Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

Search Engines and SEO

Traffic Potential

The traffic from search engines is theoretically unlimited, but it’s easy to find out the potential of specific keywords using Google’s External Keyword Tool. For instance, I know that there are 74,000 searches for the exact match phrase “keyword tools”. The potential of that keyword match is about 74,000. If you search for all of the key words you’d like to rank for you can sum them up and know your potential. Remember things like overlap between keywords though.

Building Volume

Building volume from search engines is probably the easiest way to drive traffic to your website. You just need to rank (and not necessarily that high) for your search phrases. There are two fundamental ways to build volume on your website through Search Engine Optimization. Those are: off-site optimization and on-site optimization.

On-site SEO is what most people think of when they think of SEO. That being said, I think it is the least useful. I feel like (by far) Google’s algorithm favors off-site SEO over on-site SEO. That is, of course, my opinion. You can do things, such as making sure you have relevant title tags, meta descriptions, and h1 content. You can also make sure that the linking structure on your site contributes the most link juice to the main page of your site (if that’s what you’re going for).

Off-site SEO is, for the most part, link building. You want back links to your site to give you ‘authority’ for the key words you’re trying to rank for. Each backlink you get is like a ‘vote’ for your site in the search engine.

You can get backlinks from a ton of places, like forums, blog comments, guest posts, articles, etc. The best way to determine if another website is worth putting time into is to look at the place where your link is most likely to show up, view the HTML source for those links, and check for this in the anchor tag:

rel=”nofollow”

If that’s over your head, just hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, or email and I’ll help you out. I can even look at the site for you.

The other major thing to keep an eye out for on your backlinks is the anchor text. Make sure the anchor text you’re leaving behind contains the keywords you’re trying to rank for. This means that if you’re putting them in your signature on a forum, don’t link to ‘My Website’, link to ‘Keyword Tools’ or whatever is relevant to what you’re working on.

I will be covering more on backlink building later in the ‘Referral Traffic’ section.

Referral Traffic

Traffic Potential

Referral traffic has unlimited potential (well, limited to every site on the Internet). Theoretically you can have EVERY website link to you and people would visit you through those links. Referral traffic can be pretty great, especially when it’s coming from highly trusted or niche specific sources. Something to be wary of is quantity versus quality. For example, ten visitors from a blog that converts at 50% are much more valuable than 100 visitors from a news site that converts at 1%.

Building Volume

There are really two major types of referral traffic, and those are paid sources and unpaid sources. Paid sources include ad networks like Google Adwords, or sponsored links, like the top listings on YellowPages.com. Un-paid sources are like twitter and Facebook updates, blog comment links, forum signatures, etc.

Paid Sources

Setting up ads using networks like Google Adsense or Facebook is the most common form of paid traffic, but you can also buy paid links and banners directly on other websites. Paid sources, when set up correctly can be a great source of targeted, convertible traffic. Be careful of paid linking as many of the search engines, especially Google frown upon it.

You can also outsource the generation of your traffic to physical people, or start an affiliate program. You can start paying affiliates $1 for everyone they get to sign up for your list. You can also hold a contest, giving away an iPad to the biggest source of referrals to your site over a given period of time. Always be wary of people “gaming” a system though.

Un-paid Sources

Building unpaid backlinks for referrals can be pretty easy. Unlike with SEO backlink building, you don’t need to worry about if the links are giving you ‘votes’. You’re merely trying to drive traffic to your site via other sites. Great sites include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Digg.

Un-paid sources, of course, also include everything I mentioned in the SEO section above. I find that the best ROI is usually with websites that generate both traffic and “follow” links, so always be aware of the “follow” / “nofollow” value of your links, even though that may not be specifically relevant to this type of traffic.

Direct Traffic

Traffic Potential

Direct traffic is probably the best kind of traffic you can generate. It’s also probably the hardest to track. Direct traffic is virtually unlimited and the quality of visits is really high. The reason the quality is so high is because someone is physically entering your address into their browser to visit your website, so not only is it more work than other methods, but it also requires a bit of recall. Ultimately that means they want to be on your website.

