Your business may depend on your website. Are you getting enough visits?

The success of any online business (and to a degree, storefront businesses) often comes down to the success of its website. Your business’s website serves as the core element of public outreach. It is how people find out about you, learn about you, and eventually become convinced to buy from you. If you hear of a company and want to find out what it does, or are looking for any company that can fulfill a need, the Internet is going to be the first place you turn to, followed by social media accounts. But even a company’s social media accounts have the ultimate purpose of driving traffic website. Because it's this simple: the more traffic you get, the more successful you will be.

Use any of these seven tried-and-true methods to start increasing website traffic immediately:

1. Employ free search tools.

• Take advantage of Google and other Internet search engines by optimizing your website to reflect keyword search results.

• Adding new content to the website on a regular basis makes the website appear more prevalently on search engines, and so does being active on Google +.

• Use social media search bars (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram in particular, as hashtags make searching easier) to promote your page and website--the more you post, the greater chance of attracting attention you have.

2. Use other people’s traffic to increase your own.

• One of the best targeted traffic-increasing methods is by guest writing on another business blog that complements, but doesn’t compete with, your own business blog. Be sure to incorporate a link to your website!

3. Pay to receive traffic.

• Advertise your website using Google AdSense.

• Pay for an a post promotion or ad on social media. Spending just a few dollars on a single campaign could generate over a thousand views.

4. Network on social media.

• Simply participate in discussions and engage with users of social media to generate traffic.

• Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn have been proven to be particularly effective at generating traffic for you.

• Discover what people are searching for, and supply them with related, unique content.

• Reach out to other website owners for mutually beneficial promotional agreements.

5. Network face-to-face.  

• Depending on the nature of your business and your industry, some professionals may choose to have direct contact. Meetup.com is a great resource for arranging such contact.

• You might meet with other website owners, instead of just reaching out online, to discuss in greater depth mutual arrangements to promote each other’s websites.

• Discover and attend nearby business seminars or conventions.

6. Promote your website offline.

• There are tons of ways to increase website traffic and brand-name recognition off the Internet. For example, you might:

  • Hang up and hand out flyers.

  • Sell cheap T-shirts.

  • Put up stickers around town.

  • Take advantage of public speaking opportunities. Visit joesabah.com to see if you can get on a radio show to briefly promote your website and business.

7. Try to guarantee personal and professional referrals.

• Word-of-mouth remains a highly effective promotional tool.

• People that get recommendations from people they know, like their friends, or respect, like a celebrity, are more likely to take that specific advice.

• Even referrals from people that someone doesn’t know, like people on the Internet, are highly effective at generating traffic.

Everyone knows the Internet is a goldmine. Knowing how to fully take advantage of that goldmine is a different story. Where to even start? It is important to keep an open but cautious mind when learning ways to increase your earnings off the Internet, as there so many opportunities out there, and it can seem hard to narrow them down. This article seeks to highlight some of the best money-making methods online:

1. Be an affiliate marketer.

As an affiliate marketer, your job is to promote products or services for others. This can be done through a variety of means--be it email campaigns, website advertising, or social media promotion. Affiliate marketing remains one of the most consistent ways to make serious money online, and requires less work than starting your own business.

For more on Affiliate Marketing, see our article “Affiliate Marketing: The Basics (Plus 2 Steps to Get Started!).”

2. Turn traffic into money through advertisements.

There are quite a few ways you can monetize your website traffic, including

Google AdSense, which remains the most popular go-to method for digital advertisers and people willing to sell website space for extra revenue. You can be making money whenever someone clicks on the ad. Additionally, useful analytical features of the program automatically discern what types of ads would be most successful on your website. One should keep in mind, however, that the revenue generated from these ads won’t be that big if your website has low visitation. That’s why it is so important to promote traffic!

Traditional banner advertising (TBA) is another advertising method that will monetize your website’s traffic. With TBA, you will most likely be working directly with advertising clients instead of going through third-parties like Google AdSense. Search the following forms of TBA on the Internet to find advertisers that would pay for ad room on your website:

• Cost per click (CPC): You get paid a little every time the ad is clicked. When using this method, you must keep track of how many website visitors click an ad. This can be done using statistics-tracking software like Google Analytics. Report the number of clicks to your advertising client and they pay you at the established rate. Or, as is true with affiliate products, the link imbedded in the ad may be specialized for you so that the click or sale can be traced back to you. You may be able to choose how much to charge, or they may choose for you, but either way, the price should be relatively low, as clicks do not guarantee a sale or more business for that person. If the person provides you with the ad to use (which is most often the case), make sure it’s appealing and fits in well with your website.

• Cost per 1,000 pageviews (CPM): This method is nice because the quality of the ad or what is being advertised (and the likelihood that the ad is clicked on) is not as important--you are paid every time the ad is viewed 1,000 times. The advertiser will probably decide to pay a rate of approximately $3-$10 in advance so you’ll showcase the ad up to 1,000 views, and then the process will repeat. This is a general contract--some advisters may choose to require more or less views. Advertisers will likely be more willing to pay more to advertise on more successful, traffic-driven websites.

