No matter how good your copy is, and no matter how smart and creative you are, without traffic, you are dead.Fancy graphics and flash do not matter if no one actually comes to your website to view them. Traffic is always the end game for anyone trying to publish ads or sell anything on the web.It may seem like a mystery to a lot of people, becuase so many products focus on SEO or PPC or web management products, with not much time devoted to the nuts and bolts of getting links and traffic. Very few actually work on where the heck you get traffic from.
With any venture on the web, your number one source of traffic for the long run should be natural, search engine based. Why?Once you work on a few keywords that get decent search volume, this source of traffic is FREE and consistent.PPC and other methods are also fine, but are also subject to other risks ($$$ cost) that really have to be managed. Basically you need links and content - this is the key to getting higher rankings on Google.
One way to get links is through submitting niche articles related to your site to an article directory. Once you decide on what type of site you want to build to either sell stuff OR just do adsense revenue, its a good idea to write at least 20 articles (300-500 words).Make sure you have signed up for an Adsense and Adwords account before you write any articles, even if you have no plans to use them.Google has several great free tools for doing keyword research. You don’t need to spend days researching keywords BUT you really need to pick 3 or 4 keywords to focus on for your articles that get decent traffic in the search engines and are related to your topic. Another tool you can use that is free is PPC Web Spy (just google it) – it allows you to see what keywords people are bidding on for their PPC ads on Google – again, they have probably done extensive work since they are paying for the ad clicks – no reason you cannot just benefit from their work and use some of those keywords.
Once this is done, make sure you write at least 5 articles per keyword grouping (2 for each article) with links to your site using those keyworeds.Do not try to focus on too many keywords at once - you will need 200-300 links on each to really have any impact, the larger the list, the harder it is to focus on all of them at once. This is where any article directory comes in handy.You then sumbit your article which is then redistributed for you by the directory to others looking for content or to learn about a subject.This really does make getting links easier and faster in the long run - it just takes a bit of time to start working. In addition, you may want a tool to help rewrite your articles so that many different versions are distributed to thousands of sites. This is a key to quicker ranking on the engines as the same thing distributed over and over just does not do the trick.
In addition to articles, you will want to submit your site on all the major social networks like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, etc.The more of that the better. You will want to create an account on all of them - very time consuming but needs to only be done one time.You can do a search on Google or other engines for a list of the major ones. Once this is done, there are of course tools that will automate a posting to all of the accounts at the same time - again most of these have a fee to use per month BUT save you a ton of time.
Most stuff you want to do on the web can be found for free, but the key is free vs time saved by paying for tools to help automate stuff. I usually opt for the time saving tools - in the long run its really worth it as there are only so many hours in the day. Its always a trade off of time and ease of use vs paying for it.Some things I accomplish with completely free tools, others I pay a monthly fee to use because of the amount of time saved so I can get more done.
Of course there is more than these 2 steps - but if these 2 are only done you should start seeing results in about a month. Longer term, even once you get ranking, you need a plan to continually feed articles to directories – not as often as the beginning, but you really want to do at least 1 per month per keyword to keep fresh links coming into the search engines. Over time, the content you distributed that Google finds links to disappears as sites go offline, content is deleted and replaced etc.Once you have a decent amount of articles written, you can often just do a complete rewrite of an older article and then submit that again.
