How to Drive Traffic to Your Website

There are so many success stories you will hear about businesses making it good in the internet. The troubling thing is, there are maybe a tenfold or even a hundredfold of stories contradictory to theirs. Many have unsuccessfully launched a business enterprise that is internet based but only a handful shall succeed.

Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the eagerness to succeed and the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

The Very Basic

Like Neo, traffic is “The One”. Without traffic, all your effort would just go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products to. In the internet world traffic is the walk in customer. The more traffic you have the more people would be able to sell your products to.

But like any business that’s in every corner building or in the mall, not everyone that goes in will buy, but the greater of number that do come in to browse your merchandise, the greater number of people that will buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

But, how do you get traffic, traffic large enough that could make a small percentage of eventual buyers enough to make a good profit. Many big companies generate traffic of tens of thousands a day and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buys, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others. Yes that’s right; you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people that knows that your site exists; the more people would of course go to your site, that’s common sense.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, this do not generate the same high volume as those methods that are getting paid. These paid advertisements include advertising schemes by Google and Yahoo.

The Value of Searches

The search and will be the easiest and fastest medium in finding what a person needs in the internet.
Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many people. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors and clicks that they are the most common sites that people go to. It is easy to understand why so many companies would pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide information to the millions of users that they have each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites link pop up in the high ranks of the search results page, you get a great chance that they will go to your site. While search engine optimization is a cheaper and low cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will be on the top ranks.

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may sound like not such a good idea, but the payoffs would tell a different story. When you pay for your traffic, you are guaranteed of a consistent traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day.

Paying for your Traffic

Usually, you will be charged with the number of hits a link gets when your ads is clicked, this is called pay per click. For some search engines, you will be charged with the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched. It is imperative that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keyword for the right moment.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be for naught. You will get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result to a great boost in your sales figures. Paying for your traffic would be a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer.

Getting Started as a Freelance Writer

Many people find the idea of becoming a freelancer very appealing. You can work from home, and

take on as much or as little work as you like. Getting started as a freelance writer however can be difficult. If you are new to the scene it is hard to win business because nobody knows who you are or what your writing ability is like.

Here is one way to do it (there are others but this one seems to work well!)

1.       Write a sample article to show to prospective clients. Make sure it is the best you can do. Spend time perfecting it and making sure that it is grammatically correct.

2.       Go over to the Warrior forum and post a WSO (a Warrior Special Offer) advertising your service. Offer a really attractive rate to get people to try you out and include your sample article within the advert so that people can see that you write to a decent standard. I would suggest a price of around $1 for every 100 words as a starting point. That should get you some initial clients.

3.       Once you have completed some orders get testimonials from your clients. If they are happy with the work you produce they should be more than willing to do this.

4.       Relist your WSO, this time including the testimonials.

5.       After a few weeks send a follow-up email to your previous clients asking if they have any more work for you. A lot of the people you write for will always be in need of content and will have plenty of work for you.

6.       Set yourself up with a website. Give plenty of samples and include some details about yourself and your initial experience.

7.       Rinse and repeat. Each time you do this you will be gaining new clients and building a relationship with your existing ones. Over time you should find that your reputation builds (assuming of course that you produce good quality work) and as it does you can begin to charge more money.

There are of course other ways of getting started as a freelance writer. Sites such as Elance can also offer a fruitful way of getting freelance work, but I hope that this article has given you some food for thought.

Being a freelance writer can be hard work but it can also be extremely rewarding. For many people it provides an easy way of making money online, even if it is just as a way of funding your other business activities.

Writing a Good Autoresponder Sequence

So you’ve got people to opt-in to your list and you’re building a subscriber base. This is probably the autoresponder sequence then you’re pretty much putting all of your list building efforts to waste…

single most important thing you can do in your online business BUT if you don’t follow it up with a good

A good autoresponder sequence builds a relationship with your subscribers. It (hopefully) gets them to buy products from you and engage in what you’re all about. Many people get it wrong. They stack up the messages without giving much thought to what they are actually doing. 

Here’s how to do it right: 

Put yourself in your subscribers shoes.

Easier said than done I agree, but do you really want to be receiving sales email after sales email each and every day? The first step towards writing a good autoresponder sequence is to put yourself in your subscribers shoes and think about what they would like to receive. What interests them? What will benefit them?

 Give content. Don’t just sell.

It’s a funny thing but the truth is that the less you sell, the more you’ll sell! Give quality content in your autoresponder sequence and look out for your subscribers interests. Tell stories, give them helpful advice that they can put into action straight away without needing to buy anything

Carefully time your emails.

Autoresponders let you space your messages in any way you wish. All you have to do for each message is to specify the number of days between that email and the last one. Try delivering them every day for the first few days, and then space them out a little longer after say the first week. Why? Because immediately after subscribing people are ‘hot’ about you and it’s a great time to sell to them

     Think about what they originally signed up for.

Most people build their list by giving away some sort of freebie in return for the opt-in. A top tip for writing a good autoresponder sequence is to make sure that your emails relate back to the original thing they signed up to receive. If your squeeze page ‘bait’ was about blogging then they are obviously interested in blogging or they wouldn’t have subscribed!

Above all – give quality content and deliver to your subscribers content that you know they will enjoy. Take a look at other marketers autoresponder sequences. How do THEY do it?

How To Create an Interview Product

Production creation is something which many people struggle with when starting an online business.

Getting the information to actually put into a product can be difficult, as can be finding the time to write or produce it.

A great way of creating a quality product quickly however is to do an interview with an expert in your niche and then package it up as a product...

The benefits of doing this are massive. Providing you find the right person to interview you should be getting access to an instant pool of knowledge which can go into your product.

The first step is to find your interviewee. This is not as difficult as it sounds either because they get tons of free exposure and the chance to sell themselves, meaning that many people will jump at the chance to be interviewed! Approach people in your niche and ask them. You can find them in the usual places like blogs, forums, etc.

The next thing to decide is what format you want to conduct the interview in:

You could firstly do an email interview. You simply email over your questions and let the other person respond in paragraphs, and then put the interview responses into a report or ebook. This is something I've done quite successfully in the past.

The other option is to do a 'live' interview and then record it. This could be done over Skype or telephone for example. Of course this has the advantage in that you can create two products out of the interview - the audio recording, and the transcript of the audio recording. If you choose this option it's always best to pre-plan and have a guide in front of you so as you know what you're going to talk about in the interview. You also need to let the other person know what you want to talk about in advance so that they can do a bit of pre-planning for the interview too.

Thinking of questions or topics to discuss:

This is easy - just think about what people in your niche want to know. If you don't know what's hot then just take a look at forums, blogs, or websites in your niche. For example, people in the internet marketing niche might want to know how he/she would build a list, or how they got started with an online business. Ask questions about the hot topics in your niche and you won't go far wrong with your interview.

However you decide to do it, creating an interview product is one of the easiest ways of creating a product, and it's also one of the best because you should end up with a product that is genuinely of high quality.