Introduction

The Fuel That Drives Your Business

Some people tell you to be patient when it comes to building your business online. Sure, patience is a virtue and it has its place. But I think patience is overrated.

Nope. I think if you want to see your business thrive, why not jam your foot on the accelerator and see how fast you can reach your goal?

Of course, you need fuel to get wherever you’re going, right?

Well in internet business your fuel is your website visitors, aka your “traffic.”

The more people you have visiting your website, the faster you’re going to real-your goals. The faster you’re going to be profitable and successful.

Of course, you don’t want any old traffic. You want Qualified Traffic. You want people who are actually interested in your information, products, or services.

Or, to continue with our metaphor, you have to make sure you have the right fuel. You don’t want the low-grade fuel in your car- you want the premium-ultra fuel.

This report is dedicated to showing you how to get the premium-ultra fuel – to get the qualified traffic to your site.

And it’s devoted to helping you get that traffic as quickly as possible so that you can be profitable quickly.

How to Use This Report

Website traffic is critical to your success. If you don’t have visitors you don’t have a business.

Sounds harsh, but it’s like opening a restaurant and never having customers. Your business won’t last long.

This report will show you how to get it done. Each chapter is a step in the process.

At the end of the chapter you will find action steps related to the information provided.

Take these steps and you’ll have tons of traffic flowing to your website on a regular basis.

This report plays an important role in your overall business plan. As you move through the steps and take action, you’ll be documenting your thoughts, ideas and goals.

This information will become part of your business plan. Each activity and action step in this report becomes part of a larger whole.

There are two basic approaches we recommend when reading this report and corresponding workbook:

1. Read it through cover–to–cover and then go back and work through the workbook questions and exercises. This approach works well if you’re pressed for time and you work better if you can compartmentalize your time in two or three large chunks.
2. Read the report section by section, exploring the exercises as you read. This approach works well if you have smaller segments of time available each day and if you’re anxious to start growing and positioning your business right away.

Finally, while the majority of the questions are posed throughout the report after each section, there is also a comprehensive corresponding workbook.

This makes it possible for you to think about the questions and exercises as you read and then go back and complete them at a later date.

This workbook and book are set up so you can fit them into your personal reading and learning style.

Additionally, there is a corresponding Mindmap for your brainstorming and creative thinking sessions. Use them to your advantage.

What This Report Will, and Won’t, Do

This report will help you generate traffic to your website, which ultimately will grow your business and your profits. But you have to take the action.

Simply reading the book and answering the questions aren’t enough.

It won’t generate traffic for you!

Only you can do that. You’re the only one who can take action and realize your goals.

Let’s get started!

Chapter One: Mechanics – 7 Ways To Generate Traffic

For every vehicle there are moving parts that make it work. Website traffic is no different.

There are mechanics to it, or tools that make generating traffic effective and possible.

In this chapter we will:

1. Define the most common and most effective traffic generation tools
2. Provide examples of how each tool works
3. Provide tips to maximize the traffic generation tool and offer key success ingredients.

Traffic Tactic #1 Content

Content will likely be the foundation for your business.

It doesn’t matter what business model you use, content markets your business; it provides value and credibility and it drives traffic to your website.

For the most part, content is an important aspect of most traffic generation methods.

Whether you’re talking about blogging, linking, social networking, or article marketing, all of which we will address in just a second, content is the foundation of that tactic.

This is because that’s how the internet works.

It’s a source of content and as a website owner and business owner, the best way for people to find your website is for you to provide content.

Anytime someone gets online, they’re generally seeking content. They want information. They want to learn, they want to improve, and they want to be entertained. 

It’s important to know that content doesn’t have to be just print material. It can also be audio or video content.

It’s also critical to know that content is directly related to the amount of traffic you get on your website because, among other things, search engines base their results on the content you have on your website. 

Let’s take a look at the two basic ingredients of content as it relates to generating traffic.

SEO – Keywords

The first and perhaps the most important way content drives traffic is that it helps your website show up on the search engines.

When people talk about Search Engine Optimization or SEO, they usually start with content.

This is because in order to show up on the search engines results, when your prospects search for your information, the search engines need something to search or compare.

They look at and “index” your web pages – your content.

For example, if your webpage is about sports supplements, then your page and website will be compared to other websites with the same type of information and keywords.

By providing a wealth of content on your website about your niche topics, you’re essentially giving the search engines more of a reason to list your website higher in the results.

And when people search for your information, they’ll see your website, click through and voila – you have qualified traffic.

Links

Search engines also take a look at the links you have coming into your website and to specific web pages.

The more quality and relevant incoming links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be.

This also means you can drive traffic to key web pages, like a sales page, or you can focus on driving traffic to your website as a whole. (You can also create a combined strategy depending on your goals, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter.)

