How I Generate Website Traffic – Step by Step Plan

It gets overwhelming when you start to research how to drive traffic to your blog. There are so many different ways one can get very confused what to do first and then end up doing too much, in too many directions and then not making any headway.
What do you need to concentrate on?

Search Engine Optimization?
Guest Posting?
Pay Per Click?
Submit to Directories?
Forums?
Social Sites?
Content?
YouTube?
Podcasts?
Ect……and many more.

What do you do first? Do all of it? Do just a few? The answer is different for everyone. I have see sites benefit for just one source.
Concentrate on just ONE technique and only one for each TIMELINE. That means you will have 3 techniques building your traffic. The three timelines are, Short, Meduim and Long Term.
For me this is how I approach my traffic building.

Short Term

Immediate results,

Social Sites,
I have traffic from this in just a few days and spread the word of my site. I post USEFUL rich content and create conversations in my niche. I seek out others that do the same and comment on their postings.

Medium Term

Takes a little longer results,

YouTube,
Posting video and commenting on other video in my niche is my medium strategy. I add sites in my niche to my channel and comment on other channels.

Long Term

The longest time results,

Content,
Write from your Passion, from you Heart, Rich, Full, Honest Content. Content is King and
always will be. The search engines will pick up on the great content and you will be rewarded with constant traffic that will last for years.

In 2001 I had an Inflatable Moonwalk part-time business. I did not have any experience in websites. I wanted to advertise my business on the internet and had no idea how. I purchased a piece of software the I built my site with. The software would automatically link all my pages together and allow me to insert the keywords all the right places without a huge learning curve. Back then the software cost $150. So I put up a 3 page website with pictures of my Inflatable Moonwalks and general information. It took me about 4 or 5 weeks to get everything just the way I wanted. Not being a large site, but it was really informative for our customers.

I started checking every day to see if I could get the site to show up with my keywords. I had no luck. So I just forgot about doing anything else more to the site. After a couple of months later my customers were telling me that they found me on my website. I was surprised and searched for my keywords on Google and Yahoo. Yahoo had me listed as #2 and Google had me listed as #9. After finding this out I canceled all my other advertising. Well my site stayed on Yahoo between #1 and #7 for seven years. Google was a bit tougher, I was between #4 to #25 for the same time period.

The only changes to my site were price updates in those seven years. I did the work once and I benefited from that work for 7 years. At the end of those 7 years I sold the business and shut down the site because of an accident I had.

“How I Generate Website Traffic” – Click to tweet

In recap,

  1. I build my social list which I send to my website and they sign up for my newsletter.
  2. I post videos and comment on others in my niche, which have links back to my website and they sign up for my newletter.
  3. I write content, keyword rich from my passion, which is found from search engines.

This is just my way, I am a minimalist, I like to keep things simple and straight forward. I hope this helps.

To Your Success,

-Todd


Give Your Subscribers What They Want….

How many times have you checked out a blog and it looks like a site with good information, you browse around a little and then you subscribe to their newsletter. Then in a few days you start getting email from the blog that is nothing more than telling you how great what they have to recommend is. You click on the link in the email and it sends you to a squeeze page that just wants you to buy something.  You don’t get any USEFUL information in their emails.  You just keep getting email after email offer. You can tell they are just in it for the money.   They really don’t care to offer any help to anyone.  I have emailed a few sites to ask for advice or help just to see if they would respond…..you guessed it nothing happened. I subscribe to about 20 sites a week, and don’t see much value in the newsletters, just lots of offers.

If you want to make an impact online and build a huge list for your blog, write great, valuable  information and give it away in your newsletter and people will stay subscribed to your list and your following will grow HUGE. You will become the authority for them.  Then you can recommend product and services and make an income the will surpass most of the other bloggers and websites. Remember the “money is in the list”. But before you get to that your subscribers needs come first. Give them the useful and valuable information that they seek. Then your list will trust you and your recommendations.   And the money will come.


8 Tools I Use To Run My Online Business

You can go broke buying software to do everything you need to on your computer.  I choose Linux as my operating platform and all of my software is open source and free.  It is reliable, fast and stable,  somthing I did not get with windows.  I looked at Macbook but passed because of price.

Laptop: Toshiba Satellite L455-S5009 Laptop

Operating System: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – the Lucid Lynx

The Toshiba Laptop is a good preformer with 4 gig of memory and 320 gig hardrive. It is able to handle all of my internet and processing needs.  If you intend to do alot of video editing do not buy this laptop.  It does not have the power to handle those needs.  Other than that it is a great laptop for the price.

The Linux operation system is a joy to work with, simply it just works.  You don’t have to reboot or deal with freezing programs.  It doesn’t need anti-virus or firewall either.   I have been very pleased with the performance, stablility and reliablity.  The boot up time is less than a minute and shut down is less than 6 seconds.

Programs I use:

Open Office

Firefox Browser

Lastpass

Xmarks

Cam Studio

Headway Themes

I try and use as many Cloud Based Services (browser based) as I can, that way I can update my blog and affiliate sites from any computer anywhere.

This is just a short list of my most important software tools.  If you have an addition, let me know in the comments below.