Convert Web Traffic Into Money

Two Key Factors Of Making Money Online

When you want to make money online, there's two key factors:

1. Getting traffic to your site
2. Converting that traffic into hard cash

The key to make money online with websites is to get as much TRAFFIC as possible. Without traffic you will earnin nothing at all. The clue here is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

However, SEO can be both difficult and time-consuming. That's why I suggest everyone to start with a "legal cheat" that will help you gain traffic fast and bring your site to the top of the search engines quickly.

Getting Traffic the Fast & Simple Way

All you need to do is use a good SEO tool. I would reccommend the one and only Serach Engine Submitter, the best software out there. No need to download anything, just enter the site(s) you want to submit, and voila: Within the next weeks your site will gain tons of traffic just like that. This brilliant little service have helped me save hundreds of hours, and thanks to this site I am now making much more than I otherwise would. Highly reccommended!

BEWARE: Make sure you use one that will not result in your site getting puniched by Google. The one I reccommended is perfectly safe and will help you get tons of extra traffic. Definitly worth it, so give it a try. If you decide to go with their commercial service, you even have a money-back guarantee, so there is basically no risk whatsoever. Don't think about it, try it, and you will see. Click here for more information.

Traffic and Conversion

However, traffic and conversion are related.

For example, imagine that you have the perfect ringtone website, but the only visitors were seniors that didn't own mobile phones. Another example, consider an outstanding russian dating site that only recieved visitors from the U.S. The problem in these two cases are obvious: It's not the websites itself, as we've already imagined that they were "perfect". The problem however, was the traffic they were getting.

Targeted Traffic Is The Only Traffic That Matters

It does not matter how good your site is, if your traffic isn't targeted.

Furthermore, it does not matter how many visitors you're getting as long as the traffic isn't targeted.

In the examples above, you would probably want teenagers ready to buy ringtones (or click on your CPC ringtone ads) for your ringtone website. And you'd want russian singles to visit your russian dating site.

Targeted traffic always convert better than traffic that isn't targeted.

For CPA (Cost Per Action) websites it's usually better with one single targeted visitor than 100 visitors that has no interest in your site. However, in CPC (Cost Per Click) this is not that important, but still, targeted traffic is far better as they more likely will click on your ads.

How To Get Targeted Traffic

The first question to ask when targeting your traffic is:

What kind of traffic do I want to my site?

What type of visitor do you want to your site? To answer this question simply think about what action(s) you want your visitors to take. For example, if you intend to make money by promoting ringtone services as an affiliate, then ask yourself "who would be more likely to click on my affiliate links and buy ringtones from the site I'm affiliated with?"

How do you get targeted traffic to your site? Once you've identified what type of traffic you want to your site, it's time to figure out how to bring those visitors to your site.

Key Aspects

Key aspects when attracting targeted traffic:

• Search Engine Optimization - the process of improving both volume and quality of traffic to a website from natural search engine results for targeted keywords.
• Contextual Advertising - where advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed.
• Web Analytics - he study of the behaviour of website visitors.
• Psychology - the scientific study of mental processes and behavior.

Each of the key aspects above is a discipline in it's own, and there have been written many books about each of them. Thus, I cannot cover it all in one single article. There will be no fluff and filler information. I will leave in-depth discussions and reference to research behind. Instead, in the following text I will cover exactly what you need to know to attract targeted traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to recieve more targeted traffic. In other words, SEO is the process of improving both volum and quality of your traffic.

The most important aspect of SEO is unique content with targeted keywords and getting in-links (links to your site from other websites) from the right places.

White Hat and Black Hat

There are two dominating techniques tn the SEO environment: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO (the latter also known as spamdexing). Black Hat SEO involves manipulative methods, and I would not recommend them to most people, mostly because the risk of getting banned from the Search Engines, but also because it's unfair to everyone else that uses fair methods when competing for higher rankings.

Two Ways to do SEO

There are two ways to do SEO (you need to do both!):

• On-site optimization: Optimizing your own pages for the Search Engines.
• Off-site optimization: Which basically means getting other sites to link to your site (getting in-links).

On-site Optimization

• The obvious: Make sure your text is readable to the search engines, and not hidden inside some java applet, flash movie or an image. Don't use frames and iframes. Avoid Flash and technological trends (Ajax etc.) if you can.
• Writing for the Search Engines: When writing online, there's one major challange: You should not only write for the online reader (Jackb Nielsen shares a lot of free information on how to write for the web) but you will also have to write for the Search Engines. In other words, your text needs to be optimized both for the online reader and the Search Engines.
• Clean Code: Your code must be clean and tidy. To sum up an entire field in its own, what you basically need is to write valid HTML/XTML. Check if your site validates by using validator.w3.org. Always check if your code is valid.
• Writing meta description: Meta data is the first part of any html document. Stuff your meta title tages and meta description tags with good keywords withouth spamming. The meta keyword tag is far less important than it used to be, but you might still benefit from placing 5 - 12 relevant (key)words here seperated by space only and no comma. If your site is in any other language than english, declare it in the meta language tag.
• Limit your main keywords to one or two words or phrases to each individual page.
• Few subdirectories better than many: Don't confuse the Search Engines by using many sub directories. Few are usually better than many, even though you could get more keywords if you have many subdirectories.
• Use keywords in headings (the -tags) and in internal links (-tags).
• Keywords first! This is the golden rule. Make the most important keyword phrase first in the title-tag, first in the heading, first in the first paragraph and so on. Use keywords near the top of your page (first in your code). Then distribute keywords in the following code, but do not overdo it.

Off-site Optimization

• Submit your websites URL to hundreds of search engines and directories in less than thrity seconds. Try the magic yourself at Search Engine Submitter. I swear, this site has saved me hundreds of hours, and thanks to their services I recieve tons of extra high-value traffic.
• Make your site remarkable and people will link to it even if you don't ask them to. Success breeds success.
• Check your rankings: The only Search Engines you need to worry about is Google, Yahoo! and MSN. For non-english sites you may also want to check for indexing in the top portals and national search engines.
• Get in-links from related sites. Quality is WAY MORE IMPORTANT than quantity when it comes to inlinks. However, any site with a Page Rank higher than 6 or 7 could probably help your rankings. But the most important when it comes to in-links is that the pages that link to your website are related, for example if your keyword is "Funny Ringtones" you should get in-links from other pages that rank high for this exact phrase, plus any other page that ranks high for either "Funny" or "Ringtones"

SEO Resources

SEO Book by Aron Wall is by many seen as the authority of current SEO methods. However, even this book have its flaws, and especially if your site is not U.S.-based then it's a big chance that the information is not highly releant to your site. You could find a lot of free information about SEO on the internet but be aware that most of it is not acurate. There's only one way to really learn how SEO works for your particular keywords and websites, and that is to do it yourself.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is a term for advertising method where advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the visitor.

Google AdSense (www.google.com/adsense) is the most popular contextual advertising program (it was also the first). Webmasters will get a JavaScript code that they have to insert into their webpages.

Then, Google will be using advertisements from the inventory of advertisers. Yahoo! Publisher Network (publisher.yahoo.com), Microsoft adCenter (adcenter.microsoft.com) offer similar services.

There's many more, see this list of affiliate programs and networks.

So, what has this got to do with bringing targeted traffic? If you would like to bring targeted traffic through advertising, this is the best way to do it. You have to advertise where the relevant users will look.

Tell it to the people who care. Tell stockbrokers about your new trading platform. Tell

Timing is everything. It's usually not a good idea to advertise for Summer Clothing in the winter season, as most people would not think of buying summer cloting at that time of the year.

Contextual advertising have benefits for everyone involved: the ads are more targeted and thus they are more likely to get clicked. The website owner get revenue from each click through CPC, and the owner of the ad get targeted traffic.

Contextual advertising is not the only way to get targeted traffic. In fact, any advertising that is targeted will be more likely to bring targeted traffic than advertising to broader media channels.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics is the study of how visitors behave when they visit a certain website. When you have defined what type of traffic you want, you need a tool to measure if you're getting that type of traffic.

I would recommend you use Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/) to measure your traffic. It's free, easy to implement and use. You will get detailed information about your visitors, the volume of traffic, what pages they are visiting and much more.

However, Google Analytics will not be of much help if you want to find if your visitors like President A better than President B, or if you want to know wheter your visitors prefer pizzas rather than lasagna. Sometimes, you need to find some spesific information about your visitors that your visitor data cannot reveal, and to do that you would need to cunduct a survey. You could create your own survey script or use open source scripts such as phpESP (php Easy Survey Package).

Web Analytics Resources

The study of Web Analytics is a broad field, and to learn more about it I recommend buying the book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. You might also want to read Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer's Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business by Eric Peterson.

Psychology

Finally, to get targeted traffic you need to understand at least a few things about how humans think and behave, particulary how your market segment thinks and behave.

Obviously you do not need to earn a degree in psychology to get targeted traffic. However, you should do your best to understand to mental processes and the behavior of both your current visitors and your potential visitors. You could learn a lot about behavior from testing your users, and furthermore you could develop an in-depth picture of their mental processes by asking them to explain what they are thinking when performing those tests.

To learn about mental processes for potential visitors you could actuate a test where you assigned a certain task to your visitors. Fore example, you want to know more about the mental processes that occur when someone is searching for a way to order plane tickets online. Select 5 to 10 users that are representative to all visitors to your site. Instruct them to order two plane tickets from location A to destination B, and ask them to explain what they are thinking when performing the task. Such testing will teach you a lot about the psychology involved in ordering plane tickest online.

You probably understand by now that getting a high ranking in the search engines is just part of the job when it comes to targeted traffic. SEO and targeted advertising have the potential to bring you the visitors you need. The question is: Can you bring the visitors the information or services they need?

As much as you need to adjust your traffic to your site, you will also have to adjust your site to the visitors you intend to bring to the website itself.

No Such Thing As Stereotype Traffic

You have heard that before, haven't you? Maybe even a thousand times. However, what you also need to realize is that the visitors of your website will never be stereotypes, even if you're in a tight niche market.

What you need to realize is that people belong to different markets. Let's say that your prospetcts are 'computer geeks'. So what market are they in? You know it: Software... computer hardware... geek accessories... You may be right, but geeks are not just geeks. They eat, they get sick, they are just as much human as everyone else. They buy homes, or they may rent appartments. They buy cars, or they use public transportation. Maybe they have pets, a girfriend, a wife, children... Anyway, our point is: There is no such things as stereotypes, and people belong to several markets.

You must know how to get your prospects attention even before they become your visitors. And to succeed with this you absolutely must have to identify from which sources you could get the most targeted traffic. In other words, you (your website/your business) must be present wher your prospects hold their attention. And as hard that may be; you will also need to catch them while they are in the right mood...

Catch Them When They Are In The Right Mood

Everyone knows that they should fish where the fish are. But if the fish aren't hungry, then they probably wouldn't bite. Getting traffic isn't just about getting the right people to visit your website; you will also need to get them to visit your site when they are in the right mood.

Yea, you're right: It's not as easy to get traffic these days, as everyone is competing over it. You will sometimes need to work really hard to get it.

For example, if you wanted your prospects to sign up for a loan... would you buy banner space from a local online news paper? Would you buy national radio advertising? Or would you just keep working at your keyword rankings?

Rank high for relevant keywords in the Search Engines!

A Fun Thing To Do

Getting traffic doesn't have to be boring. Work a little, play a little. You know; All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. While I definitly think you should take some time off, you could also combine work and play. And at the same time you need to be creative and think a little outside the box.

For example, if you were selling beachwear online; buy a pair of sandals, get your website's name engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach! Hell, if you really would want to make money then you could SELL the sandals and make other people do the job for you, most wouldn't even notice.

Be creative, and think sharp. Getting traffic is mandatory for any online business, and it doesn't need to be boring. Enjoy!