It’s important to know that content for the sake of content will only get you so far.

Quality content is really what you’re striving for.

Content that is well-written, entertaining and informative not only brings website visitors back for more, it motivates people to link to it.

They’ll link to your website content from their blogs, from their newsletters and websites and they’ll link to your content in their social networking posts. 

This all drives a tremendous amount of traffic to your website!

Making Content Work For You – Key Ingredients For Success

Creating content that appeals both to your human prospects and the search engines is a delicate balance.

You want to fit keywords into the content so that the search engines recognize it.

You also want the content to sound and read naturally. (I’m sure you have read content online that’s been jam packed with keywords. It’s awful, right?) 

The most common practice is to create your content with the keywords in mind but not to position them anywhere initially.

Just write your content and then you can go back and place your keywords where they naturally fit.

It’s best to try to get the keywords in your headline and first and last paragraph because that is one of the first places the search engines look.

They also look at your sub-headings and in the body of your content.

The remainder of your content should contain keywords and words related to your keywords but should not sound forced or unnatural. 

For example, if you’re writing an article on benefits of omega three fatty acids you might use the words “fatty acids” “Omega 3”, “omega three”, “omega fatty acids” and so on. 

You vary the words so it sounds natural.

The goal when writing content is to write naturally and then go back and insert your keywords where they fit.

When using audio and video content, tag your content for the search engines and your keywords.

If you’re using a host like YouTube or iTunes make sure to also properly categorize your content.

This will help with search engine optimization. On your website you can also optimize audio and video posts by creating a description and a title for the content.

Search engines will recognize and index this content.

And don’t forget the growing trend of user-generated content.

We’ll get to that a bit more in blogging but there are many ways to have your website visitors help you create content.

Traffic Tactic #2 Article Marketing

Article marketing works much like content marketing, only instead of publishing content on your website, you’re publishing the content on other websites – namely article directories like ezinearticles.com.

When you write and publish an article on an article marketing directory you’re actually accomplishing several things at once.

Most importantly, you’re driving traffic to your website.

This is because not only will your article be available on the article directory for search engines to find and people to read, other website owners with similar business topics can and will publish your article on their websites, which creates incoming links to your website.

When your content is published on other websites you’re also broadening your exposure. You’re reaching a new audience who will read your article and click through to your website.

Note: When you publish on article directories and other websites it’s important to have an author’s bio box.

This is generally published at the end of your article and includes a link to your website.

Below are a few examples of bio boxes I used on ezines.com to drive traffic to various web pages:

So, article marketing enables you to drive traffic in two very important ways.

It creates links to your website, which in turn improves your SEO ranking and thus you receive more traffic from basic search engine searches.

It also improves your traffic because more people are coming across your content and clicking through to your website – you’re reaching more people.

For the most part, article marketing is free. This is definitely the case if you write your own articles and use free article directories. 

You can also outsource your content and/or utilize PLR to help you manage your content creation needs.

Article marketing also helps boost your credibility as an expert in your industry or niche topic.

It’s important to know that article marketing isn’t just for article directories. You can partner with other business owners and publish articles on their websites.

For example, if you own a home organization business you can publish content on websites that sell home organization and storage supplies. You can also offer your content for reprint.

And you can write articles for print publications.  Always, remember to include a link back to your website.

All of this helps build awareness of your business and generates traffic.

Tips and Article Marketing Keys to Success

The key to making the most of this traffic generation tactic is to create great content.

Great content is easy to read, it provides a benefit, and it motivates your reader to visit your web site for more information.

There are a few key strategies to accomplishing this tactic well:

• Make sure your article has an attention-grabbing headline. People won’t read it if the headline doesn’t capture their interest.
• Use headings and sub-headings, bullets and formatting to make your article easy to read.
• Focus on offering quality information. Solve your prospects’ problems and answer their most pressing questions.
• Always include a link to your website.
• When possible, include a call to action.
• Optimize your content for the search engines by placing keywords in strategic places. And when using an article directory, be sure to choose the appropriate category(s) and tags when publishing your article.

Traffic Tactic #3 Link Building

Link building is the practice of generating incoming links to your website. We’ve already talked about how links come to your site when you create compelling content.

We also talked about how they’re created when you publish content on other websites and include a link back to your own site.

Linking is the second way Search Engines value a website after content.

The quality, quantity, and relevance of incoming links, however, make a real difference in the effect they have on your site. 

For example, if you have a website about sports medicine and you have a blog about dog training linking to your website, that isn’t going to have as much weight or value to a search engine as having a link come from a website or blog about sports nutrition or sports injuries.

Search engines value your incoming links based on the websites they come from.

If they come from a website that’s completely unrelated to your topic or a website that has a bad reputation, then the link won’t have value to you.

