Website Traffic That Makes You Money

When building a new website most people are aware that it will need traffic to do well. But where will you get this traffic from?

Social Traffic

A quick glance around the blogosphere might have you believing that the secret to success to to gain lots of readers, and to build traffic from social media sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon. What good is this traffic? Visitors that come from these sites are webmasters like you. They don’t click on ads. So they won’t make you money. Yes “social traffic” can make you money. If you have a great site with a lot of great content, and you work really hard on it over a long period of time you will probably manage to build up a good sized readership. This readership may even be large enough to allow you to sell ad spots on your site at a flat rate. However, as this traffic is mostly made up of webmasters like you, the people who buy your ads will find that they are not getting many clicks, and it is not worth their money. I don’t recommend you chase this sort of traffic.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site from search engines. You won’t get any organic traffic until you have a good amount of backlinks to your site. So new web masters who find backlinks hard to come by often give up and often go looking for the social traffic above. There are two types of organic traffic that you can target, and here is how the theory of getting this traffic works:

a) Long Tail

A long tail search term is a term that isn’t searched for often. Something like “How can I make money using free blogger accounts and Google Adsense”. This term is very specific and and the visitor will be highly targeted, so worth a great deal to you. However, because this exact term is not likely to be searched by great deal of people, you can’t, and shouldn’t target this term. The theory of gaining traffic through long tail terms is that you write a lot of content about your chosen topic, and the more you write the more possible long tail traffic will find you. More content = more possible terms = more traffic. Simply writing more content will get you more visitors.

b) High Volume Keywords

A high volume search term is a term that is searched by a lot of people. Something like “Make Money Online” or “How to Make Money Online“. If you can rank for these terms you will get a lot of visitors. It is important to research high volume terms to find out i) How many visitors the term will bring? ii) How hard it will be to rank for the term? and iii) If you are using Adsense, how much will clicks from that visitor pay? For the first and last points you should use Google’s free Adwords research tool. Go to the tool and search for a general term relating to your site.i.e: “Making Money Online”, you you will get a list of relevant terms. To find out how hard it is to rank you need to consider a few factors. The first place to start is to search the term in Google. What site is ranked on top? What PR does the site have and how many backlinks do they have? To find out the backlinks part there are a number of tools that can help you. A free option I use is the browser plug-in SEO Quake. The more backlinks the sites at the top have the harder it will be to rank for them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try, it’s just that it will be harder. A lot of competition for a term suggests it is worth ranking for. For information on how you rank for terms read more in my article about Making money online for free.

Tagged as: Money, SEO, Traffic