I hear people all the time asking, “How to start an online business?”
In this article, you will learn about:
- The different kinds of traffic.
- Why some traffic sources are better than others.
- How to make sure you attract as much FREE traffic as possible.
- Traffic sources to avoid like the plague.
The first thing you must understand as you embark on your internet journey is that the internet is all about information. When you do a search let’s say on growing tomatoes, it is no fluke that the first page of the search engine response is exactly about growing tomatoes, not cucumbers or a sale on cultivators.
This is exactly the same with any search term. This matching of search terms with the exact best website answering the search term has made some people very rich.
There are many sources of traffic:
- Solo ads are ads you pay for people to put your ad on their mailing list. The traffic you get can be luke warm.
- Pinterest pins are free or you can pay for promoted ads. This traffic is tightly focused.
- Facebook ads are quite cheap, but you have to really know what you are doing to get them to accept your ads.
- Google AdWords are the little ads you see on various websites. They are cost effective and generally deliver hot to buy traffic.
There are quite a few other sources of traffic, but for this discussion I am going to focus on FREE search engine traffic.
There is more than 1 reason to understand what the search engines are looking for when assessing your website in order to send you organic (free) traffic. They have many criteria for judging a site.
- How many pages does it have on various aspects of the site’s main theme?
- How long does the average visitor stay on site. (The longer they stay, the more useful information they must be getting and therefor the higher quality your site must be).
- How many inbound links go to your site. The more that other sites link to yours usually means that they view your site as an equal or as an authority site on your subject. (This is pure gold for you)
- Does your site sell unknown (maybe risky stuff) or do you offer quality links like Amazon or eBay?
- Apparently they have hundreds of things they look for, but they are hidden in the secret search engine algorithms.
Traffic sources to avoid are those offering tons of traffic for next to nothing. These usually have really low quality traffic and you stand a good chance of the search engines banning your site. This is bad news.
Some places offer content spinning software for you to create content for your site very quickly. These are to be avoided like Ebola because they take a simple piece of text and “spin it” many different ways. What you end up with is terrible text. The search engines can smell a rat and declare your site a poor place to send free or even paid traffic.
The search engines are all about quality of the content on your site. They even judge it when you buy traffic. If your site has a poor page ranking, they will charge you more for the traffic they send you than if your site is ranked highly for the quality of its content.
How to start an online business? Always keep in mind what your visitor is looking for.
An excellent example of this was someone who had an excellent site on anxiety attacks. He wrote an excellent eBook on the subject, but nobody was buying it. It’s main theme was how to deal with an anxiety attack.
In desperation, he did a survey of his visitors. He found out that what they were looking for was NOT how to cure an anxiety attack, but “AM I HAVING AN ANXIETY ATTACK?”
He rewrote the eBook to satisfy the actual need of his visitors and his eBook is now selling briskly.
Traffic is the lifeblood of your site. Make sure to attract traffic that is looking exactly for what you offer.
