Why Can I Never Get Traffic Running To My Sites?

What is the exact searches per month for your keyword?

Have you spent any money? Sorry to say this but you might have to do that. It is difficult to get à decent ROI if time is the only thing you spend. Or maybe you just dikt write articles that are Roos enough. Try using à cooywriter?

searches of between 1500 and 10000 per month.

Ive spent about 2000 so far and dont have any websites making more then $1 a day.

Im actually starting to get upset thinking about it.

I just bought a house now my IM budget is almost 0.

I dont even know what to do anymore.

Thanks for the replies guys, I appreciate any and all advice.

D

Ive been working on this site for 2 months and I just want to flip it to make a profit to help get me back to even and reinvest the money into more logical ventures.

Flipping is the course Ive chosen to take but I cant get the traffic to get the sales.

Its kiling me, sorry to be dramatic, but its late and now Im emotional :S.

Thanks for the advice J.M.

D

Sorry to hear about your condition. Had you examined the competition in the field up front? How many back-links do the successful sites have? Sure would be interesting to heard how many you are seeing after that investment. Like he mentioned above, it takes time for search engines to 'credit' with with link juice for some links.
Your not likely to get back much of your investment flipping until you do have traffic. Hopefully like bottomed out stocks, it can only go up.

Sure sound like you've been conducting yourself properly and shouldn't be in the fabled sandbox. They say building too fast can get you sandboxed, but that seems to be 100s of links a day to a virgin domain.

Im going to earn my way to the war room by online sales. Dont give up. Fight on!

One of the "problems" with organic traffic is that it can take a while. It can take 8-12 weeks to start seeing descent traffic assuming your keyword is not very competitive. For those who need cash quickly, SEO may not be the best option for generating traffic since it takes time.

On the other hand, since cash may also be in short supply, it may be a catch 22. Its frustrating. I have been in that position too. SO I look for real LOW BUDGET advertising options ( $50 and under).

Alright, I have a question that continually boggles my mind.

What is "decent" traffic.

Do some people gauge 20 UV a day as good? 50? 250?

Im just so demoralized because I have been doing this since 2003 off and on.

I have been putting absolutely everything I have into it since last year and still have nothing to show for it.

I am working as hard as I can but feel I am getting nowhere.

To me it seems like Im doing all the right things, but how do I really know what all the right things are if Ive never really experienced success????

If anyone is willing to be a mentor, someone who has experienced success and is willing to pass it on I would be more then grateful and would do what I could to pay them through work, seeing as I have no more money.

The last 40 bucks went to the war room, probably the best money I have spent in the last 7 years.

Thank you for reading and replying everyone.

D

Where do you rank for your chosen keywords?

If you have chosen ones that get between 1500 and 10000 per month you should be getting more than a dribble of traffic so my guess is that you are not ranking high enough for organic traffic.

Without know your site and keywords it's pretty hard for anyone to really give you solid advice, but I certainly understand why you would not want to reveal them.

Lee

Patience and persistence are the keywords here. Keep working on those traffic generation methods and have some patience. Traffic takes time sometimes.

You might also need to make sure, those search numbers have to do with "exact" monthly searches on google. Sometimes the google keyword tool might show a huge number of searches in "broad" search. But the real numbers are the "exact" searches.

is this for generic? if your a "local business" then you need to target local marketing like Google places and yahoo local. I do "local" marketing and my clients get betwwen 200 and 800 visitors a month just from Google local analytics.
About Google places? Is it all about programs or are there any real services to help any business locally get top listings? What if you could offer any business #1 spot in Google places for not just 1 keyword but 3 or more keywords? What if they didn’t need to make 1 change to their web site? What if it didn’t matter what city or how big or small their business was? What if no matter what changes Google makes it has no effect our listings? What if they had top listings in their city and every surrounding city too? What if there was no long term contract? What if they also got top spots in Yahoo local for FREE? Well there is. I have clients who have a top 3 spot for 9 search terms in Google places, locally and have had them for 18 months. I also have 2 businesses in the top 5 in places, in the same city?

my rankings span from 5 to 25 for chosen keywords.

I have done exact match through google to find the search volume.

Sorry for this thread sounding so desperate, but if this doesnt work I have nothing.

I'll explain my entire keyword process.

1. Go to google adwords tool, set to US, set to exact, set to no less then 1000 global no greater then 50000 global.

2. take every keyword term adwords tool gives me, enter into excel sheet along with search volume.

3. manually go through and find competition number for every single term, enter it into excel sheet.

4. order by competition.

5. start from the top, search every single keyword and rate them according to the top 10 results, 1 being very easy to enter, 3 being forget about it.

6. find my main term as well as between 3 and 20 sub terms.

7. EMD search.

8. Purchase EMD or add stop word to end of EMD.

Then I would spend time installing themes, On page optimization. write content.

write content for each keyword I found. publish 2, schedule the rest.

leave the site for between 2 and three weeks.

start link building campaign, with blog comments, yahoo answers, forum profiles, article marketing, video marketing.

but regardless of how much I do it there is never a significant change.

Ive never gotten a term to number 1, even under my easy entry category with 200 links Im not seeing number 1.

Does it sound like Im doing it right??

Thank you everyone.

D

I rank between the 5th result ad the 25th result for the majority of my keywords.

If I reveal my site here would it still be possible for me to flip it when it ranks better?

I evaluate the SOC by rating the top tten results.

I do not know how to reverse engineer my competition.

Thanks Giles.

D

Yeah, but how do you "rate" them? By the # of backlinks? the quality of the links? The number of links that have the keyword in anchor text? The on page SEO?

If none of your keywords are #1, then it would seem you need to do more/better linking to get them there, right? Simple as that, really because typically the #1 slot gets the lions share of the traffic.

Of course, you also need to consider conversion but if you aren't getting any traffic it's kind of hard to play around with that.

I hope Giles, the Crew Chief weighs back in on this because I think he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do, but from a quick glance (at the ******* keyword), it seems like the #1 guy is beating you on high PR links.

I see that you have a lot of high PR links but they all appear to be nofollow (or link missing according to SEO Spyglass). Looks like you have 1 valid PR2 and a bunch of PR0's. Unless I screwed up my search.

Lee

Sounds like your market research is off mate.

Also, google adwords keyword tool is renowned for giving false data. So a keyword that says it's getting 1500 per month EXACT match, in reality may be only getting a trickle of that.

Google's keyword tool, while helpful for gaging the general, rough idea of traffic per keyword, is pretty unreliable at best.

Out of your list there you should keep up with video marketing and social networking. Be active in FB, twitter, youtube, and linkedin.

You should keep posting here on the forums and maybe 1 other. Don't forget about blog commenting. That's another easy way to generate traffic. If you find a blog that you really like then you might want to do a guest post if they allow it. You will get a lot of traffic from guest posting especially if the blog is active and gets a lot of traffic.

Hi! In my opinion, there are a lot of factors affecting Web traffic volume and "quality", such as niche, relevant micro niches, buyer demand urgency and volume, competitor reputation strength and popularity, etc. My suggestion is for these prerequisites to be satisfied before implementing my recommendations (just personal recommendations based on my own opinions, observations, inferences, test results and experience) below:

A. Niche market research, buyer group market research, affiliate and competition market research then keyword research.
B. Target a niche with relevant micro niches that have high buyer market volume consisting of people with immediate needs and urgent problems relevant to those niche and related micro niches as well as high buying power to satisfy those needs and solve such relevant problems.
C. Target a niche with relevant micro niches that have low competitor volume, strength and exposure/popularity.
D. Target relevant keywords with high global and local monthly volume and low competition volume/strength/popularity. These keywords should also be the most likely ones used by people included in the target buyer market when searching for relevant info/advice/content on the Internet to educate and inform themselves with updated and relevant content which can then allow them to have more informed decisions in getting content that can possibly solve their related problems and satisfy their relevant needs.
E. Develop products/services and content, or become an affiliate of merchants with products/services, which can satisfy the relevant needs and solve the related problems of the target buyer market. Formulate additional features of products/services and content which will provide more benefits to them, and those additional features should not be found in competing products/services/content providers to give the target buyer market unique value. Also implement enticing rewards/incentives/discounts/freebies/contests.
F. Create softsell onsite content offering benefits relevant to the needs and problems of target buyer market as well as related to my products/services. Products/Services should nicely supplement onsite content with more benefits and info/advice not found in onsite content.
G. Create softsell promotional content offering benefits relevant to the needs and problems of target buyer market as well as related to my products/services/onsite content. Onsite content and products/Services should nicely supplement promotional content with more benefits and info/advice not found in promotional content.

