Traffic generation is one of the skills you have to master to be successful in building a business. It’s really pretty simple. People have to find you before you have any chance of turning them into a customer. No traffic equals no customers. There are several different ways to go about traffic generation, and they’re all effective. But, just because there’s multiple ways to drive traffic to your website doesn’t mean you want to jump in to all of them at once. So let’s take a short class called Traffic Generation 101.

Traffic Generation Is How You Get Eyes To See Your Offer

You have to get traffic to your website if you ever hope to generate any income.

The best offer, sales letter, or video in the world won’t accomplish anything if nobody actually sees them. On the flip side, the worst converting sales letter or offer on the face of the planet will be able to convert at least a few sales if enough traffic sees it.

Once you start generating a reasonable amount of traffic, your conversion points such as your opt-in or sales letter will lead to some sales. This will cause a basic ratio to develop. What I mean by this is that for every x number of visitors, you’ll get y number of leads that opt-in or buy something from you.

Here’s an example in case this is confusing. Let’s say that 5% of your traffic elects to opt-in to be on your list. That means that if 100 people see your website, 5 of them will subscribe to your list.

Once this ratio develops, you can get a better picture of how much you need to increase your traffic generation efforts in order to get the desired number of opt-ins. Need more leads, ramp up your efforts to drive traffic to your site.

Of course you can always get better at converting the traffic you already get by improving your copywriting, but that’s a story for another day.

So how do you drive traffic to your website?

Methods Of Traffic Generation

There are several different ways to generate traffic. Some are more effective than others, but they all work to get your message in front of other people. Here they are:

• Blogging. This is an excellent way to get organic, free search traffic from Google. You can also get referrals from your readers through social media shares and links from their websites. The positive side of this method of traffic generation is that if you’ve used the right keywords for your unique selling proposition, the traffic you’ll get will be highly targeted to what you have to offer. That’s a good thing. The downside, though, is that unless you’re an absolute wizard in the use of keywords, it takes time and consistency before you start to gain any real traction in Google.

• Social media. Social media isn’t going anywhere. Actually, it’s only going to get bigger and bigger, and it’s importance in traffic generation will soar, also. Anyways, social media can be utilized to drive traffic to your site by you sharing your site to those you’re connected with. It also comes as your readers share your material with the people their connected with. This gives you the ability to build a far-reaching audience by using social media properly.

• Pay-per-click (PPC). These are the ads you see when you search for something on Google or one of the other search engines. When you click on the ad, the advertiser is charged a fee, anywhere from a penny to several dollars for each click. Again, if you’ve done your keyword research work properly, this is an excellent method of traffic generation that is highly targeted to what you have to offer. The problem with PPC advertising is it can get expensive very quickly if you’re going after highly competitive keywords. The more competition, the more expensive each click is going to be. Another pitfall of PPC is not doing your keyword research properly, which can also cause it to get expensive very quickly because you’ll be driving people to your site that aren’t interested in what you have to offer. With PPC your results need to be constantly monitored and tracked, and changes quickly implemented, but it can be an absolute goldmine of traffic. Many of the huge names in online marketing have built their business with PPC advertising.

• Commenting on blog posts. Another method of traffic generation is to find other blogs in your niche or one very similar. When you frequent those blogs and leave comments, the blog owner and some of the other readers who frequent that site will click on your name which will usually lead them to your site. This is another source of fairly targeted traffic because they’ve come from another site that’s closely related to yours. Proper etiquette dictates that you leave genuine comments that add to the conversation, not just to get exposure. And don’t spam with a bunch of links. Your comment likely won’t see the light of day. This is another area that takes time to build a decent amount of traffic, but with consistency you can build up a fairly solid following.

• Guest posting on another blog. You can find blogs that are again in a similar niche and develop a relationship with the blog owner. From there you can see if they’d be willing to allow you to provide a guest post. When you do, you’ll generate some pretty decent traffic numbers based on how popular the other blog is. There’s a couple of important things to remember, though. One, you need to develop a relationship with the blog owner before approaching them to guest post. It’s their blog and reputation, which they take seriously, and they need to feel comfortable that you’re going to provide value to their readers. Another thing, when you get an opportunity to write a guest post, bring your “A” game. Take time and provide your best content. If you make the mistake of putting a half-hearted effort into a guest post, you won’t get many opportunities to do it.

• Article marketing. Yet another means of traffic generation is to write and place articles on article submission sites. This used to be a really hot way to get traffic, both from clicks from the article and through back links to your site. But, Google has changed their search algorithms a few times, and I don’t believe that this method is as effective as it once was. I don’t have much experience in this area, so I don’t want to go into any more depth, but just know that it is another way to generate traffic for your website.

• Commenting in forums. Much like commenting on blog posts, commenting in industry specific forums can drive traffic to your website. And much like commenting on blogs, proper etiquette dictates that you leave valuable comments that answer a question or furthers the conversation going on. And again, don’t spam the forum with a bunch of links or you’ll only accomplishing irritating everybody else and getting yourself banned from that forum.

The Keys To These Traffic Generation Methods

There are a couple of keys to remember when using these methods to generate traffic for your site.

One, you need to focus on two or three areas when you first get started. Get really good at those first, and then branch out to some of the other areas piece by piece. If you try to do too many things at once, you won’t get good enough at any of them to drive any real traffic to your website. Don’t worry, focusing on two or three of these methods and getting good at them will provide enough traffic for you to make a legitimate income so long as you have a proper sales funnel in place. Get really good at a couple of them and then go from there.

Another key is to make sure your intentions are pure and that you follow proper etiquette. What I mean by saying to make sure your intentions are pure is that you need to be sure you’re doing what you’re doing for the right reasons.

Look, we all know that you want more traffic to your site. We all do.

But, you have to want to provide value to the conversation you’re joining, too. If your sole reason for commenting in forums or on other people’s blog posts is to drive traffic to your site, or even worse spamming their site with a bunch of links, it will be come readily apparent to the most casual observer very quickly.

The only thing you’ll accomplish is irritate everybody else. That will only serve to tell them that the last thing they want to do is visit your site. You won’t increase your traffic one bit that way.

Simply put, don’t do it. Provide value to others, and you’ll see it returned to you. Give and you shall receive.

That’s it, I’m done.

Before you go, take a minute and leave a comment. Did you learn anything here? Did I miss a traffic generation method somewhere? What methods have worked for you? Leave a comment and let me know. I’m truly interested. Also, take a second, look to the left, and share this post on the social media sites.

Class dismissed.