No Traffic. No Money.
- ARTICLES |
Internet Marketing Catch 22
As important "taking action" is to your Internet marketing business there is an equally important component that is often overlooked or glossed over quickly... traffic.
I'm not talking about the rush hour commute you dream of ditching... it's web traffic.
The principle of Internet marketing is simple. You need to sell something to make money online. This can be your own product or selling stuff as an affiliate (other people’s products, eBay, CPA offers, whatever).
But just because you put a slick-looking website or squeeze page online doesn’t mean you should go running to check yourbank account just yet. You need traffic.
And there is your Catch-22. No Traffic. No Money.
Different Sources for Web Traffic
There are a million and one products out there selling you all their strategies and blueprints but I just break it down to paid and free traffic.
Over-simplified? Maybe. But it keeps me sane and making money online.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is stuff like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) the most popular being Google Adwords.
You can also strike deals with email marketers. Pay them to send a mailing to their list for your offer. You can pay them up-front for a solo-mailer or offer them a commission of 50% on up for any sales they make from the traffic they send you (commonly known as affiliate marketing or Joint Ventures).
There are a lot of other ways to spend your hard earned money but I want to keep things simple by just covering a couple ways that will work for you.
Free Traffic
You can get free traffic but it takes some elbow-grease by doing some stuff to ensure your website/offer appear in the search engines. That “stuff” is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
So lets focus on free traffic and SEO.
In my over-simplified world, SEO breaks down in two areas:
On-page and off-page.
On-page SEO is the stuff you do on your website. Using your target keywords in your content, title tags, domain name, having internal/external links on your site, etc.
Then we have off-page SEO stuff and there are a lot of ways of doing this…
If you’ve been studying Internet marketing online you know that list could go on and on, and on and on.
And that is part of the problem. There are so many traffic techniques that you’ll drive yourself mad trying to master them all. In the end you’ll end up frustrated and you’ll end up with little traffic and no money.
That’s the reason I recommend focusing on 2 or 3 strategies and then stick to them.
What I use and recommend…
Once you start getting traffic then go ahead and try other things but just stick to a few strategies at first.
Once you've selected 2-3 strategies for driving traffic to your website stick to those methods. Avoid the latest, greatest, hyped up thing and stick to those strategies.
If you work those methods you'll start seeing results. It won't overnight (unless you're going the paid traffic route) but you will start seeing traffic and sales.
As important "taking action" is to your Internet marketing business there is an equally important component that is often overlooked or glossed over quickly... traffic.
I'm not talking about the rush hour commute you dream of ditching... it's web traffic.
The principle of Internet marketing is simple. You need to sell something to make money online. This can be your own product or selling stuff as an affiliate (other people’s products, eBay, CPA offers, whatever).
But just because you put a slick-looking website or squeeze page online doesn’t mean you should go running to check yourbank account just yet. You need traffic.
And there is your Catch-22. No Traffic. No Money.
Different Sources for Web Traffic
There are a million and one products out there selling you all their strategies and blueprints but I just break it down to paid and free traffic.
Over-simplified? Maybe. But it keeps me sane and making money online.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is stuff like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) the most popular being Google Adwords.
You can also strike deals with email marketers. Pay them to send a mailing to their list for your offer. You can pay them up-front for a solo-mailer or offer them a commission of 50% on up for any sales they make from the traffic they send you (commonly known as affiliate marketing or Joint Ventures).
There are a lot of other ways to spend your hard earned money but I want to keep things simple by just covering a couple ways that will work for you.
Free Traffic
You can get free traffic but it takes some elbow-grease by doing some stuff to ensure your website/offer appear in the search engines. That “stuff” is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
So lets focus on free traffic and SEO.
In my over-simplified world, SEO breaks down in two areas:
On-page and off-page.
On-page SEO is the stuff you do on your website. Using your target keywords in your content, title tags, domain name, having internal/external links on your site, etc.
Then we have off-page SEO stuff and there are a lot of ways of doing this…
- Article Marketing
- Social bookmarking
- Blog commenting
- Forum marketing
- Social networking (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Press Releases
If you’ve been studying Internet marketing online you know that list could go on and on, and on and on.
And that is part of the problem. There are so many traffic techniques that you’ll drive yourself mad trying to master them all. In the end you’ll end up frustrated and you’ll end up with little traffic and no money.
That’s the reason I recommend focusing on 2 or 3 strategies and then stick to them.
What I use and recommend…
- Article marketing.
- Video Marketing.
- Social bookmarking.
- Press releases.
Once you start getting traffic then go ahead and try other things but just stick to a few strategies at first.
Once you've selected 2-3 strategies for driving traffic to your website stick to those methods. Avoid the latest, greatest, hyped up thing and stick to those strategies.
If you work those methods you'll start seeing results. It won't overnight (unless you're going the paid traffic route) but you will start seeing traffic and sales.
Alan Petersen has been a full-time Internet Marketer and Infopreneur 2007. You can follow me on Twitter and get more advice and tips on my Internet Marketing Blog.