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.

So, how do you get around the PPC blues in a competitive market? Instead of creating a search targeted campaign, create a site targeted campaign. By creating a site targeted campaign, you are able to direct all of your advertising to specific websites through Google’s AdSense program. Here is a neat method that I use to bring traffic to my products:

1. Type in your desired keyword into Google (or any other search engine for that matter)
2. Open the first ten search results
3. More than likely, many of the websites you’ve opened participate in the Google AdSense Program. It’s been my experience that Google shows websites that promote advertising through AdSense first (which is where they make their money), although Google explicitly denies that they are anyway selective with their search results, it does nothing but make them money if they do.
4. Open Google AdWords and create a Site Targeted Campaign.
5. Add in the URLs of the websites that you chose that participate in Google AdSense. Google will automatically begin to display your ad on these sites.
6. Set your minimum CPM. This is how much you’re willing to spend per 1,000 impressions. I like to bid high on these and make sure my ad gets displayed as much as possible. If I really needed traffic, I would bid $5.00. However, it might work more in your favor to instead bid CPC, something more like $1.00 per click. Keep in mind that this is going to get expensive really fast, so you need to make sure that your website converts well, that you’re attracting the right kinds of customers, and that you’re Cost Per Conversion at least breaks even.

Keep in mind that actual results may vary. This is just a methodology that’s worked for me for the past few years–finding the top few websites in the search results and advertising on those pages. Most likely, these guys get a lot of traffic and have optimized their website very well. For a lot of people, this works very well in addition to their current Search Targeted Campaign. Just remember, if you want to have both a Site Targeted Campaign and a Search Targeted Campaign, you need to keep those campaigns completely separate in Google AdWords. Google likes to mix the two together automatically, but you will get higher conversions if you remember to keep those campaigns separate.

In the next few days, I’m going to create a product review site for a niche market and share with you how I can turn a simple review into a money making machine. Keep in mind, although I do get compensated for the reviews of products I promote, I am VERY honest. I will never promote a product that I haven’t tried for myself first. I would like to show you how easy it is to make money by promoting products that you already know and trust. Believe it or not, almost everything on the web is for sale and companies pay money for your recommendations and traffic. That’s coming down the pipe in a few days!