Money Blogs – Make Money With Content: Part Three

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing articles for our Money Blog series. If you missed Part One or Part Two, feel free to check those out before moving on.

This week, I’m going to talk about a few of the ways to get the traffic flowing to your site. Some of my advice is obvious and other parts of it are simply things I’ve found that just plain work. These methods can be separated into three general categories: the old fashioned way, the paid way, and the down and dirty way.

Getting Traffic the Old Fashioned Way

You might be asking yourself, “what in the world online is old fashioned?” Well, you got me there… I guess I’m trying to convey that this is the method that will require the most work on your part. However, I’m not trying to say this is the hard method either. What I’m talking about is writing content that people want to link to. That’s what it’s all about, folks: getting links. Burn this simple equation into your brain: links = traffic.

If you’ve done your homework with Google Adwords and Google Trends, you already know which particular keywords a person will use when searching on a particular subject. In turn, you now know the type of content people are looking for. Consistently writing original, helpful articles lays down the foundation for what’s going to happen next.

As you pump out the content for your site, search for other sites that may be related to yours. Get to know the community (if there is one). Read these other websites and leave helpful feedback. This will help you get your name out into the blogsphere. Once you’re considered “one of the guys,” try asking the site’s author to trade links with you.

If your site contains a tutorial or two (or two hundred!), submit your tutorials to one of the popular tutorial sites out there. Good-Tutorials is a great place to start, assuming your site has the kind of content they’re looking for (mostly Photoshop, photography, web design type tutorials). You can easily score 800 – 1000 visits in a day if they accept your article and feature it on the front page. That’s 800 – 1000 people who have seen your site and may link to you, visit again later, and possibly recommend a friend!

Don’t worry if you’re not the latest Photoshop genius with amazing video tutorials. There are hundreds of tutorial sites out there and they are all looking for people like you who write original, creative content.

One last thing every serious content site owner should do is submit their site to dmoz. Getting your site listed on dmoz is a sure way to get some Google love. Just be sure and follow the submission guidelines closely and don’t wait too long to submit. It can take months and months to get approved.[ad name=”250×250″]

Buying Traffic with Ads

If you’ve got some cash to spend (or better yet, some blog income to invest), you can always turn to services like Google Adwords to start an ad campaign for your site. The benefit of Adwords is that you can easily reach a targeted audience. Be aware, though, that this is going to cost you money upfront and you won’t always get a return, especially if you’ve monetized your site with simple Adsense ads.

Most people who utilize advertisements to drive traffic to their site are looking to convert this traffic into income. This can be done several ways, but the most popular ways are getting a visitor making a purchase (either from the their site or an affiliate) or by the visitor signing up for a paid service (again, either from their site or an affiliate.) These conversions offer a greater return but are also more difficult to make.

Naturally, if you start an ad campaign, you’ll want the cost of driving traffic to your site to be less than the money you make from it. Otherwise, you’re just digging a hole. This can be a tricky balancing act, and can easily result in losing money. Start small and experiment with different ads, and be sure you’ve got a way to convert your resulting traffic into income!

Getting Traffic the Dirty Way

There are a few “dirty” ways to get traffic flowing to your site, but they aren’t considered good practices in the eyes of many search engines (Google, especially). So before I go any further, let me say right now that I do not recommend these methods. Google has been known to chastise websites that use dirty practices and, believe me, you do not want to be punished by Google.

One very common way people get links is to buy them. That is, they’ll pay a website on a monthly basis to get a link from them. You can get a lot of text links pointing to your site this way, and it may help your page rank (how highly your site ranked in search results) in the search engines. However, Google is smart enough to know when you’re buying text links all over the place and they just might remove your site from their index all together.

Another “dirty” practice is to register your site to a link exchange website. Doing this can result in an immediate jump in the number of links to your site. But yet again, Google (and other search engines) knows that a huge spike in links to your site isn’t normal, and may reduce your page rank.

Conclusion
Well, I hope that my Money Blog series has been helpful. I don’t plan on writing a part four, but I could be persuaded to if there’s enough interesting questions. In case you jumped in here at the end, be sure and catch Part One and Part Two!