• Pay per lead (PPL): Often associated with pay per call (PPC) advertising, these methods include using ads that encourage visitors to take action with the client. The visitors see the ad and call, or email, or otherwise contact, the client. There is more than one way to employ pay per lead advertising (as is true with most advertising methods), like working the number into a blog article. Pay per call advertising is often arranged by third-party companies, like InterGMedia. Check them out and see what products you could be promoting.

• Call per action (CPA): Common in affiliate marketing, this method means the advertiser only has to pay when an actual sale is made through their advertisement. You will be paid a commission of the sale, which can be quite substantial, depending on the commission percentage and the price of the product or service. Call per action advertising may seem harder to pull off successfully, but it should be noted it is the method with the greatest potential for obtaining high amounts of revenue. Likewise, you have a greater incentive to make the ad successful.

3. Market and sell your own products or services.

Having your own unique product or service is probably the best way to make money online, but not necessarily the easiest. The work goes beyond the digital realm and requires some creativity, aptitude, and long-term commitment. You must also consider manufacturing and shipping costs, if the product is physical. Your product or service doesn’t have to blow the world away--it can be somewhat basic, if you desire--but there has to be a recognizable need for your product or service, be desirable enough so that it won’t be a tough sell, and have a profitable production margin. Your are responsible for the success of your business, so the more work you put into it and the more you learn, the better you do.

Some general tips and guidelines for selling and promoting your own product or service:

• Information products like ebooks are inexpensive and relatively easy to produce and deliver. You could probably sell actual books for more money and become more popular and potentially profitable by self-publishing, but e-books are less expensive to produce, don’t have to be shipped or bought at a physical location, and you won’t have any unsold physical copies burning a hole in your pocket.

• If you prefer to write less, audio in its many forms is always popular. If you know a foreign language, you could easily create some language-learning content and sell it on disc or, more simply, require payment for online access. Or if you enjoy reading, you could record and sell non-copyrighted audio books. You could also make your own music or start a podcast that could get  sponsored.

• Use video to demonstrate and promote your product or service. You might consider creating original content for sale or starting a video blog that could earn money from advertisements.

• For everything you produce, create an entire product line by converting the product, into other formats. For example, if you wrote an ebook, you could convert and expand the information and niche using video, email campaigns, or an entire website.

The Internet is full of thousands of examples of people that have made more money than they ever could imagine, all through affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is promoting someone else’s business, product, services, etc., and is almost entirely a digital craft. Marketing is done through a variety of methods like placing targeted ads and building email lists. Websites want traffic and are willing to pay you substantial commissions for successfully attracted business.

If you have no marketing experience (or really, no experience at anything business-related), fret not! People are often surprised by how simple affiliate marketing is to pick up and get started. Since the work you do to market is all done online, affiliate marketing allows you to become your own boss, work when you want, and depending on how much initiative and resolve you have, earn upwards to a six-figure salary or more. That is full-time pay for what often feels like relatively easier work, and indeed, one can even automate the process of affiliate marketing and be making money whenever, wherever.

So where do you sign up? This article contains the first two steps you need to get started, including the basics, the tools, and guaranteed success tips.

     1. Understand your role as an affiliate marketer.

Remember that your primary goal as an affiliate marketer is to gain money by promoting another person’s product, service, and/or website. This can be done a variety of ways, such as pay per click, but the most common payment method is a sale commission.

Sales commissions can be exceptionally high, and depending on the price of the product you are promoting (and of course, how successful you are at promoting) that means big bucks for you. You earnings are guaranteed through the use of hoplinks--when a particular person clicks a special link provided to you by a company for a certain product, and ends up making a sale, then you get paid.

Online programs such as Clickbank University provide useful instruction with additional clarity on these aspects of affiliate marketing, as well as useful tips on developing a marketing strategy.

     2. Find an affiliate product to market.

You should find a product that you are personally interested in and will be motivated to promote. The product should also coordinate with whatever marketing strategy you are employing. For example, if you have a blog dedicated to golfing, then you should probably be promoting golf equipment.

A website isn’t necessary to promote someone else’s product, although it admittedly makes it easier. You can promote as many products for as many companies as you want, but some companies will not allow you to be an affiliate unless you have a successful website. Also, you may be only be able to target certain product niches, and promoting even one product can be an extensive process, especially the first time around.

In any case, try to have an idea of what products or services you might be promoting before creating your website or starting a campaign, because naturally, your website and campaigns should reflect an interest in whatever the potential customers are interested in.  

If you are unsure of how to find affiliate programs or take advantage of available product promotions, simply Google it. Search for an exact product (if you know one) or topics that are industry-specific, and follow it with affiliate marketing. The aforementioned ClickBank.com is an excellent affiliate aggregator, as well as Commission Junction (cj.com). Affiliate aggregators are programs wherein marketplaces advertise available affiliate marketing jobs available. Programs such as these make it especially easy to be an affiliate marketer, with ease of payment options.

Getting started with affiliate marketing may seem intimidating, but remember, every successful journey begins with the first step. Just keep making steps forward and eventually, you will be smash success. Good luck out there!