Getting Traffic

Getting traffic to your site - visitors - is an important part of success. But I want to stress now, that I think conversion - getting people to click on ads - is more important.

Although big traffic is the buzz most people lust after, my approach to traffic is more organic; I do little to force it to happen and I believe my time - and yours - is better focused on making other things happen.

Given the time and money you have, you will be faced deciding how best to invest your time. My personal opinion, based on my own experience, is that your time is best invested into building sites.

I have wasted countless hours seeking link exhanges - even using software to do it - that produced little in the way of tangible results. So my suggestion for building traffic is this simple.

1. Follow my SEO guidelines to help make your page as "relevant" as possible, on page.

2. Make a few posts at the forums I've specified and include a text link to your new site.

3. Submit some articles to article directories.

4. Randomly and sparingly, interlink your own sites. DO NOT interlink all of your sites to all of your sites. A to B, B to C, C to D - OK. A to B,C,D - B to A, C, D, etc, not OK.

5. Exchange some links via our Adsense Income forum.

It's important to note with link exhanges that it's best if it appears tot he search engines as "random and natural". I strongly discourage you from using services like Link Metro - or any automated softare. I have used them, and almost all of those pages result in a PR0 from Google. At best, I believe it's a waste of time - at worst, it's getting your site penalized or deindexed. Avoid.

NOTE ON TRAFFIC: There are certainly ways to be more aggressive with getting traffic to your site - from using Pay Per Click (Google Arbitrage) to aggressively seeking link exhange partners. I don't go deeply into these approaches, because I use them myself on a limited basis. My method for building traffic is to allow the natural course to take effect. As of May 2006, the Fireplace Outdoors site now receives an average of 87 visitors per day with a CTR in the 40% range. Complete site promotion has been posting one link in a forum, posting two articles to GoArticles.com article directory, and links on two of my other sites. That's it! Would the site benefit from more promotion and exposure? Maybe - but I've put that effort into other sites (spending countless hours exchanging links) and they don't perform as well as this one. I suggest your primary promotion focus be article submissions to directories to gain maximum leverage on your time. The search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated at detecting SEO manipulation tactics, and for your long-term best interest I recommend you avoid them.

Random and natural.

Here are the primary ways of gaining traffic to your site, with a brief description of the pluses and minuses of each.

1. Search Engine Optimization

This is where our traffic, in the Adsense Income program, will come from primarily.

The plus is that it's free; the minus is that it takes time for this to happen and you have relatively little direct control over it happening. This is why I recommend that you start building and you keep building. Getting traffic from SEO requires some patience and faith.

Here are the key basics to SEO.

2. Pay Per Click Advertising

You can also pay to send traffic to your site with paid search engine ads. Sending traffic to an Adsense monetized site is known as "Adsense Arbitrage". The idea is that you pay for cheap traffic and hope that traffic clicks on higher paying ads on your site - the difference between what you've paid and what you make is your profit (or loss).

I've had some success with this approach, but it requires some more advanced skills. I don't recommend this approach if you're new to marketing. Some people would have you believe this is a sure, easy way to make money - it's not.

3. Articles

By submitting articles far and wide, you will gain a little traffic to your site - direct from the articles. The advantage is actually far greater by having many sites publish your articles with links pointing to your site. This gives you an important boost in the eyes of the search engine, suggesting to the search engines that you're site is an "authority" and thus giving you a boost in the rankings.

Article submissions are a "must do".

4. Your Own Newsletter

Almost every marketer suggests "the money is in the list". That means that having an email list of subscribers can be profitable. Building and maintaining a list can be profitable, but it also requires management, additional costs and the skill set to make it pay off. It's a skill set that I recommend you intend to develop. But if you're getting started, then I recommend planning this into the future - not now.

5. Viral or Word of Mouth

Again, there are many proponents of "going viral". But, it isn't an easy thing to pull off. Since I wouldn't recommend monetizing a viral success with Adsense, I won't cover it now. But, as you build your sites, you may give some thought to "How could I make this buzz-worthy, without detracting from the primary focus of the site? [which is to gain clicks on Adsense ads]."

Some semi-viral ideas to consider down the road