity to make it pay off.  Bricks and mortar stores take a much larger investment and thus are much riskier and less available to everyone.

Do not let a slow period get you down.  You know what works, we talk about it here on this blog every week.  All that is needed is the determination to stick with it and see the payoff develop.  You can do this!

This is the last post in my little series on analyzing your Web Stats to make improvements to your marketing efforts.   In your “make money from home” efforts you can use your Web Stats to fine tune and target your traffic generating tasks.

Remember to log into your WebStats…

a) Log into your hosting account’s C-Panel
b) Click on your Web/FTP Stats.
c) Choose any of the Stat options, however I use Awstats.

Scroll down past the Visits Duration stats and soon you will see…

Connect to Site From or Referring Sites

This is the real meat of all your WebStats. This will tell you “from where” your visitors are coming. Review this list carefully and be sure that you have the appropriate websites sending you traffic.

For example…if your site is about “Inner City Gardening” then you’re probably not going to get many sales conversions from visitors that come from HowToBuildABetterMotorcycle.com or EverythingInConcrete.com.

What you want to see are links from Google, Yahoo and the other search engines which will show your PPC campaign efforts and from the organic searches on those search engines.

You also want to see your social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Digg where your blog’s social bookmarking tasks are at work.

Look for links from Yahoo Answers and from the forums you visit and post in regularly – these will be people who are following your link from your signature profile.

Also look for payoff for your work in article sites like Ezine Articles and GoArticles.

If you see sites that are not compatible with your product and it is sending you a ton of visitors then you will perhaps discount these visits from your sales conversion calculations.

These links are not bad for you in the sense that the search engine spiders will visit those other sites and see your backlink and visit your site more often – this will even help you rise in the organic searches if the backlink is from a high page-ranking site. However, these types of visits may not turn into a lot of sales.

You want to concentrate your efforts into getting relevant links from writing articles, posting in forums, posting in your blog, answering questions in Yahoo Answers, Yedda and other interactive sites. Don’t forget to put your product in ClickBank and pay a commission to affiliates that will send their targeted traffic to you.

Use your WebStats as a tool but do not become too obsessed. This tool will help you quantify the time and effort you are spending on traffic generation. Like a freight train, your results will be slow at first but will build momentum fast.