Last Updated on Apr 8, 2020 by James W
If you are going to make money with a website or blog, whether you are selling goods and services or building an affiliate site, you need to take your visitors from being curious about your site to becoming converts and customers.
How do you do that? There are many tutorials online that offer advice, but the steps can be broken down into a fairly simple formula.
Start with Your Domain Name
Already have a domain? Great. Still, here are a couple of thing to think about, even if you have already purchased a domain name and started a website. You need to keep things REAL.
- Relevant: Your website name should be relevant to what you do, either your name, the name of your business, or what you do.
- Easy: Your website name should be easy to say or spell.
- Abbreviated Carefully: Make sure any initials or abbreviations you use do not combine to form anything inappropriate or that can be taken the wrong way.
- Literally Interpreted: Sometimes when you run names together, you get undesirable or inappropriate domains. Don’t make this mistake.
Even if you already have a domain, if you shift your focus or find that it is inappropriate or undesirable, you can create another one and save your traffic by using a 301 redirect.
Be careful with subdomains and titles of blog posts as well. Make sure these represent your blog or brand well.
Keep SEO in Mind
We all know that SEO is important, but we don’t always know how to manage it ourselves. The key is to use tools that will help you optimize posts without a lot of extra work. Tools for WordPress blogs like Yoast SEO make it pretty easy.
There are a few keys. First of all, you need to have some keywords in your web content, but they need to be natural, not just stuffed into the text. Yoast will help you with both the readability and making sure you have enough keywords in the right places.
The other piece is web excerpts and how you share your content (more of that in a moment). You can specify the excerpt or metadata of your pages and posts. This affects not only how search engines view your site, but the user experience as well.
If you need to, there are online courses available and plenty of blog posts you can read that will teach you more about SEO. The key is, you can’t ignore SEO, and learning to deal with at least the basics will improve your organic traffic long term, which will help you gain more conversions.
Market, Even if you Have to Pay
Once you have created your content, you need to get others to see it. There are only two ways to do that: organic or paid traffic. Organic traffic comes from word of mouth and social sharing, and paid traffic is from social media promoted ads like on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
This also includes pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google and other ad services if they are appropriate for your business. The point is that not all marketing is free, and it is not possible to build significant traffic with only organic traffic. The best marketing plan includes both.
So which paid ads are right for you and your business? That depends on what you do with your site. If you are selling a product or service, PPC may be the right answer for you, although you will have to determine if they are worth the cost. These ads are on a bid system, and the more competitive the space is for what you sell or what service you provide, the more they cost.
If you are simply trying to build traffic to your blog, especially if you are doing affiliate style marketing, then social media ads and boosting posts may be best for you. If you are selling books, there are even more choices.
Shop around, but don’t be afraid to pay for marketing. It is one of the best ways to build an initial audience.
Share Everything, Often
No blogger can market themselves enough by themselves to really turn a profit, and neither can an ecommerce owner. You need others to market for you, and that is done through word of mouth. Online word of mouth comes from social shares: shares on Facebook and LinkedIn, retweets on Twitter, and other forms of engagement on Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
You need to share your content, but for organic shares to happen your content needs to be something people want to share. Here are some examples:
- Informative: Content that gives users great information or advice gets shared more often. This should be clear, detailed, and professional.
- Humorous: Humorous content also gets shared more often. Make your audience laugh and you will have them hooked.
- A Giveaway: People like to get things for free. Want to get more traffic and shares? Give something away.
If you can get others to share your content, you multiply your reach to their users as well. Be sure you share all of your content. You never know what will resonate with users and what will get the most or the best attention.
Your web content can change the curious visitors to your site into converts. It won’t happen overnight or by accident. It will take work. If you keep SEO in mind, market, and share, you will can see amazing results and make money online.