1. Erics Tips.com
2. Dave’s Online Videos

You will find all the information you need, to learn how to build your own website and you will also find lots of other excellent information about how to succeed online.

In part 3 of my blueprint for online success, we are going to examine perhaps the most critical piece of the puzzle: Driving targeted traffic. Once your website is up and running you must spend a large portion of your time driving visitors with some interest in the product you are selling. The keyword to note here is ‘targeted traffic’. There is no point driving visitors to your website if they have no interest in the product that you are selling. I would rather have 1000 targeted visitors compared to 100,000 untargeted visitors. You only want people that have a particular interest in your niche or product because the chance of converting them is going to be far higher.

The internet has revolutionised the way the world does business. Whereas in the past it was all about mass marketing average products to everyone and anyone, now it is all about marketing quality products to a smaller more responsive niche. If you are intending to mass market to then you’d better bring your cheque book. The old business model of buying ad space on T.V. and hoping to interrupt people enough so that they buy your product is drawing to a close. The new era is all about marketing to a specific pool of people who actually have some pre-interest in your product (for a more detailed explanation of this I highly recommend that you check out Seth Godin’s excellent book Meatball Sundae). So you must be smart with your traffic. Only market to people who are interested in your niche and work on driving targeted traffic to your website.

The way I see it there are 3 main types of website traffic, paid traffic, free traffic and affiliate traffic. Each type of traffic has its own advantages and disadvantages and the type of traffic that you drive to your website will depend on your budget, your aptitude for hard work and the number of hours that you have in the day. Furthermore within these categories there are many different ways of driving traffic. Some are more effective than others and it can take a lot of trial and error before you find a method that really works for you. It would very difficult for you to utilise all methods, so my advice is pick some core traffic generation methods and stick with them. Let’s have a look at each different method.

Paid Traffic –

This is an excellent way to get highly targeted traffic to your website very quickly. The downside is of course that you have to pay for it! Having said that if you know your metrics .i.e. Cost per visitor, conversion rate etc, you can really make it work. Here are some excellent sources of paid traffic.

1. Pay Per Click – Probably the most popular method of paid traffic. When someone types a keyword into the search engines, your ad will display on the front page of the search engine. You only pay when your ad is clicked hence the name pay per click. It is a very attractive form of advertising because you are showing ads to highly targeted visitors (after all they are the ones who typed in the keywords). However please be aware that PPC can get extremely expensive and you can burn through cash very quickly (think $1000’s of dollars in a matter of hours). I highly recommend you check out Perry Marshall who is known as the guru of adwords. Google, Yahoo and MSN all run PPC programs, although Google Adswords is probably the best known.

2. Banner Advertisements – You simply display a banner on another website and a visitor clicks on that banner and comes to your website.This can be done on a CPC basis (cost per click) or CPM (Cost per thousand impression) basis. This can be a very good way of driving targeted traffic to your website but again you need to know your metrics. There are thousands of websites in every conceivably niche possible that have banner ad space on their website.

3. Text Link Ads – These are ads that appear as hyperlinks within text on a page. Note that although Google Webmaster Guidelines frowns upon the buying and selling of links many people still do it and it can be a good way to drive some traffic to your site. Also you get the SEO benefit of having a backlink.

4. Ezine Ads- Ezines are essentially electronic newsletters that get sent to a list of subscribers, also many ezines can be targeted towards specific niches. The list of subscribers can be huge and it can give you are opportunity to have your ad read by tens of thousands of people. Furthermore you can purchase something called ‘solo’ ads, this means that your ad will shown exclusively on its own (ie. Without any other advertisers).

5. Email Lists – It is possible to buy email lists of people who have opted in to receive emails and adverts. There are many email list brokers available who will be willing to sell you a list although you should always perform some due diligence before buying any lists as there are some unethical operators out there.

6. Content Network – Many website owners opt to display adverts on their website and get some money every time somebody clicks on the ad. As an advertiser you can tell Google if you want to advertise across its network. You can do this on either a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (Cost per thousand impression) basis. This can be an excellent way of driving traffic to your website. But again you need to understand your metrics and set your budget accordingly.

