Traffic is the growth source of every online business web site and it is the lifeblood !

Without Traffic, your web site is dump and your business never gets exposure to any one in this world. So online business is all about driving traffic – which is the key factor to work on. There are other factors which are more important than traffic generation however, without traffic all those other factors become ineffective.

Similar to a real world business, say you setup a super market and loaded with tonnes of items to sell and what happens, if no one visits your shop ? it is useless. Hence the business is dependent on visitors or more preciously on customers. (i have published a similar business case study/example here on, how to make money in business ?)

Now, we could say – Driving CUSTOMERS is all about online business…

Okay, lets see more on this topic and in the end will understand the importance of driving traffic – finding targeted traffic for your business online – achieving the purpose/goal…

Web Site Traffic Strategy.

You build web sites, you build blogs and in the end – ultimate goal is growing your business. Whatever you do, is for the benefit of your business. In other words, constantly we are finding customers for product or value in hand – that’s the simplest definition of business.

Hence, i am keeping value creation at one side and attracting visitors on the other side. These two are highly interdependent and relay on each other.

• Without value – no one will visit your web site and with out visitors – you could not show your value or product to any one. There has to be a mutual synchronization between these two entities. That’s, value creation and showing it to people – the ultimate aim of traffic generation.
• Simply, have value in hand so that you could attract people by showing them – that will be the best business strategy.

Find Customers Not Just Visitors.

For the growth of your business, traffic is vital. That’s pretty clear now. The sources of traffic and nature of traffic decides a lot in your business. We all know that generating targeted traffic is more important than just driving huge number of traffic (may or may not be targeted).

First, the targetness is highly decided by the source of traffic, that means from where you are getting visitors ? Either from search engines, from social media tools, from other web sites (or referral traffic) or direct visitors. In these sources – at least search engines and social media tools are highly controllable in terms of deciding the nature of visitors.

In other words, your content highly decides the nature of traffic from search engines as well as social media tools.

And also, how well you are networked with similar people, decides the nature of traffic from social media tools as well as the referral traffic.

• Simply, have content which serves the customer needs and get networked with those people who are related to your business, done ! Now you are sourced with targeted traffic (or customer traffic).

Engaging The Most Out of Traffic – Define Purpose.

Yes, there are lot of stuffs involved and we have to play the game wisely in order to succeed. All these hard work will get benefited ONLY if you define the Purpose of your business. Without having a purpose, it doesn’t matter how many visitors you drive to your business site – its useless.

• Keep the ultimate purpose in front and attract people to serve that purpose. This way, you could utilize the targeted traffic well.

For example, if you are selling a product from your web site add value in-and-around your product, if you are offering a service add value by showing your expertise in front, or if you are offering advice (just blogging) keep the content in front – this gains maximum exposure.

Simply, fix the purpose of your business and attract people to your site showing that purpose in front !

Conclusion…

To conclude, you have to be more focused towards the purpose of your business than driving traffic. Have the business goals in mind and see, how you could potentially utilize the traffic for your business.

Always find alternative sources of traffic and do a lot of experiment with your visitors behavior so that you could tweak..n…tweak the strategies until you achieve the end goal.

image: tammy

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For example, if you are running a departmental store and what if no one comes to your store ? or say you are running a laundry service in your locality and what if the people don’t know about your service ? Go it, right ? You need exposure to your business to run. When you are able to create that “exposure” your business could survey and you could find more audience to it.

In fact, audiences are the life of your business. This fact is well applicable for online based business too. When you are selling a product online, you have to find the audience/traffic so that you could sell it.

Not All Visitors Are Buyers.

Creating exposure is the major goal to get audience. When you are running a business online, do every audience buys the product ? The answer is NO.

But you could work for improving the conversion rate and that’s possible. What i want to tell here is, not all the visitors coming to your site are buyers.

Example: Say, you are running a site to sell “finance softwares” and what if, your web site gets visitors who are looking for “antivirus softwares” ? There is a contradiction, right ? There is a gap between the visitors and your business. This happens more in case of online businesses.

Now our goal changed to getting the “Right audience”.

We have to show the product to the right visitors. When you sell “personal finance software”, you should find people who are looking for “finance related information” which creates the right exposure to your business, that’s called “Targeted Traffic”.

Keywords the Source of Buyer Traffic.

We realized the importance of getting targeted traffic. Now the question is, what is buyer traffic ? and how to get it ?

In general, before buying, people do research about a product/service as well as they will directly look for products. With that in mind, lets see how do the buyer makes buying decision ?

• Buyer has a problem.
• He needs information.
• He looks for information.
• He thinks to buy a solution.
• He looks for products.
• He finds 1-2 product.
• He buys.

Now this is a simple fact that you have to find that “buyer who has problem”. And “show the product as solution”.

That’s it, you are done. Use the appropriate keywords to bring such people to your site, it converts the best.

