9.Generating Traffic Your Website

It’s time to start generating traffic to your website but how can you drive targeted traffic to your site? With so many strategies available to you, how can you know which approach is better for your particular niche? If you’ve been following my 10 step process to creating a successful affiliate website you have worked through sections 1 through to 8, and generating traffic is number nine in the series.

Being new to online marketing you may feel overwhelmed by the options and the depth of knowledge required to move forward in any particular direction. While this is essentially true, a step by step approach to building your traffic incrementally is the best approach. You will by now have been exposed to the ideas of both free and paid traffic generation, blogging, paid ads, and social media.

The aim of this post is to give a 10,000 feet overview of the options available to you but the detailed strategies involved in any particular option will be out of scope for this post.

As I was saying, web traffic is delivered via one of two fundamental varieties —FREE and PAID.

For those starting out in online marketing, the Holy Grail will always be free, targeted, organic traffic which I will pay close attention to in this post. Although everyone likes ‘FREE’ be aware that moving forward you may find that an already successful campaign may be scaled up with the use of paid ad campaign designed to retarget a proven source of traffic. So it could be that your future strategies include a mix on both free and paid traffic.

For the purpose of this post I am concentrating on free traffic generation, but if you’re interested in learning more about paid traffic PPC, Wealthy Affiliate training camp has lots of tutorials.

Let’s look at some free traffic drivers used to drive free organic traffic to websites.

Blogging

The aim of running a blog site is to create and maintain an authority site with expertise in a chosen field, publishing helpful posts and offering guides for those struggling to complete their tasks. But how do you get your blog out there to your readership that’s desperately looking for your help?

# You can submit your blog to directories such as Dmoz or Alltop and submit to the search engines like Google and Bing. It’s arguable whether these submissions actually help your site to get noticed any quicker but it can’t do any harm right?

# When you see a strategy that seems to work when you’re checking result in Google Analytics, make sure you focus on what works. It doesn’t matter if it’s unexpected or unplanned, just follow whatever strategy works.

# A nice way to offer quality, get noticed, and start an email list is by offering a free product like an eBook. This could be something you created yourself or bought as a white label product for the purpose of giving away.

# When you see your blog is getting traffic and comments are starting to arrive, remember to leverage every comment by replying and entering into a discussion, asking questions, answering questions, and generally inviting more and more interaction.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Building your blog site you’ll need to think hard about your SEO. This means you need to understand your product, your audience and know what they are looking for before you can develop your keyword strategy and build out your content. The point of SEO is to improve the visibility of your site and its content to the search engines so people search for you can find you on the first page of results.

# Work on creating ‘long tail’ keyphrases that target your audience with pinpoint laser targeted accuracy.

# In addition to your ‘long tail’ keyphrase strategy, consider all the other words that may be related to your niche or product and think about how you can leverage these words. Can you write additional posts to target these additional keywords?

# Headline and subheaders are your roadmaps. Use these well and your readers can navigate directly to your content of interest. Not only that but your headline have to pull your readers in, compelling them to click on your header and read your content.

Social Media

Social Media is an enormous area to cover but let’s just go over the basics. Your presence on social media is critical to getting your content out there and seen by your readership.

Take time to develop a presence on as many social networks as possible but the most prevalent are Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+. An important idea to keep with you is the idea of interaction, don’t just post and run….treat others on your social network like humans and interact with them and create discussion.

# Every post you write needs to be pinned on Pinterest, tweeted on Twitter, published on Facebook, linked in LinkedIn and so on….get my drift? Post frequently and post 24/7 using Hootsuite

# Facebook: Start a Facebook group and submit a post that creates discussion and promotes interest in your post

# Submit your posts to StumbledUpon

# Join a blogging community like ProBlogger or CopyBlogger.

# Submit posts or comments to Reddit. This is a surprisingly efficient way to drive traffic to your site. Remember to open your account submit comments and interact with the community for a week before submitting your content, otherwise, you will be seen as a bit spammy and ignored, or worse.

Video Marketing

# Create videos for every post you write because video converts. That’s the truth!!! This is not everyone’s idea of fun but once you have made a few videos you start to get used to it and your video production becomes better over time. When you see the traffic that coming to you via Youtube you’ll forever be a fan.

Email Lists

# Bringing visitors to a website is the first step but we need to think further and try to make our visitors return again and again, or at least have a way to keep them in the loop so we can nurture a relationship and convert them into customers.

We do this by creating an email list so we can send our readership news and offers to keep them coming back to our site. Now we have an email list, every new blog post can be sent to their inbox.

Get Creative

Do you have top 5 list of websites in your niche? What if you created a list and wrote posts about those sites? What if you contacted these site and guest blogged and vice verse?

Summary
We have looked and the basics of promoting a website to gain free organic traffic for free. This list is, be no means exhaustive because there are always more new and exciting ways to promote your site.

When you become an affiliate marketer you will need to keep up to date with all the changes in the industry which is in constant flux.

If this sounds scary, don’t let it put you off because the rewards are worth the hard work, and you will see that you will never be far from help. There a wealth of information on the internet, you can also join programs like wealthy affiliate for free, which gives you all the training and support you need to start you own online business.

Don’t forget to read the whole series of my ’10 steps of creating a successful affiliate marketing website’.

1.Build your free site
2.Hosting
3.Niche Market
4.Keywords
5.Google analytics
6.Mailing lists
7.Writing content
8.Affiliate links
9.Traffic generation
10.Testing!

What do you think of my post, did it help you or give you any new ideas? Did I miss anything out or do you have any questions?