You only need to have real success in a small number of traffic building areas to achieve a successful business online. It is a serious mistake to try to tackle too many things at once and find that you don’t do any of them properly or only half do them so you don’t find out if they could work.
The real problem is that there are so very many ways of making contact with people via the Internet so it is easy to be tempted into trying everything. Even if you’ve got great products and a great website you’ve got to get traffic to that site.
When I first started online, I signed up for one expensive video course which listed 17 main ways of generating traffic and went into considerable detail on most of them. The course instructor said that you should only select some of these and become an expert in them before moving on to others techniques.
Sound advice, but despite that I still tried as many as I could to find out what suited my style. Unfortunately, I didn’t even become a ‘Jack of All Trades’ because of insufficient technical knowledge. So I just kept spinning my wheels for months by trying one method and then another and then back to one I had tried before.
Finally I decided to try to define what sort of traffic I really wanted when I eventually got some experience. I tried to identify what areas I should really be concentrating on given my lack of skill in such things as video marketing, which I was told is the big one for the future. Maybe it is, but it would be a good idea to catch up with the present first if you’re a beginner online!
Obviously, having taken an ‘educated’ guess at the visitor profile I should be targeting, I was able to eliminate some of those 17 ways of generating traffic ether because they didn’t fit the profile I had thought up or because they were too difficult.
By this time, I had virtually gone full circle with traffic methods but having done so I’ve come back to good old fashioned keyword research which is the basis of so many other traffic techniques. I know this sounds elementary but it’s so easy to get confused by all the ‘novelty’ methods that experts throw at you every day.
Therefore, I recommend that you spend quality time on keyword research for your niche and then concentrate on Article Marketing and posting on Forums. The best method I’ve discovered is to use Google’s AdWords research tool which is great for finding keyword phrases that are frequently searched but which have relatively little competition according to the indicators on this site.
But in addition to Articles and Forums, advertising sites like Craigslist, USFreeAds and maybe BackPage might be good – they are only classified ads but have a huge circulation and they are easy to use. Again keywords can play a major part.
Whatever methods of traffic generation you use, you must have a good looking website so that visitors will want to see what you’ve got for them. I’ve found that as an online beginner, I didn’t know what a good website consisted of so I got a professional to build one for me.
Unfortunately, I ended up with a website that looked good but definitely wasn’t in tune with the style of the site content. Even worse, I didn’t know how to tweak it and I certainly dare not carry out any major alterations. Once again the experts had got the better of me!