Without wasting much of your time, let’s see what the WCT Strategy stands for:
W- Create a simple website around related products and services which you will be promoting.
C- Regularly publish quality content on your blog.
T- Constantly get free targeted traffic to your blog from various sources and build backlinks in the process.
Let us quickly take a look at the website, content and traffic strategy.
Website
As an online business owner, you need to build a website or blog for your product, service or information if you hope to earn money on the web. At different levels of costs, you can get a website to start an online business. I will look at the 3 options available and you can decide which option is best for you at the moment.
Free Blog Option
If you are starting an internet business as a beginner and you don’t have a dime to invest, this option of starting a blog is open to you. There are lots of free blogs on the web to start with but be careful to read their terms of services for the platform you are signing up with.
The most popular free blogs are Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. You cannot promote affiliate products on Wordpress.com (NOT Wordpress.org) which will not go down well with you as an affiliate marketer. As for Blogger.com, you can promote affiliate products and services on your Blogspot.com website.
In order to create an account with Blogger.com, you have to create a free Gmail.com account and then use your email ID to sign up with Blogger. You can read my ebook on how to make money online for free using free Blogger blog platform to start your own business.
The major disadvantage of using a free blog is that you are limited with what you can do when it comes to monetizing your blog. Also, the sub domain name you choose is not professional as it is attached to the main domain which you sign up with.
Register Domain Name and Host It with Free Hosting Site
This is another better option open to you. You can register your own domain name and set it up to point to the domain name servers of free hosting site of your choice. If you ask me, this is far better than the free blog option discussed previously.
It will cost you less than $10 to buy a domain name and own it per year with NameCheap. The cost of renewing the domain every year as your own will not be more than $15 even if you include the cost of WhoIs Guard privacy protection.
After you register a domain name, go to Blogger.com (if you are using Blogger free hosting) and create a Blogspot.com account. Simply follow the instructions on this Google web page to customize your domain to point to Google domain name servers. Like I said before, domain name registration is less than $10 if you register it with NameCheap.com. Search for the current month’s coupon code from Google.com and use it to save about $1.03 per domain name.
The biggest advantage of buying a domain is that you can use your custom name for promotion instead of the sub domain you are given by free blog websites. When you start making money online consistently, you can transfer your domain and website content to your own web host without any hassles.
Investing just $10 for a whole year to pick up a brand domain from NameCheap or any other reliable registrar can save you lots of headache in the future when your business starts growing and expanding. I have experimented with all the 3 options of creating a website as discussed in this ebook and this option is the second best if you are not going with the self-hosted blog option.
You can use the method to learn the ropes and immediately your monthly income is consistent, say making $100 a month from home online, you can switch to the next option which is having self-hosted blog on a domain.
Self-hosted Blog Website
A business-minded internet entrepreneur should be able to start an online business with about $30 from the beginning. You will invest this money to register a domain name, buy website hosting and buy email marketing software. Having your own hosting service will enable you to install Wordpress blog on your domain, customize it for on-page search engine optimization and publish articles on the fly.
Starting a blog with Wordpress.org is the most popular option and it is beginner friendly too. You can watch free video tutorials on how to install Wordpress blog on your domain name and you will be good to go.
The only challenge with self-hosted blog for beginners is just the monthly fees associated with web hosting and email service providers which they have to pay. But if you know what you are doing in your business, you can make $100 a month in your first 30 days of starting an online business. You can re-invest about $30 out of your monthly profits to pay for your essential internet marketing tools and services such as web hosting and email marketing software.
I have good news for you. In your first month of signing up with HostGator web hosting service, you can pay only one cent ($0.01) for your hosting through this HostGator web page. Simply remember to apply the coupon code, hgcpncode02, when you are checking out.
Also GetResponse offers free autoresponder account in your first month of signing up with them. Click here now to go to that free web page and sign up for GetResponse free account for the first 30 days.
All in all, with a fully self-hosted blog, you are at liberty to promote lots of affiliate products and services, do 301 redirect links, set up squeeze page and newsletter on your blog or even sell your domain name and website for big cash pay day if you need quick cash somewhere down the road.
Content
Website content represents articles, videos, audios, images, podcasts, webinars, e-courses, newsletter, software, templates, free ebooks, paid ebooks, just name it, which you continually publish on your blog. As an internet marketer, you must learn SEO (search engine optimization) so that creating content with SEO in mind will not be a problem.
Traffic
It is not just about traffic but TARGETED traffic to your website. There are various sources of website traffic which you can deploy on your internet business. But you must master one traffic source for promoting your websites. It will help you to quickly grow your visitors every time you launch a website or blog.
