There are many different ways to earn money from a website. You can sell advertising, sell your own products or services, sell as an affiliate, etc. While each of the different business models has its own techniques and methods that make it more successful, there is one secret that all money-making websites share, and that is traffic.
Actually, that’s not the whole secret. The whole secret is that they get targeted traffic. In other words, the traffic they receive wants what they have to offer. That is the biggest secret when it comes to making money online, or anywhere else.
For example, if someone were looking for rubber chickens and I had a site about raising chickens in their backyard, do you think they would be interested? After all, they’re both about chickens, right? Incorrect! These two topics couldn’t be further from each other in your visitor’s mind, so when they see that you don’t have rubber chickens, they’ll hit the back button. But what if your site was really about rubber chickens? If you had several varieties available for sale, and you also offered some tips for using them in comedy routines or for home and office pranks, do you think they might be interested? I would say that it is very likely. He might even buy more than one because of the great information you gave him on the differences and the best uses for each type.
However, the differences are not always as obvious as this one. Sometimes a keyword you are targeting in your marketing efforts seems to make perfect sense, but it doesn’t really fit. You motivation may be targeting a keyword like “breakup” for your site on how to get over a relationship, only to find that most of the traffic is searching for a movie with that title.
The way around this is to do some research in your market before you start targeting specific keywords. Do a keyword search and see what the top ten results lead to. Find out which keywords are relevant to your competitors’ websites using a tool like the Google Keyword Tool. By doing this before you start targeting keywords, you’ll be less likely to search for irrelevant keywords.
After that, you can keep track of your website statistics to see which keywords are bringing you the most traffic and which ones have the highest bounce rate. By keeping track of these types of statistics, you can gain even more valuable information about what your potential customers are really looking for. And with that knowledge, you can get more targeted traffic, which is what it’s all about.
So remember, the only real and true secret all money-making websites share is that they have enough highly targeted traffic to make money. If you can’t get that, you’re not going anywhere.
