Drive Traffic to a Web Site

Traffic Is Everything

Most web sites, even the ones created by people with big dreams, fail because no one can find them.

Most webmasters do not know how to drive traffic to a web site.

Picture a store sitting in some back alley where no one walks by. How successful do you think it will be if no one ever sees it? If you want to make money on the internet, you want a store on a major thoroughfare, where it's not only seen, but seen repeatedly.

How many stores have you driven by for weeks, months, or years before you finally thought, "You know, I think I'll go see what's in there"?

If you're going to make money on the internet, you need to drive traffic to your web site.

Search Engines

Today search engines are the number one way to drive traffic to a web site.

There are those whose brand will bring people to them: WalMart, Amazon, maybe even your city or state government web site. But probably not you.

For you to drive traffic to a web site, you have to create a "brand of one." You have to establish yourself. That means getting some customers in the front door of your web site and treating them well.

On the internet, search engines are the way to do this.

But how do you do this? Google says there are 56,200,000 web sites on how to train a dog. How in the world are you going to compete with 56 million web sites in your niche so that you can end up on the first page, or near the first page, of a search engine? Any search engine, much less Google!

The Secret to Seach Engines

What I'm about to tell you is not a secret. You can read it anywhere.

Thank God that even the people who read it mostly don't do it. Though the tricks for how to drive traffic to a web site are commonly known, the carrying out of them is rare.

The answer is keyword-focused content pages, and you accomplish that in 3 steps:

1. Learn what people search for
2. Find out what's not being supplied
3. Create pages that meet that unmet need

Let me give you an example. My wife is a doula, and I have several friends that are midwives. Thus, a web site on midwifery is something I might suggest to one of them if they needed money or had time to try to drive traffic to a web site.

Midwifery, for example, is searched for 40,000 times per month. Google lets me know, though, that childbirth is searched for 246,000 times per month, and Lamaze is searched for 95,000 times per month.

Now I have a list of ideas for web pages.

Here's where you run into a problem with driving traffic to a web site. How do you find out what's being supplied?

Well, the free way would be to type each term into Google. There you can see not just how many web sites cover that topic, but you can look at how well the first few sites cover it.

For example, if your search term is midwifery, then is the subject covered by web sites with URL's like midwifery.org and midwifery.com? Is the topic central to the sites that are listed on Google's front page? You may have trouble getting good rankings on a search engine if these things are so.

But that's tedious and unrewarding. SBI! has had a robot do it for you.

When I punch midwifery into BrainStormIt! at SBI!, I get not only a list of keywords that is often better than Google's—and in the case of midwifery, it's much better—but I also get a "supply" rating as well. To drive traffic to my web site, I can sort my keywords by supply and see just what I'm competing against.

This is crucial for a subject like midwifery. Midwifery is well-covered by wikipedia, midwife.org, the American College of Nurse Midwives, and several other strong sites.

But "placenta previa" is not!

Unbelievably, 49 thousand people search for placenta previa every month, just on Google! Yet only about half of the front page results even have "placenta previa" in the name of the page, much less in the name of the web site!

The same is true of "mucus plug," which is searched for 33,000 times per month and sparsely addressed on the internet. Better yet, "mucous plug" gets another 12,000 searches!

There's a start for driving traffic to a midwifery site. A midwifery front page won't get much action on the search engines, but pages on placenta previa, mucus plug, and a number of others will have a shot at going straight to the top, even on Google.

Of course, I don't know how you're going to know that if you're not using SBI!'s free tools.

And, of course, you still have to write the page correctly to drive traffic to your web site..

To make pages that drive traffic to a web site, there are two issues you must address:

1. Write pages that answer people's questions
2. Write pages that make your topic clear to the search engines!

Write pages that answer people's questions.

Answering people's questions isn't hard. There are very few topics nowadays that can't be researched right on the internet. SBI! has a tool that helps you research a topic, but it's unnecessary. Google any topic, spend a little time at several web sites, and you can become enough of an expert to answer the questions most people have.

Writing the answers is hard.

Here, SBI! has provided one of the best tools I've ever seen. You don't even have to sign up to get it! It's free to anyone right on their web site.

It took your school teachers most of twelve years to convince you that you can't write.

Everyone who can talk can write. Even if you had to talk into a tape recorder, then transcribe what you said, the truth is … if you can talk, you can write.

SBI!'s free book will teach you how to unlearn what school taught you, and it will release you to write pages that will drive traffic to your web site.

Write pages that make your topic clear to the search engines!

There are some standard methods for writing pages that please the search engines, and they work to drive traffic to a web site.

• Use a meta tag in the head section of your web page to tell the search engine your specific keyword.
• Use that keyword in the title bar of your page and in the title of your page.
• Use the keyword in the first sentence of your page.
• Find a way to use it in a link on your page. (SBI!ers put it in the link at the bottom of the page.)
• Use the keyword frequently on your page, as frequently as possible while still making your page readable and pleasant for humans.

SBI! double checks your page to make sure it meets those criteria before you load it. That's one of the many benefits it supplies to help drive traffic to a web site.

Do These Things Really Drive Traffic to a Web Site?

I have described to you how to get started driving traffic to a web site. From experience, I can tell you it works.

To this day, informationdojo.com gets no more than about 10 visitors per day. In fact, you probably came here linked from one of my SBI! sites. In contrast to this site, here's how christian-history.org is doing so far this month, just shy of a year into building it:

I apologize for the quality of the image. For some reason my screen capture worked pitifully on it. It was easier to read on the original web page.

Nonetheless, you can see the numbers. The average pages per day right now is 677. (As of January 26—10 days later—the average is up to 693 because I had my first 300 unique visitor day and my 2nd over 1000 page day yesterday. SBI! keeps getting better and better!)

How well does that compare to others who have tried to drive traffic to a web site the SBI! way? Well, my Alexa rank is 1.9 million (today, it fluctuates). That puts my site in the top 2% of web sites because Alexa ranks about 100 million sites.

On sitesell? It makes my site average. 53% of SBI! sites are in the top 2% of the web.

How popular do you think church history is? I assure you that I have no topics that are searched for 40,000 times per month on Google, like people do for midwifery, placenta previa, and mucus plug. Nonetheless, I'm getting 279 visits per day!

Alternative Ways to Drive Traffic to a Web Site

There are other ways to drive traffic to a web site, but they should happen AFTER you've written good, strong, keyword-focused content pages.

Other ways include:

• Videos on youtube
• Tweet on Twitter using keywords to pick up followers in your niche
• Similar use of other social networking sites

One of the other major ways to drive traffic to a web site deserves special mention, and that is exchanging links.

Once again, SBI! makes it easy. At the link I just gave you, you can simply sign up—once again, for free—to exchange links with SBI! sites and others who use Value Exchange.

This is a great thing because as I've pointed out, over half of all SBI! sites are in the top 2% of the web. Exchanging links with an SBI!er is an excellent value. Google gives you extra credit when a popular site links to you.

What About Monetizing?!

If you're like me, then driving traffic to a web site can be enough. My site is on Christian history. The purpose of my site is to convince people that Jesus meant what he said, that he's alive and can fulfill what he said, and that the only way to follow him is wholeheartedly.

As a ministry, it's sufficient to me to drive traffic to my web site.

But this section is about making money on the internet, not just driving traffic to a website.

So let's talk about the right way to monetize your web site.