Internet businesses and lifestyle businesses are usually built because their founders want to quit their day jobs. They want to enjoy life in all his beauty instead of trading hours for dollars.
Since their business is taken place online, they need a website, a blog or an online-shop. While starting out, every founder has heard that having a decent amount of visitors on their web presence is crucial for their success.
Internet entrepreneurs usually understand that traffic is important and a huge pillar in the success system of Internet business, but they don't exactly know how to generate a level of traffic that results in enough sales to pay all their bills.
For me it was a huge challenge to grow MyGreatOnlineBusiness to where it is now. In September I had 13.885 pageviews, which I think is quite good for this 6 month old blog. But that's not the situation for the wast majority and in fact, my personal blog (this one you're visiting right now) has way less visits.
Obviously, I'm failing right now to monetize those 14k pageviews per month in a way that I could quit my day job. Either 14k pageviews simply isn't enough or the engagement of those visitors is too low. For me, it's a combination of both. I definitely need to see more engagement on MyGreatOnlineBusiness, but of course I also want to grow my traffic on both blogs.
Regardless whether you just started building your website or already have 100k monthly visitors, traffic is the foundation of your success. Without people visiting your website, nobody will see your offered products or service and thus nobody will buy from you.
Traffic is highly important and there are lots of white-hat and black-hat strategies to get more visitors to your website. But there are certain points that you need to be aware of, when we're talking about traffic.
You'll have to rely on Google when you're planning to get free traffic from search engines. Yahoo! or Bing are just too small to drive reasonable traffic to your site. This is a pretty relevant issue, since you're forced to put all eggs in one basket.
Google is constantly updating their search algorithms and thus websites are bouncing up and down in the rankings quite often. MyGreatOnlineBusiness was affected by this as well, which resulted in a 15% loss in Google Adsense revenue.
Obviously your traffic strategy needs to be white-hat, that means you're using only legal methods, not buying any backlinks, not spamming comments all over blogs, writing high quality unique content and try your best to provide valuable information for your audience.
Following white-hat principles will not save you from being affected by Google updates. It's something you'll have to accept when you want to get traffic from Google, but sometimes those updates will even boost your ranking. Keep in mind that Google is updating their algorithms and focus on a natural growth for your site.
This is where the magic comes in. You don't want to have just traffic, but you'll want targeted traffic on your website.
As I said before, traffic is useless without engagement. Only those visitors who are looking for the information you're providing will leave comments, subscribe to your mailing list or even buy products from you.
For getting a high engagement you'll need to have a detailed view on your target audience, know their pain points and know how to approach them in the most appealing ways. But that's a different story.
You need to understand that the attitude of serving everyone will lead to failure! Get clear about who you want to reach with your content and who will benefit from visiting your website. And get equally clear about who won't benefit from your content.
Taylor your website just for your audience and ignore the noise around you! This is how I'm building my sites and how everybody I'm working with is building sites as well. If you're trying to serve everybody, you'll just add more noise to the Internet.
In September I purchased the Quicksprout Traffic System, created by Neil Patel. Neil worked with companies like Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and optimized popular sites like Techcrunch or I Can Has Cheezburger?.
I bet you know that owning learning material and actually using it in the real world are a totally different matter alltogether. That's why I'm using the Quicksprout Traffic System to increase the traffic as far as I can go.
This public "Grow Your Traffic" challenge will hold me accountable and your feedback will motivate me to keep working on the traffic.
I wonder how big the traffic can grow within one month implementing the strategy of world class Internet marketing expert Neil Patel.
This are the chapter's in the Quicksprout Traffic System that I'm going to implement:
To be honest, I'm not sure whether I'll make it through all those topics in October while doing my #90daysofkeywords challenge simultaneously. If I can't achieve this in one month, I'll extend the challenge and continue to keep you posted on the progress.
The goal for October is to grow my traffic on MyGreatOnlineBusiness by at least 10%, which would result in nearly 15k pageviews or nearly 10k visitors.
More important than just the numbers of visitors is the conversion. I want to increase the time a person stays on my site to at least 2:30 minutes and I want them to read 3 pages in average.
Those goals might sound small, but in September I had an average time of 1:14 minutes and 1.45 pages per visit. I definitely need to grow those to factors!
I invite you to follow this challenge here on this blog! You'll find a weekly update on the progress. Though I can't outline the exact contents of the Quicksprout Traffic System, I'll describe all my actions in all their details.
That's it for today, I'm pumped about this challenge and I'd love to hear your thoughts below in the comments!