Building Volume

You can literally build volume for this an unlimited number of ways. There are really only 4 categories of how to do it though. They are: offline marketing, video/audio, word of mouth, and collateral from other online marketing. Each of those probably has another whole subset of ways to market, but we’ll probably save that for another day.

Offline Marketing

You can do print advertising, such as business cards, pens, or magazine ads. The ROI of those things can be debated endlessly. The reality is that in some niches they work, and in others they don’t. You can also make shirts and and sponsor events and things like that. All of those things will associate a brand and website with the people involved, and they will become (hopefully) direct traffic users on your site.

Video and Audio

Video and Audio include both online and offline media, so when I’m talking about making a commercial, I mean it can be used on YouTube, Hulu, or your local Fox station. Audio can be in the form of podcasts or radio advertising. You might also be able to do a special radio spot on your local radio station. ALWAYS mention your website in your video and audio recordings, no matter how small. You need to make it part of your introduction: “Hello, I’m James Thompson from jtGraphic.net.”

Word of Mouth

This can have an almost viral effect on the growth of your traffic. The trick is: you have to have something worth talking about. If you have something worth talking about, people will tell their friends, blog about it, or in some other way, spread the word. Be wary – this works with negative feedback as well.

I built my first successful business almost entirely on word of mouth advertising. Every other type of advertising I did for that business was supplemental – like business cards were just a tool for people to remember my web address and phone number.

Collateral Advertising

This is when you generate direct traffic from other advertising that fits into one of the other three categories, because the person viewing your advertising stepped outside of the channel they were supposed to follow. For instance, when you have a Google Ad, and someone notes the URL and types it into the browser, it will register as direct traffic, and not a “click”. This is good and bad.

It is good, because you don’t have to pay for it, but that’s about it. You can’t track it, which is horrible. Thankfully, the number of people that do that is so low that it will hardly register. Other instances of this collateral are situations where your advertising causes people to talk and in turn generates word of mouth. Think about those risque Evony ads. People talk about them all the time. They know how to drive traffic.

Your List

Traffic Potential

This is another one of those potentially unlimited traffic sources. Right now, the potential is the size of the list. A 75 person list will probably get something under 75 visits (I usually guess around 50%). A 7500 person list will probably get something under 7500 visits.

The ratio of conversions from a double opt-in list are amazing. People must work to be part of your list and thusly want to receive it. This means they trust you, and depending on the frequency of your mailings, will usually buy from you if it makes sense to them.

Single-opt and non-opt lists don’t convert very well at all, especially if the list was acquired through some sort gray-hat or black-hat scheme. Usually non-opt lists are considered spam and will burn you, and many times you can get flagged for spam from single-opts as well.

Building Volume

Building your list can be difficult, especially if you don’t get much traffic or are just starting out. The finer points of building a list we’ll cover later, but basically your goal is to collect as many double-opt-in email addresses as possible.

Frank Kern, whom I have mixed feelings about build something called ListControl a while back, which helps increase the growth of your list. It’s not a novel piece of software, but it’s already built and free. Basically the concept is that you give people something free. If they refer your list to “x” number of other people, then they will receive something else that’s free, but cooler. The process just repeats itself until there is a viral-like effect.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you should always be building your traffic via all of these methods, all the time. Always be tracking the analytics of your website and figure out which traffic sources convert the best in terms of ROI. Remember that ROI involves both time and money. You should dedicate the bulk of your time to the sources with the best ROI, but always be trying the others in case the landscape of your niche changes.

This was meant as a stepping stone guide to building traffic, and I’ll be following up with more in-depth posts about each of these topics later.  For now, please throw your questions at me.  Feel free to email me or comment below.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

Get attention and be successful.

I recently read Jim Kukral’s book ‘Attention: This Book Will Make You Money‘ and loved it. I gave away a copy of the book to a reader yesterday. He really sums up what a lot of other people say about websites in a different way. Most other people discuss how traffic is the driving source behind revenue on a website and they’re totally correct. Some people say that in order to drive traffic, content is king and marketing is the queen (I actually think that was Gary Vaynerchuk, but I’m not sure). What it really comes down to is attention. If you want attention, build a good product. If you don’t have a product (or a good product), you can make up for that and get attention by doing something out of the ordinary or outrageous. Just don’t go after negative attention.