Example:

In our example of selling finance software, the following are the relevant keywords to bring buyer traffic:

• How to manage my personal finance using a software ?
• Which is the best software to manage personal finance ?
• List of personal finance management softwares
• What are the best personal finance softwares ?
• review of AAAA finance software
• Compare AAAA and BBBB
• Which is the best AAAA or BBBB ?

These are few of the ways a buyer will look for a solution to his problem. When you are able to write articles around these topics, definitely you could drive targeted buyer traffic. The conversion will be the best because you are showing the “right product to right audience”.

Define right keywords and titles, this is the simplest solution to get buyer traffic !

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What's the Role ?

Search Engines Are Stupid.

Especially, its the free source of traffic from search engines. Many web sites are dependent on SEO, even i too optimize the pages and content for search engines. That’s why i made a statement long back that: Search Engines are Stupid. Yes, because people are optimizing their pages for search engines and it lacks intelligent to find the right content.

But in practical, search engines are well intelligent to judge or differentiate between a spam page and a worthy page. Lets keep that topic aside and see the role of seo especially in making money online.

#1 Source of Traffic.

SEO is the source of traffic and almost ~70% of any content rich web site gets its traffic from search engines esp. Google, the leader in search engine solution. This traffic report here says, 41% of traffic is sourced by Google on a sample of 21 sites taken for the analysis. Ultimately, SEO plays the underlying game of driving traffic from search engines.

The better optimized pages (for keywords) gets the “Real Organic Natural Quality Traffic” and hence your site greatly makes money…because of targeted visitors.

#2 Quality of Traffic.

Search traffic or visitors coming from search engines are of high quality visitors. Another Quality Test between SEO and SMO (social Media Optimization) says that SEO driven traffic converts better when compared to social media traffic (from twitter/facebook etc). Its true that search engine users are more serious about the information they are looking. More serious users are turn to be quality visitors to our site and hence drives sales or converts.

Basically, the quality of traffic coming from SE’s are high, when compared to other sources of traffic. So SEO drives quality traffic…

SEO Vs Results Vs Money.

Its pretty clear now that SEO is the source of quality traffic. But the question is,

• How long you have to perform SEO ?
• When do we see the Results of SEO ?
• When do i make money out of SEO activities ?

Its unnatural or tough to answer these questions. Because SEO is a Long term method marketing activity and you have to perform that life longer. Yes, it runs through out the life cyle of your online business site. The SEO step that you take today, may need 3-4 months to see the results. Sometimes, it takes years for your web site to reach the No.1 position in SERP of Google. In some other case, you never reach No.1 position.

• Yes, this blog (eMoneyMakingOnline) recently reached the top 10 position in Yahoo for the “Money Making Online” related keywords. Its more tied to the number of competitors and the ranking factors fixed up by search engines.

Finally, the SEO effort -> the Results -> the Income (Money) are all interdependent and tied to each other. Better SEO efforts bring in great Results (more traffic) and your site earns good. Hence SEO plays a major role in money making online….100%

image:SMJJP

The example that i am going to share here definitely helps other bloggers to understand the importance of blog posting frequency. From my experience, i have seen that posting frequency definitely affects the traffic and it definitely increases the traffic. I have seen many people saying, quality of blog post is more important over posting frequency. I am not against that statement. Instead, i strongly believe that post frequency increases blog traffic. Lets see the data that i have collected from my experimentation’s.

Usual Posting Habit.

My posting habit is that, 3-4 posts per week and i am following this for the past 1 year. An example, the following figure shows the traffic that my blog received in a week of June-2010. It receives 611 visitors. And for the month of May-2010, it had received 511 visitors. So in a month, the traffic per week increased by 100 visitors (with my usual posting frequency).

Blog traffic per week on May-2010

Blog traffic per week on June-2010

Increase In Posting Frequency.

I started my experiment and decided to increase the posting frequency from July-2010. See the Archive here and the post count for the month of July, i have written ~45 articles in that month. which is more than twice the normal post frequency. So whats the effect ? See the below figure, my blog received nearly ~1000 visitors per week. And the increase in traffic is around +50% of visitors.

Increase in blog traffic per week on July-2010

And also, the page views increased to nearly ~7K per week.

So the effects of increase in posting frequency are:

• Increase in number of visitors coming to the blog.
• There is a increase in Google’s traffic (and other search engines too).
• Number of page views increased.
• Average time, the visitors staying in my blog increased.
• RSS subscriber count increased, its now reached 3 figure (very recently, i integrated it).
• Alexa rank quickly climbed from 300K to ~200K (in a month).
• Interestingly, my writing habit/style improved a lot n lot…

So the conclusion, blog posting frequency definitely increases your blog traffic, from all corners. More pages indexed in search engines and hence more entry points to your blog. Your readers will come back frequently to find more new information. Your blog remains fresh and dynamic. Only thing, you have to put more effort for writing more useful articles for your blog.

• I finalize, its worth to increase your blog posting frequency from today ! Learn the tips to Get more blog traffic (a short course).

