If you want to earn online cash it is important that you learn how to drive traffic toward your sites. You can have the most stunning custom designed theme, the cleverest multimedia presentations, the best written content and if you don’t have traffic, you won’t earn any money and you probably won’t even have many social referral visitors. The primary kind of traffic you want to your site are targeted visitors in a buying mood arriving from Google and other search engines. Let’s examine how you can get this kind of traffic to your site.

I won’t go over keyword selection again except to say that most niches have a finite amount of traffic. If a particular keyword has reached it’s potential you’ll probably want to branch out to embrace new keywords or else just let that particular site be an unattended cash cow or a supporting site.

Now, as you may know, incoming links to your site are the most important thing in getting your site indexed by the search engines and then ranking well in the search results. Good, niche related, links will also get you referral traffic as well although this generally isn’t enough to sustain a site over time. The question is how to get the links you need to properly publicize your site.

I’ve already covered some quick indexing techniques so we’ll assume that you’ve done this and your site is indexed. This initial step, which you’ll repeat for each post to your niche blog, is pinging, which is usually automated by the blogging software, and bookmark using Bookmarking Demon. Submissions to directory and RSS aggregation sites can also help you publicize your site and get links to it. The next step is to build up a portfolio of supporting sites that will help funnel referral traffic toward your site while building links to it. Let’s look at a few techniques you can use to support your money making niche web site.

One common approach is to use article marketing. To do this, you write 10 unique articles on your niche, preferably more generic than your money site’s niche, and have your money site’s keyword anchored link in the resource box. Then submit one each to the top 10 article directories. Then you wait for them to be approved. Once they’re approved, use Bookmarking Demon to bookmark these articles on social bookmarking sites. You might even try resubmitting these articles to minor article directories that aren’t picky about duplicate content or you can spin them if you want. Essentially, the rule is ‘the more the merrier’ when it comes to this kind of low level promotion. Remember, duplicate content isn’t quite as big a problem as some would have to believe.

Once your articles are published, take the articles and republish them to free blogs on Blogger, WordPress.com, Tripod and any other free blogging systems that you can use. You can also use supporting blogs of your own that you host on your own domains to do this. Note that you’ll be publishing them complete with the resource box, just as if some user of the article directory had used them. You can also add in links to specific pages on your money site into the article. I also suggest throwing in links to major authority and news sites like CNN, ESPN, Wikipedia and so forth to add additional value to the content. You will also use Bookmarking Demon on these supporting sites as well. You can use content from PLR articles and my own Blog Content Wizard to further pad out these blogs.

In addition to free blogs, create static sites at places like Squidoo, HubPages, Blinkweb, Synthasite and others. I suggest pointing to both your money site and your supporting sites from these sites. And, of course, use Bookmarking Demon to bookmark these sites as well and include links to other valuable sites. Make sure that you follow the rules of these sites, and the free blogs, in order to avoid deletions or other penalties.

You can also publicize your blog and get links for it by commenting on other blogs in your niche or related niches. I suggest looking for blogs that follow comments and use plugins like Top Commentator and Comment Luv to get the most effective use of your time. Remember to always leave a meaningful and on-topic comment that adds to the conversation at hand and follow the blog owner’s rules so far as anchored links go. I recommend that you bookmark pages you comment on with StumbleUpon and add them to a Bookmarking Demon run to help out the generous blog owner as well as yourself.

Lastly, you can find other places, such as forums, where you can publicize your blog and secondary supporting sites. Once again, follow them rules of the site and provide good and useful content. Oh, and, yes, use Bookmarking Demon here too.

When all is said and done, which takes about 30-90 days on average, you should be generating significant search engine and referral traffic to your money site. It does take some work though so be prepared. Most people slack off on doing the promotion of their site and seem to hope “if I build it they will come”. Hey, I’ve been guilty of this myself. But, if you want to earn online cash you have to put in the promotion work to drive traffic to your site.

Frank Carr December 9th, 2008 SEO

SEO
article marketing, Blinkweb, blogger, Comment Luv, directory submissions, HubPages, link building, rss aggregators, squidoo, supporting sites, Synthasite, Top Commentator, Tripod, WordPress.com