Lesson 2 - Content
The key to building traffic..

The internet provides unlimited opportunity to go into business for yourself. With hard work and dedication you can earn enough money to be self sufficient, work from home and be your own boss.

It has never been easier than it is today to build an independent lifestyle that can balance you and your family’s income needs with a healthy lifestyle choice and life-work balance.

Forget get rich quick. What we are talking about here is a genuine business that you can put your heart and soul into that with careful nurturing will provide you with a healthy income and a capital asset that will return your investment many times over.

At the beginning you will need to put a lot of effort into building content and building traffic (visitor numbers) for your site – content is king, no doubt about it.

Fortunately it really isn’t that hard to find content for a site that has your heart in it. During that time you shouldn’t worry too much about the income you receive from monetizing your site. Remember the order of play is CTPM…the ‘M’ for Monetization comes last.

The amount of money your online business generates is totally dependent on building traffic, converting that traffic and getting repeat business.

If you try to soon to monetize your site - before building traffic … you will end up very disappointed. What visitors you have will turn away from hard selling if they have not learned to trust you.

Take your time!!

The time to think about monetization is when you have built a great site with plenty of good content and you are getting plenty of visitors coming to your site through search engines or personal recommendations. Traffic is building and building traffic can be frustrating, fun and addictive - be warned!

So let’s talk about content - the key to building traffic. You know they often say to budding story tellers and novelists … ‘Write about what you know’. The same is true for the content you develop for you first online business. For a start, it is so much easier to produce loads of great content (and thus build traffic) if you know or at least have a passionate interest in the content you are writing about.

Whilst you may be building traffic successfully; you must remember too, that your content needs to gain peoples’ trust ... that’s part of pre-selling you and what you have to offer and establishing trust and a loyal following of visitors to your online business.

Passion will shine through. Gee, you don’t have to be a Professor in your area of interest, far from it .. as long as you have an honest opinion about a subject and it absorbs you then chances are good that you will find like-minded people who are also interested in the subject you are writing about.

So don't over concentrate on building traffic ... remember your objective is not the numbers of visitors but your ability to convert those visitors into loyal and trusting customers, willing to part with their hard earned cash.

You should ask yourself - is this a subject I often end up talking to my friends or work colleagues about or would happily engage in conversation were there the opportunity?

If the answer is yes and you have a few friends or colleagues that are also happy to discuss the subject (be honest - you are not boring them are you) then chances are you can find an interested audience for your subject from the millions of people that are online everyday and every second... building traffic you need to monetize later.

Are you attempting to answer a question others are searching for the answer to … maybe the meaning of life, or why the economy or the weather is so bad and what can be done about it.

Maybe if your interest is blue tongue frilly lizards of Australia you may find it hard to find someone interested in the subject enough to talk endlessly about them, in your locality, but I’ll lay a bet with you now that there are more people around that share you interest in the lizard that you could possibly imagine.

Sure some of them may be Professors who are probably as desperate to talk lizards as you are. Your site might just be the only forum for disseminating their passion to the masses or for inter-professorial exchanges.

By answering this question honestly you will some way to making an objective assessment of the likely popularity of a subject that you find interesting and your opportunity to build traffic.

Why not enter ‘blue tongue frilly lizard Australia’ into your Google search engine right now …. You maybe surprised. I was. I got back 30,100 results in 29 seconds of searching!! So someone must be interested.

Search Engines, e.g. Google, Bing, Ask etc.

That introduces me to the whole idea of search engines. Up till now we have been talking about real humans and their interests, yours included.

Search engines are the go between you and like-minded people and your key to building traffic - you must satisfy both the search engines and your visitors.

Search engines are like your neighborhood police officer – directing you this way and that, showing you the fastest way to your destination…he does do that right?

Unfortunately, they are not perfect…search engines I mean, not cops, we know they’re perfect!! They have to interpret our needs.

It’s a bit like an American tourist seeking directions in a France. On a hot day, in need of water, you may in your broken French ask for where you can get l’eau? and in his broken English he may point you in the direction of the local rest room (the loo). It happened to Jean-Paul - my son! So the point is you need to know the keywords, including perhaps some common misspellings that the virtual Internet ‘tourist’ will be asking and ensure the search engine points them to your online business if you want to build traffic coming in through the door of your online business.

When they get there they must find what it is they are looking for and the chances are it won’t be some favorite product of yours (unless of course your business name is Apple). They will be seeking information.

If all this sounds a little daunting, don’t worry. This problem serves YOU well.

The life blood of Search Engines is to find just the right piece of information your potential customer is looking for and placing that at the top of their search results, even if you are talking frilly lizards!

Being at the top, or at least on the first page of search results; is where you want your online business to be. So the key is to find a subject that is interesting then determine the keywords to use in the content you provide to make sure the search engine thinks your online business provides the most appropriate content and directs the virtual Internet tourist to your online business.

Fortunately, this is not as hard as it seems and there are lots of tools to assess supply and demand for keywords, advertising value of keywords (that is the value advertisers place on these keywords) and which keywords are trending (getting more popular), etc.

Keywords are monitored and measured daily so you can find out what keywords people are searching for, the overall demand for that keyword and how many sites service that need by providing content that matches the keyword, indeed contains it…not too often of course as the search engine may think the site is cheating!

Keywords, of course, aren’t just single words but small phrases or groups of words too.

Traffic, i.e. the volume of people visiting your online business tends to grow organically and exponentially, that is at a ever increasing rate.

The compound effect soon has your traffic doubling and quadrupling at an ever faster rate.

You will need to give this process a helping hand occasionally to maintain the momentum. For example, forging links with other non-competing online businesses – a sort of cross referral will also help to build traffic.

Some sites might just link in without the need to reciprocate because they like what you have to say and think it might help their visitors to know about your site. These are the most valuable and search engines check for these to provide them with a measure of your site’s popularity. So your task is to write content that honestly and faithfully delivers valued information that relates to the keywords being searched out by the search engine, satisfies the visitor to your site and ultimately turns them into a trusting follower with the potential to become a customer in the longer term.

In this way you will build traffic for the long term. .

Leave building traffic and return home ...