It can actually detract from your page ranking.

How To Make Link Building Work For You – Key Strategies for Success

There are several ways you can create incoming links.

We’ve already discussed two of the most powerful – write great content and publish content on external websites.

Writing great content is the best way to generate links and blogging is a really easy way to gain attention for your content. We’ll talk about blogging in just a bit.

You can also publish articles, reports, eBooks, videos, case studies and white papers on your website to motivate linking.

Note: You can also help improve the search engine ranking for specific pages on your site by linking to them from your other website pages.

These are called internal links and they help point search engines to key pages on your website.

Write press releases. Press releases are a wonderful way to generate incoming links from valuable and relevant websites. Publish them on your website and submit them to online press release websites. They create incoming links and generate media attention.

List your business in online directories. Directories create quality and relevant links to your website. Check out:

• http://allbusiness.com/biz-directory/index.asp
• http://dmoz.org
• http://botw.org.

DMOZ, Google, and Yahoo are both great business directories to register with. They create incoming links from extremely reputable sources. Listings are free.

For a huge list of directories, go to this site that breaks things down by paid, free, niche, and reciprocal links directories:  visit – http://www.directorylist.org.

Research your competition. Find out who is linking to your competition. There are tools available online that can help you determine how many incoming links you have, and who they’re from.

You can also use some of these tools to find out who is linking to your competition. 

Connect with the people that are linking to your competition and build relationships and partnerships.

Finally, partner with other business owners in your industry to link to each other, article swap, or to exchange advertisements.

Partnering with others is a great way to get exposure and increase your SEO and traffic for next to nothing.

Traffic Tactic #4 Social Networking

Social networking has become a powerful traffic generation tool. It includes interacting on social sites like Twitter and Facebook.

It also includes interacting on blogs, forums and chat rooms or membership sites. Any time you are interacting with other people online, it’s social networking.

Social networking:

• Creates awareness of your business (By interacting online, people are curious about who you are and will visit your website)
• Drives traffic (Linking to your website in posts, having the posts “retweeted”, liked or reposted also helps drive traffic)
• Strengthens your brand and “Liking”. People get to know who you are and what you’re about. This drives traffic and repeat visits to your site (not to mention purchases and profits).

The amazing thing about social networking is the tremendous reach. One post can reach thousands of people.

Include a link in that post and you suddenly have tons of new website traffic.

To motivate linking to your site and thus visits to your site, the key is to provide compelling and valuable content. (See a theme here?)

Making Social Networking Work For You – Key Strategies For Success

The first step to making social networking work for you is to focus on one or two social sites.

There are too many and if you try to work all of them you’ll end up really exhausted and likely not having any real impact.

So focus on one or two to begin. Choose the sites that appeal to your target audience and that appeal to your communication style.

Create a profile that represents your brand and interact.  This is key. If you’re not interacting and building connections, the tactic just isn’t going to work.

Social networking isn’t about posting link after link to your website.

It’s about building relationships.  Trust me, build good relationships via networking sites and they’ll be linking to you – this is the kind of impact you want to make.

Now that’s not to say that you can’t link to your site.

Interact on networking sites and occasionally link to your site and newly published content, just don’t make it your primary focus.

You can also motivate linking by using social networking badges on your web pages.

For example, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.ic.ious and StumbleUpon offer buttons or badges, which you can put on your web pages.

When people like your content they can “tweet this” or “Digg” that. It’s incredibly effective for generating traffic and links.

Outside of the social networking sites, when you post in a forum or leave a comment on a blog you’re often able to create a profile or link to your URL before you comment.

Simply by commenting you’re creating a link to your website.

And when other people comment, many of them will click on other commenters and visit their websites.

By commenting on blog posts and interacting on forums you’ll create awareness and generate traffic.

Traffic Tactic #5 Blogging

You’re probably already really familiar with blogs and blogging.  Perhaps you read them, have one of your own or are an active participant in the blogging community.

If so, you have a head start on this traffic generation tool.

While blogs have been primarily print content in the past, like other forms of content, audio and video are really making an impact.

So you don’t have to be a ‘writer’ to have a blog and benefit from this tactic.

Blogging works because it is naturally search engine friendly. Each new blog post you publish is crawled and indexed by the search engines.

So it makes sense that the more often you post, the more effective this strategy will be.

Frequent posting increases your search engine page ranking, which increases your traffic.

Making Blogging Work For You – Key Strategies For Success

Blogging is a more personal form of content than a standard article published on your website or an article directory.

This creates an opportunity to build a community; to invite comments and discussion, to learn about your audience and prospects and to drive traffic to your website. 

Your blog can be positioned as a community-building tool. People visit your blog, learn about you and your business, and then click through to visit your website. 