Here is where webmasters who are not making money online fail. If you build a website and publish hundred of articles on it and you don’t promote it, nobody will know that your blog exists. And the few people who will visit your blog may not be serious buyers. Here is what I mean; regular targeted traffic to your web site is the backbone of making money online, day in and day out.
Let me quickly give you an example so that you understand why you have to constantly drive targeted traffic to your web site on a daily basis. Let’s assume you just opened a brick-and-mortar variety shop in your neighborhood. If you don’t tell lots of potential buyers that your shop is open for business, I guess only few people who walk past the street where it is situated will know it exists.
But if you take the time to CONSTANTLY share fliers, advertise in the national dailies, do radio jingles, etc, about your shop, you will experience jump in sales over time because your customers base will gradually grow.
Please always bear this in mind so that I don’t sound like a broken record. If you don’t advertise your website regularly (read:DAILY), you may never be able to earn full time income online in the near future. It doesn’t matter how aesthetically designed your blog is or the hundreds of quality SEO articles which you have published on it.
I have a rule of thumb which I always follow in my internet business and it has always worked well for me over the years. It is called the Pareto principle or 80-20 rule. I invest 20 percent of my time to write and publish content on my blog and invest the balance 80 percent to promote my website. For instance, I can start a blog with just two long form articles but with over a hundred published articles on third-party websites for promotion.
I do this for a purpose. After all, every visitor who comes to my blog for the first time will read the articles as new content no matter the date of publication. The good news is that there is date exclusion plugin which you can install on your blog if you are using self-hosted Wordpress blog on your domain name. It will remove the date stamp and show undated articles on I blog until I am able to update it.
I prefer to start receiving free targeted traffic to my website on a regular basis before I continue to publish loads of articles on it. This way, I will have the motivation to work harder when I start seeing that the traffic is growing and I am making sales and affiliate commission in the process.
The more website visitors that come to your blog, the more likely you will make money online assuming your sales funnel is properly set up. I am taking the time to explain all these details for you so that you will not treat blog promotion and marketing with kid gloves. If I am not making passive income online from a particular website, the first thing I will investigate is my traffic analytics. How many people are coming to the blog daily?
The least number of visitors to your blog on a daily basis should be about 500 before you can expect to make good sales from it! Statistically, you need at least 100 potential buyers visiting your blog before you can make 1 sale (i.e. one percent CTR.) And this is possible only if the merchant’s landing page is converting at one percent sales conversion rate and above.
In other words, if nothing (i.e. no traffic and sales) is happening in your online business, the first area you should focus your attention and effort on is “website marketing and promotion.” This is why today’s topic is centered on how to promote your website blog and make money on the internet. I am assuming you have properly set up your blog and monetized the content.
How to Promote Your Website Blog
There are two ways to promote your blog on the internet, namely: free advertising methods and paid advertising methods. As the name suggests, free advertising methods are free to implement if you have the time to do it yourself. But it takes time for you to start seeing tangible results from your efforts if you don't have the requisite free website promotion skills at the moment. In other words, it is slow to implement and you can get stuck if you don’t have strong internet marketing skills.
Free advertising methods start with on-page SEO (search engine optimization) and it includes writing and publishing SEO articles on your blog which target low competition keyword phrases. Others are building backlinks to your website, doing article marketing, commenting on other niche related blogs, forum marketing, guest blogging, video marketing, social bookmarking, social networking, issuing press releases, and so forth.
On the other hand, paid online advertising are adverts which you pay for before they are placed and run on other websites which you are targeting. It is definitely NOT free but you can start receiving visitors to your website as soon as it is approved. Examples of paid advertising include PPC (pay per click) such as Google Adwords, media buying, ezine advertising, etc.
In this blog post, I want to quickly show you how to get targeted traffic to your website through article marketing, forum marketing and blog commenting. It is absolutely free but you have to be consistent with it in order to make it work for you.
As for content marketing, if you can write an article a day for your online business promotion, that will come to 365 articles per year. You can also package some of these articles into PDF ebooks and distribute to PDF file sharing sites to increase your visibility and web presence.
The way I go about article marketing is very simple and smart. First, I will research a keyword phrase which is at least 5,000 searches per month. I want a high volume keyword phrase to target because I am not aiming to rank these articles on third party websites in any way.
I want to use it to generate massive backlinks from where it is published and from other webmasters who will publish it on their web properties with my bio box included. Don’t be afraid to provide quality information in your content for your target readers to consume. It will pay big dividends in the long run when your readers perceive you as an expert in the niche market and decide to visit your money site through the links provided in the resource box.
