How do I increase traffic
So now you have your website made, but business is slow. You are probably wondering, how do I get people to come to my site? I am only getting like 10 hits per day. It doesn’t happen overnight, you have to give the internet a chance to find you.
There are many different ways to increase traffic. You can start by visiting similar sites in your niche and asking the webmaster if they want to do a link exchange. Link exchanges are usually free, and most average Joe webmasters don’t mind. You then need many more sites linking to you. You could reply to comments on other web sites, or find some sites that allow you to add your own URL to their list. By replying to comments, not only are you going to get some traffic off of it, but you are creating what is called a back link. Back links can help you get page rank on Google, but that is a different subject.
You have tried to get some webmasters to link to you, and submitted your site to some free link pages. I would suggest trying to find some top list sites. It really depends on your niche. I would Google up something like “cooking top100″ or “cooking top list”. Top list sites are just a list of banners numbered 1-whatever. The more hits through them, the farther up the page your banner goes. If your topic is popular, then you could see some decent hits from a good top list site.
Well what else can I do? You could spam/promote your site on forums. I would suggest registering to a forum, again similar in topic. Look at the member count, members online, and the amount of topic/posts. If the forum looks active, then I suggest staying around. I would try to find the most popular forum on your topic to ensure the maximum amount of people see it. Create a signature (sig), which is basically a banner promoting your site. Every time you post on the forum, the sig will be displayed at the bottom of your post. Try to be active on the forum and get your post count up. When you gain more respect on forums, more people are apt to check out links in your sig because they develop a trust.
Pay per post services. You may have heard of Pay Per Post, or services similar, where you can either write a post and sell it to someone wanting to use it, or buy one to use on your own site as your own content. If you want to make out better on these services, create a back link to your site in the post. This is kind of evil, and you may want to check the rules for the service first and ensure that it is ok. This is why it is evil. For one, somebody else is going to pay you for the post you wrote. Two, that post has a back link, or two, to your website. I would have it say something like, “According to Shudogg.com, gas prices have gone up. Check out the full story.”
Now that is just an example, the second link doesn’t exist. Mouse over and you see that the text “Shudogg.com” links to my homepage. The text, “Check out the full story”, is a deep link. A deep link helps Google keep a good index of pages you definitely want seen.
Posting often, consistent, and quality content will bring readers back. If I go to a website, then go back again a week later, I will quickly close the page if nothing has changed. You want the readers to see a change every time they visit. A website that has good content, will get linked by other web masters.
Well, what are you waiting for? Start putting some of these practices to good use. Don’t worry about getting thousands of sites to link to you overnight.
Start Your Own Blog
Many of you must have missed the memo. You are probably asking, what is a blog? Well google the word blog and see what you get. I should get paid to advertise for google. Everytime I say GOOGLE, I should get paid a dollar. If someone asks me, “where do I find suchandsuch”, usually my first thought is, “GOOGLE”. I run to google for everything. I use it to check the spelling of words, or to find the definition of some big word I don’t recognize. Someday soon I will post a tutorial on using google. But now it is time for this post.
You googled up “blog”, and now you want one right? You probably found John Chow Dot Com (who should also pay me for saying his name lol). Now you are saying, I want to make 27k a month blogging too. Well hold on a second, and shift your gear to reverse. You need to set a realistic goal. I am sure JC didn’t say he wanted to make six figures blogging. Actually he started blogging for free, then turned his viewers into little workers to make him money. So if your intent is to make money, set a realistic goal for the first six months. Then ask where you want to be in a year, then five years down the road with your blog.
Right now you are on day -14. I say negative because it could take you about two weeks to get your blog in place and make it ready for the big bad internet. You need to think of a few things. What do I want my niche to be. This means, what topic do I want to focus on. You don’t have to focus 100% on this topic, but majority of your posts should be related to it. If you start a niche of “Cooking”, and in a handful of posts talk about rebuilding cars, you may end up losing visitors. Your people came to your site because it was something they were interested in, don’t mislead them.
You have your topic, now think of a dot com address. Jot a handful of them down. Ask someone else to think of a few, without them knowing what you came up with. Remove the duplicates. Ask their opinion on what you have. If they think one is too long, or they wont remember it, or it doesn’t sound right, then remove it. You will always like what you came up with, but you need someone else to think for your future visitors.
You have your niche, and now a few domain names to choose from. It is time for a web host. I honestly prefer 1and1. I have dealt with them building my dad’s website. I have nothing bad to say about them at all, and you get two domain names for free with your hosting. They have really good prices too! I have heard of others, like go daddy, but I know many people that have left go daddy due to server issues. I had my account ready in about two hours after paying!