Many large and small companies use blogs to accomplish several business building goals, including traffic generation.

And you can and should link from your blog to your website.

This will motivate people to click through and visit your website sales pages, opt-in pages and other pages that you want to have high traffic results.

This linking can be accomplished by simply embedding links to your website where it feels natural and appropriate to do so and by having a static website link on your blog.

Of course, you can always include a call to action at the end of your post.

And with video you can embed links as well.

How To Make Blogging Work For You – Key Strategies For Success

Blog posts are just like other content. It needs to offer value to your audience. Value can be in the form of information or entertainment or a combination of both. 

Utilize the same keyword optimization and formatting rules you would for other content. 

In addition to your standard headline, content and SEO rules to help your blog drive traffic to your website, take advantage of the many technologies developed specifically for blogs.

These include widgets and plug-ins.

WordPress specifically offers a number of plug-ins to optimize your blog posts automatically.

Other blogging platforms, like Blogger and TypePad, also have SEO tools and features you can use to optimize your blog.

Additionally, there are social networking plug-ins that make it easy for your blog visitors to “Tweet” this, “Stumble” that, “Digg” or post on Facebook. Integrating your traffic tactics will help you use them to their full potential.

Encourage commenting and discussion.  Active blogs are well read blogs. To encourage participation and comments, ask questions.

Controversial posts also encourage commenting, however you’ll want to tread lightly here so you don’t offend your readers.

Make sure readers can subscribe to your content. One of the benefits of a blog is the fact that readers can subscribe to your blog via RSS technology.

This means each time you publish a new post it can be emailed or will show up on their readers.

(A reader is a tool used to aggregate all the content/blog posts you want to read and stay on top of.)

Post regularly. If you do not have the time to post on a regular basis, consider hiring a writer or adding guest bloggers to your blog so you don’t have to do it all alone.

Traffic Tool #6 Advertising

Well placed advertisements can drive targeted traffic directly to your website or to any specific web page you want.

For example, if you’re promoting a new product, you can create ads to drive traffic directly to that sales page.

OR if you’re looking to grow your email list, you can create ads to drive traffic right to your squeeze page.

There are many different types of advertisements. They include:

PPC Type Ads

PPC stands for Pay per click. There are also pay per view or PPV and other types of pay per advertisement programs.

Google, Yahoo and other services offer PPC type programs.

It’s important to know that this is not a free traffic generation tool.

It can actually get quite expensive and is therefore often recommended as a tactic to save for when your business has grown a bit and is generating a profit.

You can turn some of that profit back into your marketing and traffic generation budget.

We’ll take a look at several tactics that are free and are better suited to new business owners.

PPC campaigns can also be tricky when it comes to driving targeted traffic.

In order to make your PPC ad campaigns generate targeted traffic, you have to study your prospects and design keyword specific ads that send traffic to a web page related to the ad.

Classified Advertisements

Classified advertisements are just what they sound like. You can use sites like Craigslist and classified ad sites to drive traffic to your business.

Many of these classified advertisement sites are 100% free.

Use the same advice and strategy as with PPC ads above.

Banner Ads

This type of advertising works by purchasing space on a relevant website.

For example, if you have a website that sells running shoes, you might advertise on a personal training website or a fitness website.

The biggest hurdle with banner ads, besides making them generate the results you want them to, is that they can be quite expensive.

And many free tactics can have better results. So let’s put this tactic aside and look at some free and low cost web traffic tactics.

Traffic Tactic # 7 Local Search

Earlier we discussed the advantage of registering your business with search engine business listings and organizations like DMOZ. 

You can also register your business with Local search and business directories.  Google has a local business directory called Google Places. Yahoo does, too.

And there are rumors that Facebook may be adding a local directory type feature to their website.

It is estimated that more than 70% of internet users utilize local search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN before they make a purchase or hire a service provider. 

And this is growing because of the convenience and popularity of mobile devices – we’re searching online using our phones.

And while this may not apply to all business models, local search applies to many information, product and service based online business models.

The benefit of using local search to drive traffic is that it’s really easy to reach #1 in the page rankings for your website when you embrace local search.

This means more website traffic. Best of all, it’s free!

Optimizing your site for the local search engines and registering with the services is easy, and it can give you an edge over your competition because it’s something many businesses neglect.

How To Make Local Search Work For You – Key Strategies for Success

The first step is to get listed with the local search engines.  Visit the sites below and register your business.  It’s free. 

Make sure you use the same information with each site and that the information you register your business with is also listed on every page of your website as copy and not part of a graphic – search engines don’t read graphics.

• com/places
• http://www.local.yahoo.com
• https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx

Additionally, services like Google Places offers analytic and traffic generation tools and features.

Some of these cost a fee but they may be worth it depending on your business model and target audience.

