There is all kinds of information on the web talking about people making money online, retiring with a bunch of hot chicks around them at the age of 26, and living somewhere on Fisher Island in Miami on Biscayne Bay.
People make it seem like you simply throw up a blog, throw up some Adsense Ads, and watch the revenue pour in. This is the furthest thing from the truth. Building a successful website of any magnitude starts with mastering building traffic.
You can spend $30,000 on building an elaborate online storefront and if 5 people per day come to visit your store, you will go out of business quicker than you set up the store. This is why I am such a proponent of phasing in building traffic and then knowing what will stop you from getting good traffic.
1). You will NOT get traffic if your web server is forwarded via a DNS to another server. For example, if you registered and started your website 6 years ago on some hosting platform and do a DNS forward on that website to another site, your traffic will be dismal.
2). Don’t ever host your site on a larger community site such as WordPress or Blogspot. These sites take all of your traffic and count it as their own. You will never get true statistics and know your true traffic numbers by using these.
3). Never use Yahoo Small Business and utilize their Sitebuilder tools to build your website. The Yahoo Small Business Server is horrible for SEO and your numbers will suffer significantly.
4). Update with new content regularly. You cannot put up a website and only update it once per week or month and hope for it to get huge numbers.
5). You must get reputable sites to linkback to your site to improve your ranking and your traffic.
6). You must create a goal for your site and measure it. In other words, what do you want the web visitor to do? Should they subscribe to your RSS feed? Should they buy a product? Should they register for email? Set up a goal and monitor/measure against that goal.
7). Understand Alexa Page Rank and what it means to your business. You must become a beast on improving your page rank. You should never, ever compromise this and always work each and everyday to get your page rank up into the top 100,000 sites in your country.
8). Have patience. You will need time to improve your website traffic as you grow. You will not make money until traffic starts to come to your site. Don’t give up on growing it.
9). Write a blog as much as you can. Bring your visitors in closer to you as the CEO. Let them know more about you and make sure they know you are an expert in your field. Talk about what you do and how you do it without giving up trade or industry secrets.
10). Measure your progress weekly. Always measure your site and your statistics. I do it daily. Make sure you know what people are interested in on your site. See what’s popular and refine that.
Good luck.
