When most people get their website live online they tend to forget the most important steps to drive traffic to it. Your site may get a few visitors to start with, but now is the time to focus on driving more traffic to your site.
Besides having an affiliate program, which should be your#1 traffic building method, there’s one other traffic building method you must consider- writing articles / content.
There are, of course, other methods such as social media marketing, search engines, banner advertising, links from other sites, e-zine advertising, posting to forums as an expert giving advice, pop-up, pop-under, exit traffic etc…
I have found that these methods do not yield high enough results to warrant the time and money spent implementing them at this point in the process. Posting in forums is inefficient. Sure, you will get hits, and yes some people will grow to regard you as an expert but the time spent on this strategy is rarely proportional to the pay-off.
I hear this advice often but for most businesses this just isn’t the best way to go. Only bother with this if find you have free time. Banner advertising, unless highly targeted or paid on a PPC basis, is often hit or miss.
Pop-up, exit traffic, and other traffic building methods of the genre are worthless unless you are using it to collect email addresses by giving away something free. Take into account the interests and needs that the stream of traffic has and create a page that will appeal to them so that they will opt-in to your list. This is the only way that I have been able to get any money out of this kind of traffic.
Even then, it wasn’t as profitable as other methods and this is why I don’t recommend it. Getting links from other sites isn’t recommended because it usually provides no way to establish credibility. I recommend concentrating most of your time on writing articles for several reasons:
They can be permanent
They can reach large, targeted audiences
They have the potential to establish you as an expert quickly
None of the other methods allow all of these qualities. To get maximum sales by writing articles should go without saying by now that anything you produce should be your absolute best work. Contents, as your primary method of building traffic, will be many of your prospects first experience of you.
This first experience should be absolutely breath-taking. They should be so impressed by your article, so amazed at your knowledge, and so curious about what other problems that you can solve for them, that they will click through to your site.
Your articles should not be sloppy. They aren’t “just articles.” Writing of articles should not be taken lightly. After you have identified an article that pulls more sales in regards to others you should start spreading it around the web any way possible. To make sure that it is the article pulling the sales and not the sales copy at the end of the article use the same sales copy on all the articles that you test.
When offering your articles to websites give them the option to sign up for your affiliate program so that they can get paid when someone clicks on the link at the bottom of your article. This will, hopefully, motivate them to use your article.