Traffic Methods – Week 4 Begins!

OK, now we are nearing the end of the course and the beginning of the real work. Yes, real work…  getting traffic to my website.

If you want to be successful at marketing anything online, you need to do the work and keep doing it. This is not a set it and forget it type of things. They don’t really exist anymore unless you want to pay for every bit of traffic you get.

Oh, in case you are not familiar with the terminology, traffic, in this context means visitors to a website.

This week we have to decide on our traffic method (or methods), set up tracking and get started driving traffic.

In today’s internet world there is really no such thing as “free” traffic. All traffic methods cost you either time or money. If you are like me, you don’t have a lot of money but you do have some time. I will be using mostly “free” traffic methods and a little paid traffic.

“FREE” TRAFFIC

There are many different types of free traffic methods to consider.  I have decided to use blog posting and social media such as Pinterest, Youtube and Instagram.  Perhaps Facebook too.

Search engines (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing) are smarter now than ever before and if this is how you plan to get most of your traffic, listen up. If you just put up a website and leave it alone expecting to make a any money, you will be sorely disappointed.

You need to update/post regularly, at least 5 days a week, some say 7 days.

So I am investigating these further to see how I can use the content from my blog to create posts on the other social media sites so I really only write one piece of content and use that to add to all the others.  I might outsource this eventually when I have the funds to do so.

PAID TRAFFIC

There are many types of paid traffic methods as well.  We have pay-per-click, pay-per-action and pay-per-view to name some of the broad categories of paid traffic methods.

I have tried some of the Pay-per-Click methods in the past and have lost a lot of money.  People keep using them so I assume they work but I have not been successful.

We are getting a bonus session next week (YAY!) on Facebook ads so I have decided to do that as my paid traffic source for now anyway.

Planning my Work

As I mentioned in a previous post my planning skills are very rusty.  Based on my experience in this course so far, I KNOW that planning is the only way I will succeed online, especially as I am using mostly ‘free’ traffic methods to start.

Getting visitors to my website (this site)  will require consistent action on my part – this is a challenge for me so I have to plan in advance or it will NOT get done.

So far I have set up tracking for my traffic and now I am off to plan my posting schedule for the next month (gulp!).

Here we go!!!!