Getting an Internet business off the ground these days seems like an impossible task, especially when you are a newbie and you are trying to establish a referral or affiliate site. Yes, the steps seem simple enough. You start out by developing you site design then press on to finding solid hosting for your site. But what does it take to be successful? Here are some thoughts...
The experts tell us your hosting package should include ample storage space for future growth coupled with a large amount of bandwidth. The bandwidth isn't all that important at the beginning because you really won't have a great deal of traffic until you get listed with the search engines and develop a following of your site. A friend of mine, asked me how much space and bandwidth he should have? My response was as much as you can get for the least amount of money with the best rating in down time for the hosting company that you are considering. There are a lot of hosting companies that possess these characteristics and they're really easy to find through you web browsers search engine.
Okay, now you have your hosting and a beautifully design website. You're ready to start making the big money now right! Not so fast, now comes the incredibly hard part of starting any web-based business, getting traffic to the sight. I don't care how good your site is or the product or products on that site are, without traffic you don't really have a business! You have a very good secret! So, where does the traffic come from?
There are many ways to acquire traffic on the Internet, some are better than others for a variety of reasons. First, you could buy traffic. Here's a lesson I've learned, you can spend a fortune on website traffic and not make a single sale. This is especially true if you go with one of those low cost mega merchants that have PPC at the receivers end. What I found was that the quality of the traffic is not that great. You'll have a lot of traffic that is almost worthless. Buying leads and traffic can be very costly! You page ranking will get better but you won't make a lot of sales.
Now there are some forms of PPC that actually attract quality traffic, but it may not be in quantity or price range that a start up Internet business person will be happy with or afford. Google AdWords and Yahoo advertising are effective but also costly. To get in the Top 10 on these search engines could cost you as much a five dollars per keyword. Unless you have a ton of money in your advertising budget this type of advertisement may not give you the amount of traffic that you are seeking. When I use this type of advertisement for my offering I usually go with the "content" option. This is a much lower expense ratio (as low as 10 cents a hit), a little slower in hit ratio but good for exposure.
You could try an email campaign! I caution you on this approach! You could find your IP shutdown for spamming if you are not careful. If you are going to use an email campaign, start a opt- in campaign of collecting email addresses that agree to receive messages from you before attempting to send out an email campaign. I'd also find a good online service to help out with this chore. Building a list takes time but with a good offer on your site such as a newsletter you can build a good list to make offers too. You'll want to get a good Auto-responder to handle a great deal of this for you.
If you are in a hurry, you can rent a list or use one of the many email services on the internet. I've tried a few and found them to be limited in attracting significant amounts of traffic. But, some traffic is better than none and you do make a sale or get a lead from time to time with these campaigns. You can give it a shot! I would not use just any service however, you want find a service that you'll use their servers and have at least a double opt-in list. This protects you from getting accused of spamming.
Wow, it still seems as though starting this Internet business is impossible. Not really! Once you master the big problem of getting traffic to your site your business will start producing the money that you are looking for in your business. OK, what the best way to get traffic to a website with people that want what you are looking for? Here it is, plain and simple. You need quality content on your site. You need to set your site up with quality keywords in your metadata description that reflect the content on your site. Have a description of your website that reflects the content on the site, not something that might be on your site, but actually is! And yes, you can have too many keywords. What I'm describing here is called SEO optimization. With optimization the search engine crawlers will find you. If you don't understand the ins and outs of optimization there are a ton of companies on the Internet that will for a fee, help you!
One more thing that will make the traffic on your website boom is links, and lots of them. It's not as important having links going out as it is having links coming in. But to get one, you must have the other! The types of links are important and I could write a book on the subject but just suffice to say that you want to link with sites of like content to yours that have quality content and good Google and Alexia ratings.
Some free sources of links include FFA pages, classified ads, forums, and articles. All will bring traffic. I don't care what you've read, I use them and they work. The really cool thing is they are usually free! If you can write, articles are the best and most effective method of getting traffic to a website. You develop a following and people learn that you are someone to be trusted. When you write articles to a service, you've increased your exposure to millions of folks who are looking for the information that you have. It could be as simple as a product review.
Now I'm not saying write an advertisement to be published, it probably won't be, if that is what you are thinking of doing. But you could write on the different types of item that you are promoting and compare one to the other. Articles are a great way to put your name and your site in front of thousands maybe millions of folks on the Internet.
Well, I trust this article helps someone out there with their Internet business venture. There's a lot of information here but if I were to narrow down the biggest hurtle to any online venture it would be generating traffic to your website.
