I saw this post earlier today when my partner Terry found it, so I decided to write a series of articles on this topic. Here is the first article. I will have the rest of the series on my website (DansMuayThai) later this month. I hope this is helpful for some of you. This has worked for me. I have had my site for about 6 months, and I get between 800-1000 visitors a day finally. Here you go:
I recently read a post on a message forum where someone asked the question of how he could get 1000 visitors a day in about 6 months time. This seems like a reasonable goal, but it will require a decent amount of work and dedication to achieve this. This series is going to consist of several posts that will act as a “recipe” to reach this goal. The 6 part series will be broken down into the following categories:
Building Content
Search Engine Tips
Building Backlinks
Social Bookmarking
Niche Based Traffic
Retaining Visitors
This post will cover tips for Building Content, which is the first and most important part of getting visitors to your site.
What is Content?
Content is the information or data contained in the various pages, posts and categories of your website. Whether your website is a static HTML page based site, or if it is a dynamic blog based site, your website must have content. Content exists in various forms, such as articles, photos, videos, ebooks and even digital merchandise.
Articles
The best content is original content. What that means is content that you own, created or have exclusive rights to. With that in mind, Articles are typically the most common form of content on the Internet, because an article is written and created by you (in most cases). There are websites that you can go to, to find articles about a specific topic and use them on your website as long as you provide credit to the original author. One of the most popular websites to find articles to publish on your site is Ezinearticles.com. Once again, I suggest you write your own articles, because if a reader likes what you have to say, there is a better chance they will return and continue to read.
Photos
Photos are another great way to add content to your site. Perhaps they are photos that you have taken yourself while you were at a particular place, and witnessed something yourself. Perhaps they are photos of you. Or perhaps they are photos you have found on various sites on the Internet, and compiled them on your website. I suggest not only having a photo album or category on your website, but also find ways to insert photos into the posts and pages of your articles. These photos will get indexed by various websites and could drive additional traffic to your site. One example, in an article I wrote about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I inserted a photo of the Brazilian Flag, which got indexed by Google and ends up driving about 15 visitors a day to my site.
Videos
Once again, the best content is original content. Perhaps you have a website on Golf Tips. A good thing to do would be to record different instructional videos and provide them to your readers to help guide them as a visual guide for the various tips. Videos can usually be more helpful than reading tips from an article or seeing photos. You can upload your videos to YouTube and the embed them on your website. The bonus to doing this, is if you link your YouTube videos to your site, someone that stumbles upon the video on YouTube may visit your website and become a frequent visitor. If for some reason, you can not record your own videos, you can always search YouTube to find videos related to your niche. Once you find one you like, you can post it on your website. Keep in mind, this may result in driving traffic away from your site at the moment, but if you develop a trust with your reader that you can find and display quality content on a topic, they may return to your site instead of searching the web for it themselves.
Ebooks
A popular trend nowadays is to offer your readers a free Ebook on a specific topic. The Ebook, which is usually a PDF file, is typically helpful in nature and geared towards a specific topic. Sometimes, websites offer an Ebook for a cheap price, such as a couple dollars. I have paid as much as $14 dollars for an Ebook that I was interested in. However, I then shared that Ebook with everyone else who was interested in it for free. So while the owner got my $14, he didn’t get anything from the other 10 people or so that I shared it with (welcome to the digital area). A better method of distributing Ebooks in my opinion, is to offer them for free in exchange for either a subscription or signing up for an email list. This way both parties get something of value. If that was the case, I would have just referred my 10 friends to the website, instead of providing them with the book
Digital Merchandise
Basically this is the concept of Affiliate Marketing. While that entire concept is beyond the scope of this post, or even this series in fact, I can briefly touch on it. Some websites allow you to sign up as an affiliate and sell their products through your website for a commission. In my opinion, the ones that work best are the ones where you can “Create A Page” and display the products directly on your website. Typically, you can insert a product title, description and photo for each page. This will end up getting indexed and will increase the likelyhood of driving traffic to your site if someone searches for a particular phrase. An example is if you do a search for “Fairtex Ultimate NHB Gloves” you may end up finding my website. This is because I have the product available for sale on my site, and additioinally I have done a product review article on this item, so both can be found on my website. Once again, it’s just another way to add content to your website, and profit from it at the same time.
Your Goal
With the goal in mind of getting 1000 visitors a day in 6 months (a goal that seems big and overwhelming), you need to act it in a different way. The way to attack it is to set small goals that you can achieve. A good way to receive 1000 visitors a day is to have a large amount of pages and posts on your website. You should create the goal of having between 400 – 500 pages and posts on your website by the end of 6 months. The more content you have, the more likely someone is to find a particular page on your website. If you end up having 500 pages and posts combined, and each one gets 2 visits a piece individually, then you have already created what you need to reach your goal. I suggest setting up your pages first when you build your website. Pages are static items that don’t change. Some examples are About Me, Contact, Links. Dynamic pages or Posts, change frequently. This is where you would post your articles or video clips. The 500 may seem like an overwhelming number, but if you break it down to a monthly, weekly or even daily total, then it will seem smaller and more achieveable. This will result in you reaching your goal in no time. 500 posts ends up being about 83 a month, 19 a week, or 3 a day. These are all achieveable if you work at it.
The next article in this series will cover Search Engine Tips. Among the tips included will be keyword optimization, submitting your website, sitemaps, Wordpress Plugins and more, so make sure you stop back for the next article.