This entire week will be focused on some of the great things I learned while reading Jim’s book. I really do mean it when I say you should get it. If you don’t you’ll be missing out on some huge opportunity.

Commitment

15+ Hours. It really depends on how creative you are.

Put yourself on peoples’ radar and execute.

The Idea

The very first thing you need to do is have an idea of what you’re going to do to get attention. There are a ton of easy ideas like contests or paying for traffic and ads. When you’re dealing with a low budget, things get a bit more complicated. You need to come up with something truly original that doesn’t cost a lot of money. Sometimes people with huge budgets are even good enough at coming up with ideas that they can get a ton of attention with little to no money.

Try standard methods like press releases and asking friends to talk about it. Consider getting into things like video or other new formats for delivering content. Do something fun that people enjoy seeing. Out of the blue, I agreed to beer funnel some amazing beer made by a friend of mine at Affiliate Summit. Doing that with some high profile bloggers got both me and my friend a ton of exposure all over the internet. That didn’t cost me a thing. It didn’t take a lot of time, and it was a ton of fun. I haven’t seen any coverage of Affiliate Summit that didn’t at least mention that. Win.

Make sure people see what you do.

You can have a killer idea, but make sure you get exposure. Make sure that if you come up with something you shamelessly promote it until your fingers bleed. Get on Facebook, Twitter, other blogs, do press releases to the big news sites and hit up traditional media like television and radio. Look for sponsors who will give you some exposure to their customers too. Hit up forums and discuss what you’re doing too. This is also a great time to get feedback from people on whether or not your idea is good or not.

Consider doing a pre-launch or pre-event to build up some hype and get people talking. If you can provide a way for people to take the information viral, do that. The more people that talk about it, the more exposure you’ll get. Word of mouth advertising is also the single biggest form of advertising you can use.

Go.

All of the stuff I mentioned above is sort of wishy washy and not very concrete. You want something concrete? Spend the rest of today coming up with something novel. If you have trouble coming up with one, contact me. I’ll help you. I’m great at it. Spend the other six days this week promoting your idea a few hours a day. On the seventh day: execute. Use this as your motivation to launch from the foundation you’ve already built.

Go.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 6

Get social.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged.  You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.

Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.

Commitment

12 hours or more.

Constantly be Producing Content

Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.

Twitter

Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.

There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.

Facebook

You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.

You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.

Problems I Had Last Week

I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.

How are things going so far?

Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3

Here’s my submission for the Shoemoney System Theme Song:

The Rob Hustle video is pretty good, but this is different and makes a better ‘theme song’ I think.  What do you think?

Why did I do this?

Shoemoney is having a contest for a theme song, and giving the winner $1000 plus a trip to the Playboy Mansion for the Azoogle party.  I’m going this year hell or high water.  Check out the contest page.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Shoemoney System Theme Song

The video below is extremely inspiring.  Often times people don’t appreciate what they have and will complain: “things can’t get any worse,” “my life sucks,” or “what do I have to live for?”  Optimism, hope, and determination give us strength.  Next time you’re feeling down or need motivation, watch this:

Be happy with what you have.  Be happy with what you’ve done.  Be happy for what is to come.  Be happy.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Inspiration and Being Happy

Ok Everyone, I told you I’d get you some great shots from the Affiliate Summit Triathlon, and they’re here.  I’ll let the video do the talking.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Bonus Video

XFN is a guideline for linking on websites. It uses the “rel” tag to identify information about a link. Most commonly, the rel tag is used for “nofollow,” which is a technique for preventing search engines from following a link on your website. XFN uses this attribute to add information about the RELationship between the source of the link and it’s target. XFN only applies to people currently, and Google as well as other companies are developing software that maps this data and uses it to create useful information.

I was just reading the ShoeMoney blog, and stumbled across this video:

I think that XFN is a very exciting new technique that can be used to enrich the internet in a bunch of ways.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: What is XFN?