7. Pay Per View – Otherwise known as PPV, ads appear in the form of a pop up on certain computers where the owner had agreed to receive them. As an advertiser you pay a certain amount every time the ad is shown. I haven’t had much experience with this however there are people who make a lot of money out of it. I recommend that you check out this blog post to find out about it in more detail. Be warned though, like PPC, if you don’t know what you are doing then you can burn through money extremely quickly.

Free Traffic

If you have no money but are keen to start earning money on the internet, then luckily there are many ways to drive free targeted traffic. Remember that while these methods may be free there are going to cost you a lot of time.

1. Article Marketing – Perhaps the most loved of all free methods, you simply write an article, put a link at the bottom of the article that points back to your website and then submit it to an article directory. You get to reach the tens of thousands of people who visit article directories every day. Also if your article is well written and optimised then there is a good chance that the article is will appear in the search engines. While it can take quite a lot of time and effort to write a decent article, you can be rewarded with a nice amount of visitors. There are literally thousands of article directories on the net that you can submit to.

2. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation – You may have noticed that I have talked a lot about SEO (search engine optimisation) this is because it is an excellent way of driving lots of targeted traffic to your website. I think approximately 80% of all people find websites from the search engines, so if you are not ranking in them then you are missing out on a huge amount of traffic. The best part of search engine optimisation is that it is totally free to do. Once you learn the basics it is very easy to optimise a website for the search engines and it can really drive a lot of traffic for you. I will be doing a separate post of keyword research, however if you are planning to use SEO to rank in the search engines, then I highly recommend that you start by targeting long-tail keywords or phrases that have less competition and are easy to rank for.

3. Forum Commenting – What better place to find prospective customers than in a forum. Make sure that you don’t spam forums and try to build up rapport with other people within it. Also some forums allow you to leave a signature so it can be an excellent way of driving traffic to your website. Plus you get a nice backlink.

4. Blog Commenting – Find blogs that are relevant to your niche and leave a thoughtful and relevant comment and you may find a trickle of traffic back to your website.

5. Yahoo Answers- Many people are still searching for answers to their problems and you can always answer them and put a link back to your website. As long as you make an effort to answer their question sincerely and your website is relevant then should be able to drive a good amount of website traffic.

6. Press Releases – There are many free press release sites that allow you to promote your site. Use them wisely and not only will you get some nice targeted traffic you will also get a good backlink to your site.

7. Social Media – I’m sure by now you’ve heard of Digg, Twitter and Facebook. You can use these platforms to build a community and send some traffic to your site. People have different opinions on the value of social media. Some people say that the traffic is hard to monetise while others make a full time living out of it. I’m kind of on the fence, I certainly wouldn’t say no to being on the front page of Digg but as the same time I view social media as a chance to interact with other people as opposed to purely selling to them.

8. Craigslist Posting – Craigslist allows you to pose free classified adverts, it can be time consuming but it can also attract a decent amount of traffic. Luckily there are many ‘Craiglist Posters’ who will do the job very cheaply.

Affiliate Traffic

If you own a product then you can always use affiliates to drive traffic to your website. The great thing about using affiliates to drive traffic is that you only pay on results ie. When they make a sale. For example you might have a $47 dollar product and you might agree to pay affiliates 75% of any sale they generate (of course this will depend on your margins). So essentially it is free traffic, ie you’re not paying anything for it. By using affiliates to promote your products you have nothing to lose and absolutely everything to gain. The World Wide Web is full of affiliates who are actively looking for products to promote, why not make your product one of them?

*** I do want to make one small point about using affiliates to promote your products. In my opinion you should only use affiliates to promote your products after you have tested out your product and its conversion. Do not use affiliates as your guinea pigs. It’s not fair on them and if it turns out that the product hasn’t converted well then you may spoil any future relationship with them. Always test your product and when you find out that it is converting well, invite affiliates to promote it for you. Trust me you’ll be thankful you did this when you launch your next product and have an army of affiliates waiting to promote it 

That concludes part 3 of my blueprint for online success. I am sure that there are many other ways to drive traffic but as I said you simply don’t have the time to do all of them. Pick the methods that best suit your budget and time. For example you may decide that you want to master SEO and PPC, that’s fine and it will serve you well. Just remember there is no magic bullet, traffic generation like everything else on the internet takes hard work, dedication and persistence. If you want to succeed online then you have to master how to generate it.

To your massive success,

Guy

P.S. If you liked this post then please link to me.