Make Money Online: Website Setup and Traffic Generation

Many aspiring internet entrepreneurs want to know how to make money online and what is needed to achieve success. Certainly, you must have a good online presence such as blog or website, but most have failed because they did not understand the importance of web design and traffic. Without traffic, your website is meaningless.

Were you to sell golf balls you would get more traffic into your store if it were situated by a golf course than if it were in the middle of the jungle – an extreme example, but many don’t appreciate that websites have to target customers just as a strip mall stores do. Although you may attract a lot of visitors they may not be interested in your products – or even your niche. What driver is going to purchase a cycle in the middle of nowhere?

A Website is Important

You need your shop (this is your website) to attract visitors and a good quality of potential customers (traffic and quality). It is not always an easy job to get a decent website. There are sites that explain how to set up a website, but these can be difficult to understand if you are inexperienced in using the internet in this way. If you prefer, you could pay a web designer a large sum of money to create a website for you. You shouldn’t pay out too much money until you are fairly sure that your plans will work, and people will pay for your product or service.

An alternative approach is to check out a few of the site available online that offer free websites, although many of these have a load of pop-up ads and adware attached to the deal. I was able to find a company offering a free website and had it ready for launch within a day.

You have a functional wesbite – now what?

Now that you have a free website you must make sure that it attracts traffic. Keyword research is the way to do this. Carry out a Google search for the term ‘dog training’ – I got over 45 million results. Now if we try ‘Puppy Dog Collars’ we get just 3 million – still high but a lot better than 45 million. This happens when you get more specific with your keywords.

What that means is no more than that you have less competition if you use that keyword or phrase as the focus of your page, and by competing with fewer other web pages (Google lists individual pages not entire sites) you are more likely to be successful.

Chance should never be a factor in generating traffic and designing your website – everything should be thought out before taking a step. Don’t be fooled into thinking that once you have set it up that money is going to fall into your lap. Unless you are rolling in cash and can outsource the work, you will have to promote your website yourself.

Blogging and Article Marketing

You will be doing just what I am doing right now if you want to make money online. Writing articles and using blogs explaining to others how to make a start. It will be a while yet before you can give up the day job – I still work. Nevertheless, that time might come if you are patient, have the desire and are willing to study and learn from those that have achieved online success.

To generate traffic you will need a good keyword generation tool. There are quite a few around if care to look online. In selecting a keyword tool, your criteria are a high degree of relevance to your web page, the potential for traffic and as low competition as possible – high commercial value is another important parameter if your keyword tool can analyze that. I will cover these in future articles but if you want to get started then these are the golden rules.

Everything is there for you: all the information you need to be successful is readily available – simply make sure you understand the basics, and then use that knowledge. Whatever you do, do it the best you can and make sure you have good keywords and a website with individual pages optimized for each of them.

Website Set Up and Traffic Generation Summary

Let’s assume that you are interested in starting an online business to make money online. Firstly it takes effort, but you can speed it up by getting a good mentor and training. You will need a website that generates traffic and you will have to promote the website. Most people don’t have a great deal of spare cash – that’s why they are turning to the internet to make money – and should make use of all the free stuff going, such as blogs, writing articles, using social networking sites, Squidoo lenses and so on – in fact you must or you will never succeed.

A good choice of keywords is the best way to attract targeted traffic by means of blogs, article marketing and so on. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important, but it takes time to learn and can cost a great deal to pay somebody to do it for you, and PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising can cost a lot unless, once again, you understand how to use such ads. However, you are sure to have great time doing it. focus on traffic generation, and get a good mentor. These are the steps needed to make money online. No matter where you go in life, you should always make sure that you are the one who has set yourself down that path.