subject: How to get 1000 hits a day! [print this page] How to get 1000 hits a day! How to get 1000 hits a day!
Search is a great way to get unsolicited traffic. You want to choose a domain name that is as close to the common search results for your niche as possible. By doing some research using google adwords keyword tool, you can find that the term "dogs" is searched 16,600,000 times a month globally. Google naturally rates sites higher that are exact matches to the search terms in their algorithm. So you want to be the top search result organically for a commonly searched term in your niche, which in the previous example would be www.dogs.com. Most of the single words like that are taken, but with some research you can find a keyword that is searched commonly, but does not have a lot of competition.
But even if you already have your domain name and it does not match the search term exactly, you are still ok! What you'll want to do is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEO can be extremely complicated so I'll just touch on it here and leave the advanced details for a future post. But, what you want to do is optimise your site so they are maximally visible to search engines. The first thing you will want to do is change your permalink structure.
Wordpress by default has a permalink structure like this:
http://dogs.com/?p=N
This isn't very searchable, because no one (especially the search engines) is going to remember that the link to your post titled "How to train your dog" is tied to the url http://dogs.com/?p=N! Instead, change your url structure to something like %postname%. For the "How to train your dog" example, this would change the url to http://dogs.com/how-to-train-your-dog. Google identifies dashes as spaces so searches for "how to train your dog" are now more likely to land on your page. So in your wordpress dashboard go to Settings>Permalinks and change the structure like below:
This is what it will look like in your dashboard.
The other thing you will want to do to get higher results is get backlinks from high pageranked sites. This is not always the easiest thing to do, because you can't just ask every site to put a link to your page on their site. There are link exchanges that will do this, but in my experience, you aren't going to get high value links. The best way to get links is to comment on other blogs in your niche. DON'T SPAM them or they will delete your comments every time and you'll be back where you started. Just make meaningful comments on their page and be sure to put your website in the appropriate field. Many of these links have the nofollow tag after them, which means web crawlers (search engines) can not follow them to your site, so they don't count as a backlink to your site. However, some sites allow following from the comments and these can be extremely valuable. Comment hunt is a custom google search that allows you to find blogs in your niche that have dofollow links. Again, DON'T SPAM, you want your links to be valuable and you don't want to be a spammer.
There are entire blogs devoted to SEO and becoming the top result in google, so this is an extremely condensed version. I will definitely be covering the advanced tips later, but this is a good primer.
Yahoo! Answers
While google pretty much has the search market dominated. Yahoo! has the answers market cornered and there are tons of people looking for valuable information in every niche. What you'll want to do is find questions relevant to your niche and give valuable answers. At the bottom of the answer there is a field for source. While that field does not create clickable links (doesn't count as a nofollow or dofollow link), it does increase exposure to your site. My first day on Yahoo! Answers got me a commission with in 1 hour of posting. BE CAREFUL not to post any affiliate links in your answer or source, because you will get banned. Only give people the information they are genuinely asking for, and don't stray too far from that because they will mark your questions as spam and ban you with little to no warning.
Social News and Bookmarking Websites
Social news websites are massive sites where users vote on content they like. Valuable content comes to the top while less valuable content goes to the bottom. Reddit, digg, mixx get massive amounts of traffic and have been known to take sites to their knees by funneling so much traffic their way. You can get your link on these sites 2 ways,
1) Submit a link yourself
2) Submit comments including your link (possibility of getting "buried" if people vote it down)
Besides social news sites are social bookmarking sites. Like delicious, stumble upon, diigo, etc. These allow users to bookmark sites they like and share their bookmarks with other users. These links can be extremely powerful and can funnel traffic at an amazing rate.
Squidoo Lenses
Squidoo is a site that has user created content (much like a blog) and allows you to get laser targeted traffic. You can create a "Lens" in your genre and post information there that eventually leads users to your main blog/site. It helps increase your online presence and is just another place on the internet that has tons of users that your site can potentially be exposed to. It is all about getting your name out there in as many places as possible and squidoo is awesome for that right now. Squidoo extremely hot in the search engines right now. Plus, it is easy to get highly ranked search results from Squidoo lenses for the most competitive search terms that would be much harder to do with a lower PR site. When people search for keywords related to your squidoo lense, it will sometimes be a top result for their query just because squidoo has so much pr.
Twitter
Twitter is one of the most powerful ways to generate traffic for your site. There are very few places on the internet where you can put your link and guarantee that thousands of people will see it instantly. The only problem new users have with twitter is they don't have any followers so they never get their true potential. You could search for people who are tweeting things about your niche and manually add them, but that takes tons of time. A great tool I use is called Tweet Adder and of all the twitter tools out there, I have found it to be the easiest to use. It allows you to schedule tweets, shorten urls, mass follow and mass unfollow users all with the click of a button. You may be wondering why you would want to unfollow users automatically. If you go on twitter and see a user who is following 1000 users and only has 40 people following them are you going to think they are very credible? Absolutely not, so what tweet adder will do is auto unfollow people who do not follow back within a configurable amount of time. If you get any tool I recommend, get this one. It even offeres a free trial so you can try it risk free without giving them any credit card info!
Another program that is great for Twitter is market me suite and it is exceptional. It lets you brand tweets with your link, target based on geolocation and a whole host of other amazing tools. MarketMeSuite is the bentley of social marketing software!
Facebook
It should almost go without saying that you should use Facebook to market yourself. 1 in 13 people worldwide have an account and that number is only growing! Create a fan page and start getting likes. You will not regret it, and can definitely make money if you use the correct terms. There are so many things you can do with your Facebook fan page (not group, they are outdated). Offer special deals, link to your other sites (youtube, your blog, etc), create your branding (logos, images). There are simply too many people using Facebook for you to ignore the massive traffic you can be getting from it. I'll cover more on Facebook in another post.
Article Marketing
Use articles to promote your websites by publishing them to various article directories. It has been around for ages and was once the best way to get thousands of unique hits per day just by itself. Google recently made a change to their algorithm that puts less value in their links, but that doesn't make it ineffective entirely. When you use a site like Article Base, website owners can grab your article and post it, giving you valuable backlinks. The algorithm change makes this less effective, but it can still be huge. Make sure you use keywords relevant to your niche in your article and title so website owners will be able to find it.
Forum Posts
Join some forums that are related to your niche and start posting. Some forums will let you put a link to your website in your signature, which is another effective link. You will also become a resource to other people in your niche and that will bring people to your site. Forums are a great resource for just about every subject out there. Just become a mainstay on some of the forums and people will start to recognize you. They will start coming to you for answers to their questions and it will be incredible for your analytics.
Classifieds
Finally, post classified ads under sections that are relevant to what you are selling. Classifieds are great because people who are on classifieds are already looking for the product you're selling. THEY WANT TO BUY, all they need is a link to a site with the product they want. When I started my first amazon affiliate store, I was able to get 80 hits a day just from classifieds and nowhere else. I don't see many people using this method and it is pure gold. Just be sure to follow the terms of any site you join and make sure when you link, you are using anchor text with your site's keywords. These are also nofollow links, but with a site like craigslist, the pr is so high, it is still valuable.
Content
As you may have already heard, content is king. You can do everything above perfectly, but if you do not have anything valuable on your site for people to link to, no one will come back. You want visitors to come back because it takes a person an average of 5 times seeing something before they pull the trigger and make a purchase. So write content that people want to see and it will keep them coming back and you'll be well on your way to making money online!
