Jan

17

My “Formula” to Getting Traffic

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I’m an Internet Marketer by trade. It is my full-time career to make websites look good and make money for people. The problem that I constantly see, however, is that a lot of my clients simply don’t understand everything involved with making a website marketable. Some think that it’s your web design that makes you marketable, with the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Some are more concerned about simply having a website with a contact page, with the “if I have a website, everyone will find me and contact me instantly” mentality. The truth is, it takes a lot of work to a get a website together that is marketable and achieving the conversions you’re looking for. Here is my formula. I can’t guarantee it will work for every business, but it certainly works for me.

Steps to getting quality traffic to your website:

  1. Before developing your website, make sure it exists in a quality niche that is both competitive (but not too competitive) and profitable. Do keyword research to see what people are searching for and try to solve their problems. A good friend once told me that in this world, there are two ways to make it in business: (1) by giving and (2) by taking. I encourage you to make your money using method number one. You’ll find a sense of pride and comfort when building your online business.
  2. Create a very high quality design that is optimized for SEO, keeps people wanting more, and drives visitors to return. To find this “design”, simply find a website that you admire who is doing very well and mimic the layout. Replace their graphics for your graphics, make this your own design. Work with a web designer (to hire me, just click the contact form) to get your ideas together in Photoshop and get the ball rolling.
  3. Layout your design into individual web pages. Make sure every image has an ALT tag, make sure every page is keyword dense, make sure that every <A href=”"> body fits in with relevant keywords. Never include a hyper link that says “click here”. Make sure every page is filled with TITLE tags, META tags, and that you’re utilizing valid XHTML in your code. Make sure that you’re Section 508 compliant as well. Avoid using the TABLE tag if you can accomplish the same thing using simple XHTML tags and CSS.
  4. Begin to write content for all of your pages. Make sure you have a page for free resources that will help you get organic traffic from the search engines. Hire a copywriter to write keyword dense articles for you. You need at least 20 to see an impact on your traffic. Make sure these articles are answering the questions that web surfers are asking the search engines. Lay all of your articles out on your pages and remember to continue adding articles at least weekly to keep the traffic coming in.
  5. Start an Article Marketing campaign. Write an article that isn’t on your website and begin to distribute that article to article directories. Try Article Submitter for a great application that does it for free. Submit only to article sites that have good PageRanks. Sometimes it might be a good idea to “spin” your articles prevent getting held up in Google’s duplicate content penalty. Write a few articles if necessary and submit them on different iterations to remaining directories.
  6. Create a squeeze page on your site where you’re trying to sell your product. Make sure that the squeeze page is making conversions from your current SEO campaign. Once you find a good conversion rate…
  7. Start a Google AdWords campaign and begin to direct traffic to that squeeze page that has a good conversion rate. At this point, it’s a matter of spending money to make money–fueling a money making machine.
  8. Begin to promote that same squeeze page on as many advertising services as possible. Consider starting a Site Targeted Campaign on as many relevant website as possible.
  9. And finally, rake in the dough!

This is my “formula” and it works every time for me. Keep in mind, I didn’t include time periods in this because the amount of time you should spend on each step is contingent upon Google’s time to crawl your website, the time for you get a PageRank, and the time it takes for you to complete your tasks (like writing articles, designing website, optimization, etc.) I recommend that if you’re interested in marketing your product or service, begin optimizing your website for SEO. For the most part, SEO is completely free and sometimes has better conversion rates than PPC. Start your PPC campaign when you know the results are coming in and that your converting traffic.

Article written by Andrew J. McClary, © 2008, All Rights Reserved.

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Comments

One Response to “My “Formula” to Getting Traffic”

  1. Ivana on April 17th, 2008 6:37 am  Add karma Subtract karma  +0

    Hi there, I like your article. Actually I do all of this, except for PPC. I am still scared to spend my money on PPC, so I am bumming. Writing articles and publishing everywhere. I like ezine the most. Associate Content is good too, but too many links in the text, goes on my nerves :). Anyways, I have a small build a niche store training set up as well, helping people quickly set up their stores.

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