But in general, i could think of 2 reasons that strongly tells Search Engines Are Stupid, when seen from technical angle. With a software developer in mind, i could see search engines are stupids. How ?

Reason #1: Why Do You Optimize For Search Engines ?

Search Engine Optimization is one of the biggest fun for webmasters (web site owners). When you are designing a web site, you have to optimize it for search engines. When you publish a content, you have to optimize for search engines. Atleast, if you are serving 90% of the visitors needs, the remaining 10% webmasters are serving for search engines.

The point is simple, webmasters are optimizing their site & content for search engines because seach engines are not really capable to find out, what is useful ? what is useless ? We have to feed them with information in specially formatted manner. That means, search engines could not understand non-optimized content/site & they are stupid !

Do You Agree ?

Reason #2: Human Developed Softwares.

Even though search engines are solving our problems, its a piece of computer software development by humans. Humans are born to make errors ! And how you do trust that search engines are 100% right always ? They are controlled by a set of humans which in turn controls the rest of world. Because the service offered by search engines are valuable to the visitor and they may be incorrect.

People should not believe search engines 100% of the time. Like human Search Engines are born to error ! Because web sites & their content are optimized intentionally for search engines. You cannot blame the webmasters because they need visitors from search engines and search engine needs information.

Now Visitors are in between looking for the information which may go wrong or you may not get the right information ! Thats the reason, Search engines are stupid.

Wait, i am not against search engines and i know how valuable service they are making to the public.

But if you think from this angle like me, you will say Search Engines are Stupid because web sites are optimized specially for them & they are served to visitors (the actual stupid) who are looking for information.

What do you think ?

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For any kind of online business, this crucial formula applies “more visibility, gives more revenue“. Just to say, more visibility means more visitors. In Internet, Visibility is through Links. So the more your links are spread over the Internet, you will get more visitors and hence more money.

Build advertising gateways.

This is the most effective and advisable method of driving free advertising for your site. Its simple. Add your website link in other websites. This could be easily done, look for similar neighbors like you. But take care to find out the right neighbour, he should have more traffic already. So that your site will get some percentage of traffic from others.

With this method, you could easily increase atleast 20% of your overall visibility free of cost.

Advertising your quality articles.

If you are good in writing, do write some quality articles. Publish the article in some of the famous article submission sites like ezinearticles, articlebase, streetdirectory etc. As you know, put your sites URL in signature or in authors note.

Do Guestly Writing

Do guest posting in other websites. But you have find out the websites or blogs who are offering for guest posting. Look for sites which are related to your business or product. A single quality post builds great trust to your visitors.

Free Classifieds To Play.

Numerous paid advertising programs are there like Adsense, YPN etc. that most of the peoples know. But even there are free classified ads in the Internet, there you could publish your ads for free. Some of the online free classified advertising programs are Free Advertising Forum, Classifieds Free, Ad To Ad. Try them out.

Free To Do Image Publishing

Create images like icons, banners, logos and put your sites URL in the bottom or in the corners. Publish those images to resource sharing sites like shutterstock, etc. Peoples may download your images, hence freely advertised. Also, you could earn some money through Photo publishing in those sites.

Active In Discussion Forums

Participate in discussion forums, the grand father way of free advertising. Add your sites URL to your signature. Find out forums related to your subject, that makes more sense.

Join and Gain Social Networking.

Its the method of connecting to others online. Good example is the Twitter, a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send and read other users updates (known as tweets). Facebook is yet another example. Your products visibility and popularity will increase once you join these networking programs.

Launch Business Press Release.

Launching a press release for your newly started online business, increases the visibility across the Internet. It demonstrates the product or your website or the service offered to others. Learn, how to make press release ? for more information.

Publishing Free brochure or eBooks.

Offering free ebooks or product brochures over the Internet marks your online presence hardly. It should carry the links to your affiliate product or to your websites through out the ebook.

This is an immortal way of free advertising since this will be circulated from one person to another person for free in this Inter-networked world. Content matters here.

Car Advertising.

Print the URL in the back of your car, its a real world advertising technique. Wherever you drive, its visible to the public. Add a catchy title below your URL, it makes peoples to try out your site sometime when they are free. This sounds great, right ???

Thats it. Atleast, this increases atleast another 20% of your overall website traffic and hence free advertising.

Finally, Catch The Search Engine.

Everyone wants to catch the search engines first page, especially on Google. You don;t need to fight like a hero to catch the first place. Implement the very basic seo tips for your website and provide your visitors with quality service. For product based website, you have to provide your visitors with quality service in terms of ordering and shipments. Find out, Website Improvement Steps ?

Offering quality service makes others to link back to your website, this directly automates increasing your position or rank with search engines. Simple Right ? Statistics says, search engines are the 75 % traffic source for any website. See the below proofs.

Traffic Report for Master New Media

Traffic Report for Labnol (an Indian site)

Keep in mind, free advertising feeds your online business with 100% profit.