If you've spent more than 15 minutes perusing the popular internet marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, you no doubt have been inundated with "You have to do this," and "Don't do that!" instruction, as well as a lot of other questionable advice.
One of the biggest obstacles you'll face in building an online business is traffic. Talk about a confusing topic!
There are about a million ways to generate traffic, but there are probably only a few worth your time and effort to learn how.
Generally speaking, you can drive traffic in 2 ways:
- Buy it
- Get it for free (paid for in time)
If your online business is fairly new, you'll find that most of your web traffic comes from the search engines, most notably the "Big G," Google. In fact, I'd be surprised if you got less than half of your overall traffic from anything other than Google at the outset.
Reason? Your site isn't old enough to have any authority or referral traffic. And it won't have either for a while (count on 3 months at a minimum).
One way you can drive more traffic to your sites in the beginning is through good "off-page" SEO – in other words, you have to get backlinks.
But how? Again, there are countless ways to do this:
- Internet Directories
- Forum posts
- Blog commenting
- Link exchanges
- PPC
- Social bookmarking
- Article Marketing
- Social media
The list goes on and on. The question is, is this sort of backlinking worthwhile?
I'd give an emphatic "YES!"
Why? First off, it requires little out-of-pocket expense (with the exception of the PPC). Second, it's reliable. Third, it works. And it's way more natural than Pay Per Click anyway.
Your results will likely be much longer-lasting than any paid method. Once your money is gone, you'll find that your traffic decreases.
But with so-called "organic" SEO, your results last a long time. In fact, if you reach the first page of Google, you'd have to do something really stupid to lose that ranking.
I'm not kidding, either.
I have a neat little book all about building backlinks called "Backlink Building for Newbies" that you may be interested in. It goes over all of the free methods mentioned above in a format that rookies and seasoned pros can follow.
If there's one thing you can do to improve your search rankings with the big search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, it's building links back to your website. I promise you that doing so will improve your search engine rankings, which will drive more and more traffic as you climb the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Again, the link: