When you first set up a new website it’s natural to do all you can to make sure as many people as possible see it. Over time you learn that a small amount of targeted traffic is better than a large amount of visitors from all directions – many of whom don’t have any interest in your site.
But you can easily become a victim of your own success. When your efforts result in a steady stream of targeted traffic it’s all too easy to sit back and relax, watching that steady stream continuing to come in. That is fine, but why don’t you aim for the next level and try and find more streams of targeted traffic to add to it?
You probably already know that the more people you can get to visit your site who have an interest in what you want to sell, the more sales you will make. That much is obvious, and you’ll get a much higher conversion rate of visitors into sales than you will from a general audience, who mostly just sucks up your bandwidth each month.
So think about what other methods you can use to find more targeted traffic. Which advertising methods can you use to get good results? Can you do things for free which don’t take much effort to get up and running? Even if you have to tweak them or do a little regular work every now and again to keep them working, it’s worth it if you get a lot of visitors in return who are genuinely interested in what you do.
However successful you are at the moment, targeted traffic can get you to the next level of online success. All you need to do is sit down and work out how you are going to get there.
Making money online is most often done when you focus on a niche. You might have several areas of expertise or focus instead of just one and this is OK provided that you really learn your stuff and focus on getting knowledgeable in that area. Research and perseverance will ensure you’re maximising your profit earning potential. A niche will do better for you because you can get knowledgeable about a subject and your website will be better understood by the search engines who want to know how to categorise your site. Here are three tools to help you make the most of your efforts.
Keyword research is really important in any niche and doing a bit of research can help you find popular and profitable niches. There are all kinds of tools online that are free and available for a fee that can help you learn about the popular online categories and keywords to focus on.
The above links can help you learn more about what’s being searched for so you can decide where to focus your efforts.
Using tools to help you discover what people are looking and what types of searches are being done for a particular category help you learn to work those keywords into your content so that you’ll get picked up by the search engines for your targeted key phrases and increase your chances of getting clicks or making sales.
People love free stuff and there’s a huge online industry built on the internet user’s desire to win something or get something for nothing. Use the giveaway or contest to help you with several areas of online business. You can use this to your advantage in internet marketing in several ways.
A free report, a gadget, even something small like a gift card or a free book can help you in several ways including: increasing subscribers, generating traffic, building a mailing list and increasing your SEO.
You can do the above in several ways including asking people to write about you on their blog with a link or referring others to your site. They can also write in comments on your blog as well as do social bookmarking to tell others about your contests.You can even really utilise the contest entry by building a mailing list and starting to build an autoresponder series. Use names of contest entries to try to sell other products or services of yours (do be sure you offer an opt-out link.).
In terms of building a following and getting attention, the small investment you make in a giveaway can result in your making more money online overall.
If you are still in the planning stages of your website and you haven’t even got your domain name in the bag yet, now is the time to make sure you pick one that won’t embarrass you at a later date.
We all know that all the good ones have gone – allegedly – but it’s still important to make sure that the one you do finally decide on is easy to read, easy to understand and doesn’t need to be spelt out when you say it out loud to someone.
Here are a few good ways to see whether you have chosen the right domain name:
• Write it down – complete with the http:// bit – on a piece of paper. This sounds a bit mad but if you can see what your domain name looks like written down you’ll get an idea of whether it will work or not
• Tell a few other trusted people what domain name you are thinking of using. If you get comments like ‘Huh?’ or ‘Say that again?’ or ‘Can you spell that?’ then it might be worth having a rethink
• Try it with and without hyphens if you have more than one word in your suggested URL. Hyphens can be a pain but a longer URL can look totally confusing without them
In the end it’s just as much a matter of personal taste as it is anything else. You will have to live with your choice so make sure it’s a good one. You also need to ensure you think about keywords – don’t go for an obscure title that won’t help you in the search engines just because it sounds good. Put traffic flow first – you won’t get many visitors without it.
Ok? So go and choose a great domain name – and then grab it before someone else does.
