How to get free traffic to your website

Keywords & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
List building
Selling Products and Services
6Comments

onlinebusiness-get-free-traffic-website-1Again and again, when I do a survey, people tell me that they need more traffic to their website. Traffic is a universal need for online entrepreneurs.

Without traffic, you can’t get subscribers or sales. It’s the foundation of an online business. In most cases, your efforts will focus on getting subscribers because it’s easier to get people who don’t know you to subscribe than to buy. After they subscribe, you can nurture the relationship and convert them to customers or clients.

But how do you attract the attention needed to get people to your website?

I’ve come up with 7 categories of ways to get traffic. While I’m focusing on free traffic, I’ll also briefly cover ads, since they’re a popular way to get traffic.

Here are the 7 categories of ways to get traffic: Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein

3 easy steps to create a profitable online product: Part 1

Keywords & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Products/Services
Selling Products and Services
5Comments

So you want to create an online product. Great idea!

Whether you’re a speaker who wants something to sell when you speak, a writer with a message to get out, or an entrepreneur who wants to build an income — or all 3 — an online product makes selling an automated, 24/7 process.

Your product could be:

  • An online course
  • An e-book
  • A series of webinars

Whatever the structure or content, 3 steps will vastly increase your chances of reaching more buyers and making this new venture profitable. They are:

  1. Plan
  2. Build
  3. Promote

 

This post covers #1, how to plan your product. Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein

How to stand out in a crowded market

Deciding What Business to Do
Keywords & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Selling Products and Services
11Comments

online-business-stand-out-crowded-market-1Two people asked me questions about how to stand out in a crowded market.

“How to grab people’s attention? It is not like it used to be. Everyone and their sister is now a coach or trainer.”

“How do I differentiate in a market that has low barriers to entry and is crowded with crud?”

These people are asking the right question! It’s true that you need to figure out how to stand out and be different and I think there are 2 ways to do that.

A different question is how to promote yourself to grab people’s attention, but that’s a much larger question. I’ll discuss that a little bit at the end, but in this post, I’ll focus on how to establish yourself as unique so that the right people — your ideal, target customers and clients — will be attracted to what you have to offer.

1) You need to focus

online-business-stand-out-crowded-field-2a

When you serve everyone, no one is attracted to you. That’s because what you say doesn’t speak to people personally and individually. So you need to focus on whom you want to serve and that shouldn’t be everyone.

The process of focusing on helping a narrow slice of people is sometimes called “niching down.” It means that you want to choose the slice of people that you can best serve. This becomes your target market and it affects all of your promotion, the products you offer, your services, your keywords, and even your branding.

When you niche down, you gain the following benefits: Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein

What are my 1st 5 actions to get my business started and quit my day job?

Deciding What Business to Do
Keywords & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
WordPress/blogging
6Comments

1st-5-actions-to-get-my-business-started-1

This question came from my recent survey. It can be overwhelming and confusing when you are working full time and therefore have so little time to build a new business. But quitting your day job might be your dream!

How do you start? Where do you start? How do you make the right decisions?

Where are you starting from?

Your 1st 5 actions will depend on where you are now. If you have no idea what type of business you want–who you want to sell to and what type of products you want to sell–then you have some preliminary work to do.

I have a blog post, What Should I Do?, that will help you.

Let’s assume you’re starting from scratch but have some basic idea of what you know and like. Here are your 1st 5 actions:

  1. Decide on a direction and a strategy
  2. Research keywords and niches
  3. Choose a domain name and web host
  4. Set up a website with WordPress
  5. Decide on a marketing strategy

online-business-sales-funnelWould you like to know what comes after that?

Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein

How to know what search terms people are using to get to your website–and increase traffic

Keywords & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
1Comments

online-business-search-terms-1You should know what search terms (keywords) people are using to get to your website. When you know, you can write content that matches the search terms. While at one point you could get this from Google Analytics, that is now difficult to impossible.

For information on using Google Analytics, see this post on increasing engagement and this post on increasing traffic.

But there’s another solution!

Before I explain, why would you want to know? Because you can tweak your pages to increase the amount of clicks you get. That increases your traffic!

Why I wanted to know

At EllenFinkelstein.com, I have a blog post that gets a huge amount of traffic. As in over 16,948 in the last 28 days. I didn’t do any SEO for it, so how did it happen? Sometimes, I think it just happened. But in truth, people asked me how to start a presentation, so I wrote a blog post. It’s called A good introduction/opener. As I’m writing this, it has 182 comments.

In fact, the title is pretty lame. It’s about starting a presentation, but “presentation” isn’t in the blog title. As it reads, it could be about starting a book! It could be about introducing another speaker! Way too vague. Yet this post gets more traffic than any other post on that website.

So I wanted to know why. What terms are people using to get to this post? And you should want to know what search terms people are using to get to your website!

The solution

Read More

by Ellen Finkelstein