You can always register your business for free now and use the traffic generation features later, once you’ve reached your initial traffic goals.

But What About Your Email List?

Shouldn’t you be directing those subscribers to your website too?

Of course you should!

Each message you send to your email list should have a link to your website, even if you’re not promoting a darned thing and are only providing relevant and useful information.

Always link back to your website. Why? Because people share email messages. They forward them to a friend!

And because your email message may strike a chord with your reader who suddenly wants to learn more, get involved and maybe even make a purchase from you. 

Your email list is a valuable traffic-building tool; so don’t neglect it. Work that list to its fullest potential.

Conclusion

We’ve just covered a number of basic traffic generation tactics.

There are more tactics that we haven’t covered like viral marketing, contests and sweepstakes and, of course, special promotions. 

As your business grows, you can take a look at some of these tactics.

However, in the beginning it’s important to stick with the proven tactics and the ones we’ve covered are definitely proven traffic generation tactics. 

In the next chapter we’ll take a look at planning to drive traffic to your website and how you’re going to integrate some of these traffic generation tactics together into a comprehensive strategy that will help you achieve your goals.

OF course, first you have to set traffic goals.

If you already have a website and have some traffic coming to it, then it may be easier for you to create traffic goals because you have a starting point.

If you are in the beginning phases of launching a website, creating traffic goals may take some time.

You may want to research your competition and create smaller goals that help you reach a long-term goal of beating your competition’s traffic.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

It’s important, in the beginning, to focus on one or two primary traffic generation tactics. 

Focused attention means you’ll be able to put 100% of yourself into each tactic and maximize it.

If you try to manage too many traffic generation tactics, your attention may be too divided and each tactic won’t achieve its full potential.

On that note, it’s time for your first action step.

Action Step #1

Choose at least one of the seven traffic generation tactics to start using this week.

Spend some time reviewing the various traffic generation tactics we’ve discussed and tentatively decide which one or two you will focus on first. 

Chapter Two: Shifting Gears – Phases Of Business & How Your Traffic Generation Strategy Grows And Changes

Okay. We’ve covered the various traffic generation tools you can use with broad strokes; and you may have decided which tactic you’re going to start with.

However, before you run out and start implementing these tactics, you want to do one very important thing – create a plan – a traffic generation strategy.

This is essential.

Not planning your traffic generation strategy means:

• Not knowing if each tactic is working
• Wasting your precious time, effort and money
• Floundering and struggling instead of achieving

Not fun, right?

On the other hand, planning your traffic generation strategy means:

• Knowing when you’ve achieved your traffic goals
• Knowing what tactics are working
  • Eliminating users techniques that don’t work or fine-tuning them for better results
  • Maximizing your time, energy & money
  • Reaching profitability ASAP!

Of course, one critical component of knowing whether you’ve achieved your traffic generation goals is to test and track your goals and the tactics you’re using to achieve them.

We’ll take a look at how to accomplish that in the next chapter.

For now, let’s get started on your Traffic Generation Strategy. Remember, this report is one part of a full business building series.

The traffic generation plan you create here will become part of your complete business plan. You’ll come back to your business plan on a regular basis to:

• Make sure you’re on track to achieve your goals
• Adapt and modify your tactics as your business grows and charges.

On that note, let’s take a look at what goes into creating your traffic generation strategy

Creating Your Traffic Generation Strategy

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when trying to drive traffic to their websites is a failure to create a plan and to stick to it.

As mentioned in previous reports, as a business owner your number one task and responsibility is to plan your business.

Experts recommend spending at least 25% of your time planning. Everything from your finances to your traffic generation strategy should be planned.

Here’s what to consider when planning your traffic generation strategy:

• What are your traffic goals?
• What tactics are you going to use to achieve those goals? This is of course what we’re talking about today.
• What is your budget?
• What goals do you have for each traffic tactic and how are you going to achieve them?
• How are your testing and tracking results?
• How will your tactics work together for maximum results?
• How often will you reassess, analyze, and plan your strategy?

There isn’t a right or wrong way to plan, what is important is that you do it.

Having a plan will make sure you don’t miss a step, make mistakes, or skip over a potentially effective traffic generation tactic.

Changing Traffic Generation Tactics As You Grow-Switching Gears

It makes sense that your traffic generation tactics will change as your business grows and changes.

First Gear

Right now, you’re likely in first gear – You’re just starting out. This means you may:

• Have limited finances-tight budget. Aspiring entrepreneurs often have limited cash reserves. They certainly don’t often have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising campaigns, outsourcing, and content creation.

(What you do have, however, is your skills, knowledge and the entrepreneurial mindset to get the job done.)

The good news is that many of the best traffic generation tactics are 100% free.

