Steps to getting quality traffic to your website:

1. Before developing your website, make sure it exists in a quality niche that is both competitive (but not too competitive) and profitable. Do keyword research to see what people are searching for and try to solve their problems. A good friend once told me that in this world, there are two ways to make it in business: (1) by giving and (2) by taking. I encourage you to make your money using method number one. You’ll find a sense of pride and comfort when building your online business.
2. Create a very high quality design that is optimized for SEO, keeps people wanting more, and drives visitors to return. To find this “design”, simply find a website that you admire who is doing very well and mimic the layout. Replace their graphics for your graphics, make this your own design. Work with a web designer (to hire me, just click the contact form) to get your ideas together in Photoshop and get the ball rolling.
3. Layout your design into individual web pages. Make sure every image has an ALT tag, make sure every page is keyword dense, make sure that every <A href=”"> body fits in with relevant keywords. Never include a hyper link that says “click here”. Make sure every page is filled with TITLE tags, META tags, and that you’re utilizing valid XHTML in your code. Make sure that you’re Section 508 compliant as well. Avoid using the TABLE tag if you can accomplish the same thing using simple XHTML tags and CSS.
4. Begin to write content for all of your pages. Make sure you have a page for free resources that will help you get organic traffic from the search engines. Hire a copywriter to write keyword dense articles for you. You need at least 20 to see an impact on your traffic. Make sure these articles are answering the questions that web surfers are asking the search engines. Lay all of your articles out on your pages and remember to continue adding articles at least weekly to keep the traffic coming in.
5. Start an Article Marketing campaign. Write an article that isn’t on your website and begin to distribute that article to article directories. Try Article Submitter for a great application that does it for free. Submit only to article sites that have good PageRanks. Sometimes it might be a good idea to “spin” your articles prevent getting held up in Google’s duplicate content penalty. Write a few articles if necessary and submit them on different iterations to remaining directories.
6. Create a squeeze page on your site where you’re trying to sell your product. Make sure that the squeeze page is making conversions from your current SEO campaign. Once you find a good conversion rate…
7. Start a Google AdWords campaign and begin to direct traffic to that squeeze page that has a good conversion rate. At this point, it’s a matter of spending money to make money–fueling a money making machine.
8. Begin to promote that same squeeze page on as many advertising services as possible. Consider starting a Site Targeted Campaign on as many relevant website as possible.
9. And finally, rake in the dough!

This is my “formula” and it works every time for me. Keep in mind, I didn’t include time periods in this because the amount of time you should spend on each step is contingent upon Google’s time to crawl your website, the time for you get a PageRank, and the time it takes for you to complete your tasks (like writing articles, designing website, optimization, etc.) I recommend that if you’re interested in marketing your product or service, begin optimizing your website for SEO. For the most part, SEO is completely free and sometimes has better conversion rates than PPC. Start your PPC campaign when you know the results are coming in and that your converting traffic.

Since you’re paying for your traffic, you can’t afford to have any distraction on your website whatsoever. I like to only use PPC for websites that are extremely targeted and in a niche market-otherwise you’re probably wasting your money. Here are a few steps you need to take to help optimize a website for PPC:

• Remove advertising from your website. Nothing makes a customer want to leave more than visiting a website full of ads. Advertising also encourages your users to click on your ads and leave your website.
• Case studies show that single column websites perform better for PPC websites. Perhaps you’ve seen these “squeeze” pages before, where all of the content on a website is incorporated into one large page? Believe it or not, this simplistic design performs very well and is one of the most effective ways to make a sale.
• Make your sales pitch extremely targeted and do not sway from the point you’re trying to make.
• Include a call to action and repeat that call to action throughout the page. This means if your call to action is to have the user sign up for your newsletter, mention it several times throughout your copy.
• Most of the time, your headline is the only thing your visitor reads before they exit your website. Make sure that your headline matches exactly what existed in your advertisement.
• Finally you need to use multivariate testing. This means that you test several different versions of a web page and see which one performs better. You should test the copy of the following items of your web page:
  • Headline
  • Calls to Action
  • Caption Copy
  • Graphical Elements
  • Body Copy

I cannot stress enough about relevancy and how important it is to the success of your online business. Here is my formula for success and it has worked for so many. Just remember the following:

Success = The Search Query + The Advertisement +
The Headline of Website + The Copy

All of the above should match up completely in relevancy. If a person types in “how to design a website” into Google, they should see an advertisement that reads “how to design a website” and then the web page he clicks should read somewhere in the headline “how to design a website”. The copy of the web page should contain everything about your “how to design a website” product. This is where most people run into problems with PPC advertising. The secret is to keep everything as relevant as possible!