Recommendations: Google each keyword without quotes. Take note of the top 10 or 20 or so page and domain results. Identify the pages and domains in the top results that have high traffic volume relevant to the target buyer market. Identify pages and domains in the top results which allow content contributions from viewers. Determine pages and domains in those results which have high mailing list volume consisting of people included in your target buyer market group. Identify pages and domains included in those results which do not allow content contributions from viewers but could be amenable to certain arrangements, like free unique content (ebooks/articles/videos/software/etc.) as well as paid products/services/content with commissions per sale that are useful and relevant to the needs and problems of viewers in exchange for your banner ads, links and affiliate links along with recommendations and reviews from the owners of those sites included in the content they'll be posting on their sites or in their mailing list updates/newsletters.

Hope you find some points above which you could test and see for yourself if it helps in your target traffic generation campaigns. Also wrote an article here about Google SE ranking and Google Page Rank dependence being paralyzing in most cases for new Internet marketers.

You have tried too hard that I have understood from here.You did not say what your sites about?Your sites must be in niche that has demand and a reasonable searches every month.

Im in a competitive niche with a less competitive sub niche.

Im going to take a second look at everything Ive done and document how I can do it better.

Will report back with my findings for anyone following this thread.

D

so Im reverse engineering all of my competitors backlinks, I find webcomp analyst to be the easiest way to do this.

Just for anyone looking into it.

either you have to create your own high-ranking back links or it will take time for the back links to build orgainically.

I was slightly flattered the other day to find an article I had written and put on Ezine Articles linking to one of my holiday apartment sites had been used on other websites. Not all obeyed the rules and gave me the credit. One site had translated my article into French.

The fact that my article has been used and the links from those other sites point back to my site all must help to rank my site a little higher than my competitors. This has taken 12 months or more to happen and I was not aware of this until I started to do a search on the name of the village where the apartment is.

It is not bringing in much business but at least I have my own example of creating an article and having it replicated on other sites which in turn brings in extra traffic to my site.

rather than trying lots of techniques, you may be best to master 1 specific technique before trying others. I would recommend social media, try fb, twitter and you tube they are very good channels to generate traffic.
You tube is used as a search engine and sometimes people just need to see you're a real person. Show personality, be energetic and give value.
All the best

Giles is really showing you the way with SEO and I'll give you a hand with two other aspects.

There is more to getting traffic than just the search engines. This is just my opinion, but I believe every IM'er needs to have at least 3 different traffic sources.

For me, it's:

1. Direct traffic from Youtube, Ezinearticles (and syndicates), forums, and other gathering of communities.
2. Affiliates (which do SEO and PPC)
3. Paid traffic, in the form of PPC

I don't do SEO, really, though I plan on adding it as a final fourth source.

While you are working on SEO, begin expanding your possibilities. Start making 4 really sweet, killer video's a week. Or if that is too much, make 1 a week. Do proper on page SEO and curiosity driven titles that draw people to the video.

Then get them to click on your link to your site.

Same goes with articles.

In fact, I would really work on writing great articles, with the goal of syndication and direct traffic. You can then take those articles and turn them into video's, then take the video's audio and upload podcasts.


Next, I have to ask - if you intend to sell this site, you want the most money out of it, correct?

What is your game plan for converting these visitors?

I can convert, with the right traffic, around 1 in 10 to 20 most of the time. Sometimes even better.

So if you are getting 20 visits a day, that is 1 sale a day for me.


What are you doing to convert the traffic?

You would be quite amazed at how little traffic is needed to make money online.


Start formulating a marketing strategy NOW - and get it implemented and testing with the traffic you are currently getting. That way, when you start getting more, it will = more income.


Rob

D,

Hope the changes you have been making so far has helped to improve your site already! Your thread has turned out to be so valuable that any other newbies viewing the thread can learn something from here.

I look forward to your reporting of your findings! All the best dude!

Cheers,
Lester

Send me a PM with details of what you're doing, and I may be able to help you.