How To Get Quality Traffic.

Here is what I have learned about getting traffic so far.

First up, "It Takes Time" Is something I hear all the time from a lot of the webmasters I have met since I began my journey. Occasionally you may get lucky and hit on some brilliant keywords that will make your site, lens, YouTube, whatever it is sky rocket nearly over night. This is very Rare.

Generally it takes a year or so to really build up an online presence, with enough of your own linkage and hopefully others linking to you as well. Once your name has sunk in and your sites have weathered a bit you will usually see a good increase start to happen.

I actually have proof of this happening. I couldn't believe my eyes when it started to happen either. It happened to one of my YouTube videos and its still increasing monthly. My videos have sat there doing a whole lot of nothing really until just a few months ago. My first videos went on youtube 2 years ago and I just left them, no marketing what so ever, no real keywords research went into the titles or description, just a whole lot of nothing really. Eighteen months later I notice that a couple of them have reached a thousand or so views which I was ecstatic about. Then a month or so after that they started to increase by 500 or so views every month until now where the video has about 6000 lifetime views. So it does Happen, Eventually. I can also see that if I had of done some link building and other promotion bits and pieces it probably would have happened in half the time.

This is also the aim of the few things I am going to list here, not to build traffic overnight but to start the traffic flow happening earlier than if you just did nothing.

Keyword Research:

Keywords are words that are key in what people search for when looking for a product, subject or information. People around the world tend to use a lot of the same words or phrases when searching for particular products. You can use keyword research tools such as google AdWords keyword tool, which will show you the amount of monthly searches for a particular word or phrase. Spend time and the longer a key word phrase you can pick the better as there will more than likely be less competition. Long tail keyword phrases are something like "animal print iphone 5 covers" or "traditional soup recipes for winter". Spend your time and play around a bit, you won't get it right straight away, I don't even have it right yet and a lot of the webmasters who have been doing this for years will say the same thing. It really is a lot of trial and error, but persevere and you will find some good keywords that you can use on multiple platforms.

Link Building:

Building links to your site, no matter whether it is a lens or YouTube video it will be equally important. Building a link to a squidoo lens is a bit different to building links to a video but there are some places that you can use for building links to both.

There are good directories for posting lenses to I won't list them all individually because there is an excellent site called SquidUtils actually created by another lensmaster and this site has some great tools for helping create lenses, it also has a good list of the directories you can post your lens links too. On squidutils you will find, links to Lensroll, Squidup and other directories, I suggest posting links to all of them.  

You can start up blogs that are related to your lenses or videos and link your blogs to your lenses and videos and vice versa. A great strategy is to pick a topic or products build some lenses, create a blog with regular posts and perhaps a video review or mention the same product or topic in your regular  vlog. Then interlink all three platforms together because Google and other search engines love sites that link to others and continue linking on and on.  

Shetoldme is a great directory that google seems to really like. It does cost a small fee to join, and because of that I resisted joining for a couple of months. Now that I finally have I regret not doing it sooner, because Lo and Behold Shetoldme is already directing traffic to my lenses, not a lot yet, but google will pick up on the linking and soon it will re index my lenses. One of my lenses in particular has started showing visits directed from yahoo, Bing and google. So I assume it has started working already even after as little as only joining a week ago. The other great thing about Shetoldme is that you can add your AdSense ID and earn 100% revenue from an AdSense advert that is added to every post you enter on Shetoldme.

Article writing is also another great way that you can provide links back to your sites. One of the best article sites is EzineArticles. You can write great articles which can provide great targeted traffic to your sales sites. Articles once submitted go through an editorial review and quality control, and their guidelines are quite stringent. It took me 4 goes at rewriting my first article "Helping your Baby Learn To Walk" before it got published and has taken me just as many goes to get my second article published. EzineArticles is a well respected and quality content site because of the strict publishing protocols so at least you can be assured that once you get an article published it will provide good quality traffic.

There are some other great ways to provide good links to your sites such as joining forums and posting and commenting with your links added in of course. You can also post on the good old social network sites like Facebook. 

Keywords and Link building are the two main points that will get you on your way to receiving better traffic. So far these are the main strategies that I am focusing on.  

So Thanks again for following along on my Journey to Making an Income Online.  

Feel free to post comments or ask questions.