In addition to writing posts on this blog and other blogs, I frequently post on the Warrior Forum. Much of what I post relates to the content and purpose of this site: Education in Internet Marketing. So these posts are summaries of what was posted there.

"How Can I Get Traffic To My Website?

Congratulations on getting your site up. There's some statistic that the vast majority of people trying IM never learn how to build a basic site and consequently get it up live online! Good for you!

Well, there are a lot of ways to get traffic to your site as many people have mentioned. Part of it though depends on why you want the traffic. Obviously you could just go over to Adfly today and buy 10K visitors who would show up at your site. That would be cheap and effective for getting traffic, but completely uneffective for getting targeted traffic. So the question becomes what kind of traffic are you after and why? Are you selling something (amazon, affiliate products) or setting up CPM or CPC ads so you get paid when people view or click? Or maybe your site is about getting people to sign up for a free offer so you can get them on a list.

Depending on the point of your site in terms of marketing, the traffic you get and want varies immensely. That said, regardless of this, I usually advocate and work on my sites in the following manner in order to get a solid foundation of traffic:

First, hopefully your site is based on and built initially around solid keyword research. You've chosen to go into a niche or area of the web that has traffic available organically, but isn't tremendously competitive. Building on this, I would research at least the top 150 longtail keywords ranging in search volume from say 150 – 850 exact searches per month related to your site. I would then systematically create/write articles and/or posts optimized and targeted at those keywords. One each for the main title and theme of the article, with a couple more thrown in there and there.

Even if you only get 30 articles up, you'll get a bunch of natural traffic and even without backlinking and SEO. Get 150 up, and your 20 uniques per week target will be blown to smithereens.

The two additional things to do with content (besides repurposing it, which is a whole different post), is to make sure you have social share buttons added to each page/post so some of that organic traffic and advertise socially for you after they read. And second, to syndicate your posts automatically with software to web 2.0 and social bookmarking sites so you get automatic penguin friendly backlinks and subsequent traffic.

Now if your site is all about a service or conversions and you have the budget, sure, go for PPC or PPV or whatever, but I am still a solid believer in the power of organic search W/O manipulating the results via SEO.

Building A List?

List building is a great way to do well online, but like everything else, can be a tough road without proper planning and action. List building is always my number one recommendation to people when they ask what they should do at the beginning of their IM career because depending on your skills and budget, it is one of the fastest ways to earn substantial and sustained income online. Even without any budget and little knowledge, it's still totally solid.

For you, with knowledge and experience, it would hopefully just be another few extra steps on top of what you are already doing.

Depending on the niche you are interested in, there are many ways to go about it but the basic idea is the same as it is for IM in general:

Traffic ==> Product ==> Sales/Conversions

But with list building, your initial product may not be a paid product. Here is what I personally feel is important for list building:

- Create your own free product to give away, you can use PLR, but I would do you own unless your in a hurry. Branding helps tremendously and being the creator of a product is a step in this direction
- Drive traffic to your landing/opt-in page. If you are in the IM niche and want to get fast results, this can be done using solo ads with extremely powerful results. If not in IM niche, solos are a bit harder to come by, but possible. Additional traffic sources are the usual suspects.
- Test, test, and test again. See how your landing page converts, and if you have a product or OTO to sell, do the same for that. Test Test Test and adjust until the front end of the funnel is streamlined.
- In your autoreponsder sequences, continue to brand and build trust and personal repoire by providing valuable and relative content. Help people and then help them again. Go above and beyond and/or provide them info that they need to succeed. Only promote when you believe in and know the product you are promoting fairly well. When you promote something, you are putting your brand behind it.

There is obviously a lot more to it, but these are good basic starting points. Things like JV'ing, bulk traffic buys, more product creation, ad swaps, and more will help to build the list further. Additionally, there are many psychological aspects that can come into play when interacting with your list. I tend to operate on the quality, not quantity side of things, but everyone does it differently.

Check out (search) products from Jamison Palmer, David Eisner, and Rob Jones. There are tons of great resources on the WF, but these three really provide solid products with little fluff and proven methods ~

Buying A Profitable Website

Well I think buying websites is a great way to go, but as others have mentioned, you need to know what you are doing and then on top of that, there is always a risk.

You could have a bad deal or the site could not be as advertised or down the road (possibly not to far), the traffic or the way the site is monetized could dry up because of unforeseen circumstances.

That said, it's a solid way to get in the game or just to make some extra cash. If I was starting all over buying sites again, I would buy low and buy a few of them and let them build. I jumped in looking for the most bang for my buck and not all of them worked out.

I think I spend around 10K within 3 months and my ROI was around 2K per month 3 months later. That said, a lot of the $ dried up after a while because the methods the sites used to operate were not viable or profitable. I saw too many $$$ and went after that.

So my approach now would be to grab up a few sites that have proper KWR or monetizing methods and a base of traffic already with minimal earnings – like say $20 – $50 per month. Maybe buy 1-3 of them and take them as projects where you use proven methods to develop the sites and build traffic to increase profits.

Success with doing this? Then I would move ahead and do it again, either buying more of the same types of sites (earning wise) or larger sites.

Final piece of info I would share is do not get emotionally involved. It's a business decision. Emotion will lead to over bidding and other bad decisions. Make a plan and stick to it. Start small and scale.

What Is The Best Starting Plan For A Newbie In IM?

Yes,

List building is a solid and powerful to get started online. Building a site in conjunction with it is also a good way to learn as you go. You'll most likely need skills of being able to create pages, edit tiny pieces of code/html, and do all sorts of little things that you can't even imagine.

When I started in IM, I had no idea the amount of knowledge and learning I was in for. Starting from scratch and now 3 years later and fulltime in IM, I can build websites, edit and write some code, work with graphics, drive traffic to pages/sites I want, and ton more. Not that I've learned it all. I haven't. But the point is that there is a lot to do and to learn and to consistently implement in order to be successful and product results.

With list building, creating your own product or getting quality PLR product to give away and build a list will help immensely. Setting up a converting funnel that you test repeatedly on the front and backend is key as well. I would encourage you to do all of the set up for your pages your self to get comfortable and learn as you go.

If you have a budget of something like $300 per month, you could easily use this to first learn what you need (buy a few wsos on list building and authority site building) and then setting it up (hosting, domains, templates, marketplace membership for product delivery, aweber, etc.). Then the next month you could use that $300 on solo ads to drive traffic to your landing/squeeze page or other forms of paid traffic. Additionally you could outsource work that drove 'free' traffic like youtube videos – paying people to create and post videos that drove people to your site.

In conjunction with the list building and landing page to get subscribers, I would encourage you to brand yourself or your biz on your own blog/site and to build that out with quality TARGETED content – say 3 articles/posts per week targeted at longtail keywords with low search volume. With this, you'll drive organic traffic with little to now SEO and you'll also be learning and operating a site from the ground up.

Success with one or both of these steps can lead to you repeating the process and scaling up. Remember that experience leads to knowledge which can produce success. Experience comes from repeated focus and consistent efforts – whether they fail or succeed.

Best of luck "