You have many options on how to present your web site now. You could write the code yourself or use a software like Microsoft’s FrontPage to build it for you. If you don’t have any knowledge of building a web site, I suggest WordPress. It isn’t for dummies though so don’t be fooled. I have a lot of knowledge in creating websites, and it is what I use. It makes it really easy to post updates. Research a little into it, and check out different pages using the different engines and make your decision.
If you chose WordPress then you need to upload the folder to your webserver. I use CuteFTP to upload my content. You need to read the instructions on how to set up the database and the WP config file. It isn’t too difficult. You then login at site.com/wp-login.php and enter the credentials you put into the config file.
Now you have a web page. There are many free themes out there to choose from, or you can create your own. There are also Premium WordPress Theme sites that will make one for you, but some are a hefty price. I recommend waiting and using the income from your site to cover the costs. Also there are tons of plugins and widgets to present the content the way you want it. The finer details will be in a later tutorial, right now we are wanting to get you on your feet.
You need to start the construction process. Get your theme to look the way you want (if making one yourself). Create additional pages for downloads, links, tutorials, whatever you are wanting to do with your site. That part takes the longest for those who are building your own theme. If you use a pre-made one, then it should all be done for you.
So you have the site looking the way you want? Add more content. Make another post for your first visitors. Add links, tutorials, whatever you are providing on your site. You want to make sure you have some content for your first visitors.
In this article I helped you get on your feet. We covered the process of coming up with your site, getting your hosting, choosing the engine powering your sites content, the construction on getting it to look the way you want, and finally what you do when your done.
My next post will be on how to come up with something to blog about, using news sites and other blogs.
Some more small work done
I have still been working on my site, I know it has been 2 days since my last post. Some things I am going to do are: Fix money maker images, fix affiliates images, add the rest of my sponsors, I am not sure about the hot deals section (I was going to use TLA to auto update it, but got denied due to low traffic/pagerank), blogroll the recommended sites, sort the recent posts in descending order. I am not sure about the rest of the sidebar widgets yet. My idea was to make a banner rotator that would rotate the different ads, and have a next arrow to cycle through my ads. In the footer I want the IE7, Firefox, and Wordpress icons. Get the adsense collapse code to work to get rid of the ugly gap at the bottom of the posts that don’t have an Adsense banner. I need to redo the banner at the top and make it look high quality instead of choppy. I also am going to add a navigation menu across the top right below the banner.
I think that about wraps it up with the main page. Still a lot of work to do, but it is going together nicely. On the rest of the pages I need to implement the theme to the post pages, and I am adding the “Comment Luv” for posting comments. I will focus on the internal pages of the site when the main page is 100% done.
This is mostly a running list for me. I will be posting the tutorials, links, software, and everything else when my site is finished. I assure you major content will be coming to this site. I plan to make it an actual website, but in a blog form to make it easy to post updates on the main page.
I hope you all are enjoying the look and feel of the site so far. Please post comments to help get the site active in the mean time. Any links to my site, back links, anything will help me out a ton!
Thank you for being patient!
Still awake at 4am
I am still awake working on this site at 4am. I have seen a few bucks already since I started the advertising programs like Google Adsense. I just did one for Technorati. Check out my Technorati Profile. I am doing all that I can to get my website seen. More traffic = more money. I have been in the flow for a little while. I don’t want to go to bed and lose where I was.
I love Wordpress. I have a feeling I am going to PWN this thing soon. I am learning new things with it daily. Once I get the coding of everything mastered, nobody can stop me. I also like the fact that I can add banners right into my posts.
Well time to wrap things up. I have some money to make.
A lot of work done today
I have done a lot of work to the site in the last 24 hours. You can’t see much of it, but it is underneath the pretty site. I signed up with a few advertising/affiliate programs. A few of them are already active, and the rest are awaiting approval and an email back before I can add the code. I have a few of the codes in a notepad document waiting for my ad rotating widget. I will be creating a widget to the side that will rotate different banners. right now I have like 4 different programs to rotate between (1and1, Amazon, Bidvertiser, and Shopping Ads). I would like to have them all presented at the same time, but I think it will make the site look like a sell out and deter visitors. So I feel if I rotate between them, I can even out the clicks to them. I may be losing a little by not having a specific ad presented all the time, but I feel over all of them I will profit more.
After I get all my programs in place, and I get the rest of the site finished the way I want it, I will be submitting to search engines and using an SEO pack. I will also post on other blogs, forums, and link exchange with others. Getting linkbacks will improve my pagerank and boots my traffic. Everything will be done legit, no spamming or anything of that nature.
When the construction of the site settles down, I will make different sizes of banners and buttons for others to use to link to my site. Then I will tweak the RSS feed.
If you are looking for tutorials, they are coming soon. Same with the downloads and everything else. I apologize, but I have to get all my ships in a row before I can start expanding the site.