Let’s work with an example. Let’s assume I want to write SEO articles promoting an affiliate product in the “yeast infection treatment” niche market. I will consider the following keyword phrases with their corresponding search volumes for promotion as at the time of writing:
- Yeast infection treatment – 40,500 searches per month
- Home remedies for yeast infection – 33,100 searches per month
- How to get rid of a yeast infection – 14,800 searches per month
- Yeast infection home remedies – 14,800 searches per month
For me to write quality SEO article for each keyword phrase, I will simply use Google.com and other authority blogs and websites to conduct my research. Let’s take the keyword, “how to get rid of a yeast infection.” I will go to Google.com and enter the search term.
I will read up on the topic from pages 1 to 5 of Google and take down notes. By going through these websites, you will know what other affiliate marketers are doing and who are the authority bloggers or experts in the niche market. I will pay attention to Wikipedia.org type of websites if they come up in the search engine results page. You will get lots of information to beef up your content from these authority sites. But don't plagiarize!
When you finish writing your article, you can sign up with article directories such as EzineArticles.com to publish it or use free web 2.0 properties to publish your articles. You have the opportunity to include links either in your content or resource box back to your money site but don't overdo it.
Few of the free websites are: Tumblr.com, Wordpress.com, Webs.com, Slideshare.net, Weebly.com, Blogger.com, etc. The free sites which you can sign up with are so many; just look at what others are doing which you believe is getting them results, investigate it and follow suit.
With the help of Google.com, you can find and learn anything on the internet. It may take time but you will get it in the end. Getting free targeted traffic from high traffic websites is magical. When I was starting an internet business some years back, I selected a niche market and wrote two articles targeting two separate keywords for the affiliate product I was promoting.
The very first day the 2 articles were published on the article directory where I submitted them to, I made $30.40 affiliate commission. Since then, I have been using this strategy to make money on the internet on a daily basis.
The same system still works today except that you have to research and write long form quality content (i.e. about 1,000 or more words per article) unlike few years ago when 500-word article could do the magic. The idea is to drive as many free targeted traffic to your website as much as possible on a daily or constant basis.
Another good marketing strategy is for you to use social media sites like Twitter.com and Facebook.com to market your blog and link to your money site. Personally, I use pen names to run the majority of my online marketing campaigns in order to keep my business safe from copycats and undesirable elements.
You can also compile your articles into an ebook; use the free PDF software from OpenOffice.org to convert it to PDF. Submit the electronic book to sites such as Slideshare.net, Mediafire.com, and so on. The secret to online business success is consistency. I write and submit at least 2 articles a day for promotion. In some days I can write 6 to 10 articles.
If I make $50 a day on a bad day that is still big money for only 1 to 2 hours of work. Many aspiring internet entrepreneurs who are struggling to make money from home online will accept this level of income to paying the bills.
Starting an online business goes beyond starting a blog and loading it with content. You need free targeted traffic on a constant basis to make money online from home if you cannot invest in paid advertising at the moment. Another way to drive free targeted traffic to your money site is forum marketing.
Forum Marketing
In forum marketing, you simply sign up with a forum related to your niche market and start contributing i.e. to ask questions and answer questions on the forum. You either create new threads or answer questions from other members. Your goal is to show your expertise and let them find you through your signature links.
You must be ready to learn about your subject deeply and become the expert. It is the easiest way to make money online from home. I learn different subjects and topics and I have become an expert in new markets which I have never imagined to be possible.
In order to find a niche forum related to your market, use Google.com. Type the following search term “keyword forums” in the search field and check out the most relevant forums to sign up with. But replace keyword in the preceding example with your niche market. For example,
-Weight loss forums
-Yeast infection forums
-Affiliate marketing forums
When you sign up in any forum, go to your signature file and include your signature links. It will help members to find your website.
Commenting on Blogs
Making blog comments is also very effective. But you have to sign up with Google Alerts so that you can start receiving alerts from Google for your target keywords. Google will send to your email inbox the links to the websites or blogs which use your target keywords as soon as they are found and indexed by the search engine.
All you have to do to set up Google Alerts is a free Google mail account. Enter your search query and select the options in the fields as shown in the screenshot below.
If you do on-page SEO on your blog properly and promote it with article marketing, forum marketing and commenting on niche related blogs, you will instantly fire up your website traffic and make money with affiliate marketing. You can then spice it up with social networking strategies.
As you can see, starting an online business and making money is a cinch if you take the time to learn the ropes, practice, make mistakes and improve on your strategies. But if you are lazy to get free targeted traffic to your website, you may want to consider this Hot New Traffic System.
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