• Have limited time-still working 9 to 5. Many entrepreneurs haven’t quit their day jobs. This is perfectly fine, but it does present you with a time challenge. The tactics you will likely focus on, therefore, are the ones that provide maximum traffic for as little time commitment as necessary.

Blogging and social networking, for example, can be accomplished before work, at lunchtime and after work.

• Have united resources-few partners and associates in your industry to help you. New to an industry, you might not have a solid support system or network of associates. That means you may be handling most of your business yourself.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s the way most people start in business. If you have a good chunk of money, time and resources-Great!

If you don’t, no worries; many of the traffic generation tactics we’ve discussed are free and super effective (often more effective than the paid strategies).

Regardless, your traffic strategy should reflect your present circumstances and be designed to take you to the next level.

 Here’s a quick Look at how your traffic Generation strategy might look at the various stages of your business growth:

Growth – First Gear

During the initial year or two when you’re just starting out, content marketing, linking, and article marketing may be where you focus your time and energy.

As your business grows you may transition into blogging and social networking. 

Adolescence – Third Gear

As you shift into third gear and have reached some of your initial long-term goals you will likely be strengthening your traffic generation tactics.

Maybe your social networking tactics have really amplified and your blog is growing by leaps and bounds.

You’re still focusing on content marketing and article marketing as well. 

You’re also dabbling in advertising now that you have revenue that you can turn around and put back into your business.

Maturity – Fifth Gear

Business is zooming right along at this point. You’re now using most, if not all, of the major traffic generation tactics.

Content, article marketing, blogging, linking and social networking are all streamlined and your advertising campaigns are fine tuned to generate the most traffic.

At this point you may be willing to step outside of the box and take some risks. 

As you transition through the gears, or stages of your business, you’ll also have traffic goals that coincide with each of your chosen tactics. 

It’s important to know that your tactics will overlap. Your content and article marketing tactics will overlap with your goals to generate more incoming links.

Your social networking tactics may overlap with your blogging and content tactics. 

Conclusion

Planning your traffic generation strategy, including the goals and how you’re going to achieve them, is essential for success.

It’s important to accept and realize your present strengths and weaknesses and to plan ahead for the future at the same time. 

This chapter presents a number of action steps.  Achieve them, plan your strategy, and you’ll be ready to implement them and surge forward.

Action Step #2

What Is Your Budget? 

How much money do you have to spend on traffic generation tactics?

Action Step #3

How Much Time Do You Have?

Honestly assess how much time you have each day, week and month to devote to driving traffic to your website. When will you be working on traffic generation? Schedule it.

Action Step #4

What are your traffic goals?

Outline what your goals are for traffic. How many visitors do you want each day, week, and month to your website? Research your competition if you’re not sure where to start.

Action Step #5

What tactics are you going to use to achieve those goals?

What goals do you have for each traffic tactic and how are you going to achieve them?

Action Step #6

How will your tactics work together for maximum results?

Action Step #7

How often will you reassess, analyze, and plan your strategy?

Document your plan to review and reevaluate your strategy and goals.

Chapter Three: Tune-Up – Testing and Tracking Traffic

In the previous chapter we discussed creating a traffic generation strategy. You created goals for each tactic in your strategy, right?

So how are you going to measure those goals?

How will you know what tactics are working?

How will you know if your traffic plan needs a tune up?

This chapter is devoted to testing and tracking your web traffic generation tactics.

Here are just a few things you can test and track.

• Click-throughs on social networking posts.
  • Headline effectiveness
  • Calls to action

Let’s take a look at how to test and track successfully.

Testing

Testing is essentially measuring various tactics or aspects of a tactic to see how it’s performing.

One example might be if you are utilizing article directories to drive traffic and you want to find out which type of article generates more links; a review or a tip sheet. 

This is testing.  And there are various forms of testing that you can use.

The most basic is Split Testing and that’s where we’ll focus our attention. 

You can look into multivariable testing if you want to get more involved in this process, however, for most needs and purposes, split testing works just fine.

Split Testing

Split testing is quite simple in theory. It’s essentially testing one element of a tactic.

Say, for example, you want to test the effectiveness of a call to action in your articles you publish on article directories. 

You want to see which call to action generates more clicks through to your website.

The idea would be to essentially publish the exact same article with two different calls to action.

The one that received more clicks through is the one that you would then rely on for future content and published articles.

And in fact, many article directories support split testing with features that make it easy to isolate one element and test for it.

When done correctly, the data you receive is extremely accurate and beneficial.

The disadvantage to split testing is that it can take a long time to gather accurate data and if you’re only testing one variable at a time.

In general it takes fifty actions to give you statistically relevant data, with a margin of error of about 12%.

Testing Tools

Where do you go to start testing? Basic testing can be handled internally. You can do it yourself or hire someone to track and compile the data.

