Financial Planning

So now you have your niche picked, your website built, and some articles written. What next? Traffic, of course. “Traffic” is another word for “website visitors” – people actually who “visit” your website, read what you’ve put together, and browse around.

I’ll be detailing the different types of traffic first, explain the different “arguments” around the web for which kind of traffic is superior, and then end with techniques for generating traffic with links to books, resources and other websites which I’m sure you’ll find helpful.

Types of Website Traffic

The methods for generating traffic are extremely controversial in the Internet marketing world, and I certainly have my own opinions. But aside from controversy, there are only a few sources of traffic that are worth worrying about, namely:

• Paid Traffic. Visitors fall under “paid traffic” if you, well, paid to get them to your sites through advertising. Thisi s obviously extremely risky to do because if you slip up, you will literally pay for your mistakes. I don’t spend a dime on advertisements because I find it pointless, especially given that there are other ways of getting steady free traffic (as explained below).

• Social Traffic. Some of the most popular websites on the Internet are websites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. These two websites are extremely popular because they allow visitors to “find” popular content on the internet. The websites allow people to share funny videos, great articles and other things on the Internet. Making it to the “first page” of Digg is akin to getting mentioned in a major website, and can send you literally 50,000 people curious about your website. This is –extremely- hard to achieve.

• WOM Traffic. Word-of-Mouth traffic (or “WOM traffic”) is the traffic you get when other webmasters add a link to you on their blog, or people tell their friends about your website.

• Search Traffic. Search traffic is when you “rank” for a topic on Google, Yahoo or some other search engine. For example, you can get to my “Learn Financial Planning” site by searching for “Financial Planning” on Google – I’m on the first page.

• Return Traffic. Return traffic is just what it sounds like it is – it’s when people come back for seconds. If you have a website that people find particularly interesting/useful, they might bookmark the URL, or subscribe to your website so they can read your future content. On some level, they trust you.

Not All Traffic is Equal

If you’ve read my articles before, you’ll know that I’m an extremely huge believer in systematic thinking and planning. Building a “system” or a “model” is extremely important to consistently getting good results. This is why the “business plan” of any business is one of the most important aspect of the business.

Some people seem to understand that a “system” is important to succeed, but then get suckered into oversimplifying the entire process. For example, the typical “newbie” understanding of traffic looks like this:

“Your website is a machine/sytem. Put in ‘x’, get out ‘y’. Put in ’2x’, get out ’2y’. The more traffic you get, the more money you make. If you want to make money, find a way to get any kind of traffic. All traffic is good.”

The above understanding of traffic is obviously oversimplified for several reasons. First, the above “newbie” mistake simply assumes that all traffic is the same. This is like saying that all ingredients are the same when making a cake. “What? No baking powder? I’ll just add more eggs!” This is obviously not true.

Some traffic is more “valuable” than other forms of traffic. Some traffic is almost worthless.

For a limited example, most “social traffic”, as described above, is simply collection of bored people looking for something to do online. They’re finding a way to burn time, or put off some sort of assignment. They probably aren’t willing to buy anything, and they know their way around the internet well enough to be used to advertisements… they probably won’t be clicking ads. When they do get to your website, there’s a good chance they won’t be all that interested.

The opposite kind of traffic would be search-engine visitors. These are people with a specific goal. They went to the search engines, and are looking for something in particular. They are much, much more likely to stay on your website longer, pay attention to what you say, click on advertisements and even buy a product.

To me, one search-engine visitor is worth a hundred social visitors.

This is just a “taste test” of the controversy when it comes to different forms of traffic. In the next week, I’ll be going through exactly how you can build your “traffic model” for your website – to get the article delivered to your inbox, just subscribe at the bottom of this page.

How to Generate Traffic

Techniques for generating traffic depends completely on the type of traffic you want to generate. Here are a few basic tips to get you started:

Social Traffic, WOM Traffic, Return Traffic

Remember, as I wrote above, not all traffic is equal. I’m a firm believer that search traffic is much, much more valuable than “social” traffic. I don’t focus on social traffic at all, and prefer to get my visitors directly from the search engines.

Still, it’s important to understand the basics of all internet marketing.

• Write a “basics” article series. Write a 10 part “Basics” series about your niche. For example, at Learn Financial Planning I wrote Financial Planning 101. This gives people who are new to the niche a great place to learn the basics, and other webmasters are very likely to link to the page.

• Focus your time on value. Every post, every page, every inch of your website should be “remarkable” and interesting to read.

• Learn basic copywriting. People are much more likely to tell their friends about a page if the title is catchy. You can learn the basics of copywriting by reading Copywriting 101 by Copyblogger. (Note: See? “101” pages are a great way of getting other webmasters to link to you.)

• Be “vision” friendly. Most “social” traffic is, unfortunately, a collection of bored people who are looking to be entertained. Make it as entertaining as possible, or expect to get much less traffic. Use pictures, graphs, format your articles — make sure it’s easy to stay focused. No one likes a huge hunk of text. Spice it up.

Note that the above tactics work for “word of mouth”, return and social traffic equally as well.

Search-Engine Traffic

Search engine traffic is my favorite source of visitors because it’s steady. For example, I can always expect generally the same amount of search-engine traffic, so I’ll be able to make plans based around this. I’ll also be able to know how certain changes of my website impact my income – making decisions is much, much easier.

Plus, search engine traffic is easier to monetize. They’re more likely to subscribe to my articles, buy products, click ads – it’s a win-win situation. Seriously, on the basis of everything I know about the Internet and making money online, search engine traffic is the best traffic.

Search engines rank websites on the basis of “popularity” and “relevancy”. “Popularity” is determined by how many valuable websites/blogs link to you. “Relevancy” is determined by what you actually talk about on your website.

• Learn SEO. Search-engines will send little robots (literally) to “crawl” your website, to see what your website is about. They do this so they won’t rank a website about “knitting” on the first page for a Google search for “monkeys”. This means you’ll need to know how to “tell” Google the right things.

• Write Link Bait. Link bait is basically “a webpage worth linking to.” For example, funny photoshopped pictures, stories, facts, “Top 10” lists, etc. Just focus on writing valuable content and people will link to you.

• Build Links. Building links is the most sure way to get links is to manually go out there and find a way to add them to other websites yourself. Build a network of small “websites” on free website hosts like blogspot.com, wordpress.com, etc, and link to your main site from all of the small sites. Find other webmasters who are willing to trade links. Write an article for another blogger and link to yourself in the text. There are hundreds of ways. Again, subscribe if you’d like to see the full list that we’ll be publishing soon.

• Buy Links. If you already have a solid income, this is not a bad idea. Just buy the links. Pay other bloggers/webmasters to link to your website in blog posts, to review your website, to add a link to you on their sidebar, etc.

Concluding Thoughts

The most asked question I hear is “how long before I get a lot of traffic” and “how long before I start making money?” The answer is: that really, really depends. It won’t be quick or fast. It won’t be easy. You’ll have to work at it, plan at it, and think about it. 

Most importantly, it will take a lot of character: patience, hard work, rationality, etc. It might be two years or more before you build an income you can retire on… if you ever reach your goal. It’ll take a lot of “boring” labor to get where you want to go.

But most importantly, it will require that you be willing to sacrifice several hours every day to work on your project. If you don’t enjoy it, you’ll be miserable. I’m lucky in the sense that I simply love what I do. I love helping other people when it comes to building businesses, writing financial plans, and explaining financial topics.

If you benefited from this article, I’d really, really appreciate a link back to it from your blog, even if you just have a “personal” blog. Every link helps. Thanks!