You have to be very careful when placing these ads on your website. Google’s terms of service are very specific on what you can and cannot do. When you sign up for AdSense, you agree that you:

• Will not click on the Google ads you’re serving through AdSense.
• Will not place ads on sites that include incentives to click on ads.
• Will not place ads on sites that include pornographic content.
• Or otherwise encourage your visitors to click on your ads by driving special attention to it, this includes:
  • Placing graphics next to each advertisement
  • Placing the ads within a popup window
  • Telling your customers to click on the linksGoogle allows you to place up to three advertisement sections to your content. I recommend having your ads placed in a position where your visitors are likely to click on the links. My AdSense pages have ads placed right below the navigation menu, somewhere throughout the body of the content, and the footer of the page.

Now what if you don’t want to place advertisements throughout your website to generate revenue? There is another way and it’s one of the best kept secrets in the industry. Have you ever visited someone’s website and they had a Google Search box where you could search within the website? You’re able to type in your query and when you hit submit it brings you to a custom designed page where you can see the results. What your visitors don’t know is that you are potentially making money from the “Ads by Google” section of the search results. This is especially powerful because the ads that are shown are related to the query the visitor typed into the search box.

Setting up an AdSense Account

1. The first step is a preliminary one. You need to fill out an application with Google to serve their ads. Go to: https://www.google.com/adsense and click “Sign up now” to fill out an application and get started. It takes a few days for Google to review your website and grant an approval. I have seen websites get disapproved in the past, but usually for reasons of fraud or spam.
2. Once your account is approved login to your account with the username and password you supplied at sign up. Google AdSense may require a different password than the Google account for AdWords and Gmail, so you need to be sure that you’re using the right account.
3. Click the “AdSense Setup” tab Choose AdSense for content as the product
4. Select the ‘Ad unit’ radio button and click Continue
5. Select your ad format and click Continue
6. Click in the grey box under “Your AdSense code” to highlight your code
7. Copy the code you’ve just highlighted
8. Paste this code into your web pages using your HTML editor
9. Save your pages and publish them to the web
10. Rake in the dough!

The second form of generating income from your website is through referral programs. We call this “Cost Per Action” advertising. The way this usually works, is by acquiring a special link from your sponsor and you are paid a set amount for sending traffic to his or her website. These payments can be for sending a relevant visitor to the website, you can get paid when the visitor provides an e-mail address or a phone number, or any other way the visitor converts to a possible lead. This is one of the most profitable forms of advertising because you can get high payouts when the visitor performs specific tasks. For example, Discover Card has a referral program that pays the advertiser $50 every time the visitor fills out an application for the credit card. If you had a website devoted to economics, this would be an excellent way to make load of extra money from your website. Commission Junction is a great website that offers programs like these for you to promote. You’ll learn a lot more about this in my full course.

The third form of generating income from your website, which is the one that is most profitable for most of my websites, if by joining affiliate programs. Some products will actually payout commission for sales that are referred by you. These commissions are generally anywhere from 1% to 75% and are a great way to make money from the content of your website. ClickBank is an excellent merchant for joining affiliate programs and promoting them on your website.

In my course, I teach you to do each of these in depth. Whether your just starting out or if you’ve got a successful website already, my course provides the tools to be successful.

This is where you need to draw the line on whether it’s worth it or not. If you want to design a website for your company, but have no way or reason to market it, perhaps you should keep the website small and not put very much effort into it. Designing a website that is intended to get no traffic is a complete waste of time, and this is what most web designers are going to talk you into doing. After all, why spend money designing a website that nobody is ever going to visit?

If web design is something that you’re genuinely interested in learning, the first thing that you need to realize is that it is not a computer skill; it’s a marketing skill. Sure, there are many computer skills that you are about to learn, like writing HTML and coding CSS, but they are minor lessons in the marketing world. There are way too many great website ideas on the internet, but most people are unable market them properly so they slowly turn into somebody’s weekend hobby and never see the potential that the developer original strived for.

Let me reveal to you one of the biggest mistakes people make when putting together a website: They decide to build a website that “everybody” can find interest in. The Internet today is full of these websites and none of them have any type of relevancy to them whatsoever. If you want to succeed, you need to target a small sample of people. We call this niche marketing and it is the best way to get genuinely interested people to your website. For example, don’t design a website for those who are interested in sports. Instead, design a website for women who love basketball. People will be more interested in what you have to say when you are targeting a niche market.

When designing a website, try to focus on solving somebody’s problem-rather than trying to make some kind of money off of them or give them useless content. People respond very well when they feel that they’re not being heavily marketed to and are getting answers to their important questions.

Before you get started designing a website, it is a good idea to do research on whether people are actually searching for the content that you are writing. You can do this by using going to several comparable websites and seeing how their content is laid out. Google is one of the best tools to find out if your topic is popular. Remember, competition is a really good thing! It means that the idea you are about to put together is working for someone!