A simple excel spreadsheet will help you track your marketing data or you can take advantage of technology.

Online, there are a number of website tracking tools you can use.

For example, Google Analytics enables you to evaluate customer response to different web pages and click-through rates on items you’re testing, like your sign up form.

Like most things Google, it’s free.  We’ll talk more about Google Analytics at the end of this chapter.

Your website host may also offer helpful analytical tools to help you track relevant statistics.

Additionally, there are a number of consulting firms and software programs available to anyone who is interested in multivariable or split testing.

Tracking

In an internet business you can test and track just about everything, however, because this report is devoted to website traffic, we’re going to stick to that topic. 

Tracking is simply using the data available to find out how your customers and prospects found out about or made their way to your business website.

Did they?

• Click on an ad
• See a comment you posted on a blog?
• Read an article you published online?
• Find you via the search engines?
• Follow a social networking link?
• Follow a link posted on someone else’s blog?

You can also find out how many people visit your website each:

• Day
• Week
• Month
• And how that information compares to previous days, weeks and months.

And finally, you can learn which keywords people are using most often to find your website. Imagine how powerful that information can be!

As you can see this can be some very helpful and important information. It can tell you exactly which tactics are working and which are not.

And it can tell you where to focus your efforts and if you’ve reached your website traffic goals.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most useful tools, and it’s free, is Google Analytics.

You simply sign up for an account, create your code, and past it into your website code (or have your webmaster handle it for you.)

Here’s a rundown of what Google Analytics can tell you:

1 – Date Range. Use this dropdown box to select what date range you want to get data for. For example, if you want to see how many visitors you got in the last week select those dates in the dropdown box.

2 – Visitor Graph. This is a graph of how many visitors you got over the date range you selected.

3 – Visits. The number of visitors you got over the date range you selected.

4 – The number of web page views.

5 – The number of pages the average visitor visited.

6 – The bounce rate is the percentage of people who left your website without looking at another web page. In other words, they came to your front page and left right away.

7 – The average time spent on your website before leaving.

8 – What percentage of visitors are new visitors.

9 – Your dashboard where you can get more data.

Traffic Sources Menu

This is perhaps one of the most important menus in Google Analytics. This page allows you to get detailed data on where your visitors are coming from.

By learning where your visitors are coming from, you have a far greater chance of increasing your traffic successfully.

Generally, it’s easier to get more traffic from an existing traffic source than it is to try and find a new traffic source.

Here are some of the important statistics you can get from the Google Analytics Traffic Sources menu:

Overview – The first page you’ll be taken to will have an overview of your main sources of traffic. It’ll break it down by Direct Traffic, Referring Sites and Search Engines.

In addition, it will also have your top traffic sources and top keywords.

Referring Sites – If you click referring sites, you can see the top websites that are sending visitors to you. If you find a website that’s working particularly well, you may want to consider trying to get even more traffic from that website.

Keywords – This is a crucial part of search engine optimization. Google Analytics will actually tell you what keywords people are using to find you.

By analyzing this data, you can improve your search engine rankings for those keywords and get even more traffic.

You can also take keywords that are doing well for you on organic search and bid on them in PPC. You could also take keywords that are doing well in PPC and optimize your site for them on search.

As you can tell, there’s a wealth of information that’s available to you. Look over your analytics carefully and extract the most valuable data.

Conclusion

Of course there are other analytic tools and services that you can use depending on your budget and the amount of information you’re looking for. 

Knowing what works when it comes to traffic generation and where your visitors are coming from is an essential element to planning your strategy correctly and to making it work for long-term success.

In the next chapter we jump right into the main website traffic mistakes and outline the do’s and don’ts for generating website traffic.

However, before you move on, there are two action steps to take.

Action Step #7 Testing Tactics

Create a strategy to test the various elements of your chosen traffic generation tactics. 

For example, if you’ve decided to utilize article marketing, test headlines on an article to see which generates more traffic or test your call to action. 

Go back to your traffic generation strategy and add a plan to test your tactics for maximum results.

Action Step #8

Spend some time researching potential analytic tools including Google analytics.

Find one you like and install it onto your website.

Action Step #9

Create a strategy to test the various elements of your chosen traffic generation tactics. 

For example, if you’ve decided to utilize article marketing, test headlines on an article to see which generates more traffic or test your call to action. 

Go back to your traffic generation strategy and add a plan to test your tactics for maximum results.

Chapter Four: Website Traffic Do’s and Don’ts

We’ve covered a lot of information in this report. 

This chapter is devoted to cutting it down to the very basics – the do’s and don’ts of website traffic; followed by a checklist to help you create and implement your traffic generation strategy.

Don’t – Assume you know how people are searching for your information.

Don’t – Try to take on too many traffic tactics at once.

Don’t – Wing it!

Don’t – Keyword stuff.

Don’t – Create duplicate content.

Don’t – Force yourself to work with a content style if you’re uncomfortable with it. If you’re not a writer hire one or create audio and video content instead.

Don’t – Buy more advertising than you can afford.

Don’t – Participate in Link Farms

Don’t – Waste energy trying to fool search engine spiders.

Don’t  – Place keywords in your graphics – search engines don’t recognize them.

Don’t – Obsess about your competition.

Don’t – Post ONLY links to your website when engaging in social networking.

 

Do – Your keyword research!

Do – Choose traffic generation tactics that fit your skills, goals, and budget.

Do – Plan your strategy and tactics before implementing or doing anything.

Do – Create traffic goals. Know what you want to achieve and then plan how you’re going to achieve it.

Do – Implement testing and tracking measures to evaluate your goals and methods.

Do – Use keywords in your content naturally.

Do – Create original content that provides value to your audience and boosts your credibility

Do – Repurpose your content wisely and make the most from your content creation efforts.

Do – Use print, audio and video content; whatever suits your personality, skills and target audience

Do – Use a call to action whenever possible in your content so you can test and track its effectiveness

Do – Publish a biography with a link back to your site whenever publishing somewhere other than your website.

Do – Pay attention to the details.  They matter!

Do – Venture into paid traffic generation tactics carefully and with a testing and tracking system in place.

Do – Work to earn quality links to your website from reputable and relevant websites.

Do – Make sure your keywords are included in the first paragraph, in your headings and in your title and meta tags.

Do – Use analytics to help you stay on top of your traffic results

Do – Make your content easy to read online

Do – Categorize and tag your content appropriately when using article directories, YouTube and iTunes

Do – Tag your audio and video on your website and include descriptions with keywords so the search engines can index your content

Do – Write press releases

Do – Register your business with online business directories

Do – Register your business with local search and optimize your site for local search keywords

Do – Research your competition. Find out what keywords they’re using, who they’re interacting with on social networking sites, what they’re blogging about, where they’re publishing content and who is linking to them.

Do – Create a social networking profile that represents your brand

Do – Consistently interact and provide value when networking

Do – Feel proud about linking to strategic posts and pages on your website when networking

Do – Comment on relevant industry blogs and create a user profile so other blog readers can visit your website

Do – Plan your traffic generation strategy with growth in mind. Your business is going to grow, and as it does, you can add new traffic tactics to your current strategy.

Do – Use the action steps in this report to get a firm grasp on where you want your business to go and how you’re going to get there!

Traffic Generation Checklist

• I’ve chosen my traffic generation tactics. They include: (Check all that apply)
  • Content
  • Article marketing
  • Blogging
  • Link Building
  • Social Networking
  • Local Search
  • Online Business directories
  • Advertising
    • PPC
    • Banner
    • Classified
    • Other______________________
• I’ve created my traffic generation strategy. I’ve included: (Check all that apply)
• My traffic goals
• How I’m going to integrate my chosen traffic generation tactics
• My budget
• My time available
• My resources
• Other________________________________
• I’ve installed an analytic software or service
• I’ve created systems to test and track my traffic generation results
• I’ve begun implementing my traffic generation tactics!

What’s Next?  Where Do You Go From Here?

Congratulations!

You’ve just created and have begun implementing your traffic generation strategy. Once you have traffic flowing to your website, the profits will follow.

Don’t stop now!

You’re on a roll. Take this momentum and spin it into action. (If you just read this report and then tuck it away, you’re just spinning your wheels, not going anywhere).

Your destination is freedom!

You have resources to help you. Use this report and the resources found at the end of it.

Use the workbook – it’s designed for you to print out and write in (you’ll use this information as you build and grow your business.)

Use the mind map for creative brainstorming and planning sessions.

Necessary Action Steps

Set aside an hour today, tomorrow, and/or a few hours this weekend and work through the questions, activities and exercises in this book.

Write down your steps and your answers – they’ll be an integral part of your business plan.

Take action and move forward.

The action you take today affects your success tomorrow.

You’re on your way to achieving all you envision for yourself and your business. You are on the road to riches.

Resources and Links

Search Engine Tools And Resources

Free SEO Tools:
http://www.bestwebsitetraffictips.com/free-seo-tools/

Tracking and Testing Software:

• http://www.vipprofitzone.com/marketing-software/trackingscripts.html
• Google Analytics

Article Directories & Traffic Generation Tools

Ezinearticles.com

Business Directories:

• http://allbusiness.com/biz-directory/index.asp
• http://dmoz.org
• http://botw.org.
• http://www.directorylist.org

Local Search

• com/places
• http://www.local.yahoo.com
• https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx