Angela Natcus

There are many types of traffic that you can use to make money from.  You could go down the route of driving traffic via SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), getting your site ranking high in the search engines for keywords can bring people in on a regular basis – but it relies on search engines that have a habit of changing the rules, meaning you have to stay constantly on top of things – not forgetting SEO efforts of your competitors.

PPC (pay per click) ads are certainly an option, but each clicks costs money and if you aren’t making enough from the traffic it can cost you.  Others ads also work, but again you need to be ensuring you are making enough money from each advert for it to be worth it.

One way that consistently drives traffic with little to no cost is sending out special offers, information and sales info to a targeted list of subscribers.  This way you can hit people that you know will be interested, and grab their attention in the emails.

List Building

The ‘list’ we refer to is a list of people and their email addresses that have signed up to get updates from you.  Usually you will use a list package from the likes of Aweber, Getresponse or Mailchimp.  They allow you to send thousands of emails from your account and manage the list with little to no problems.

What this means is that, if you have a list, you don’t need to be worrying about the SEO of yourself and others, or the cost of adverts – you can send out adverts every time for free.

How much would you pay to be able to email thousands of people who you know would be interested in your niche and offerings, people you know could easily be converted into buyers?  My guess is a lot – normal advertising is intrusive and people tend to have ‘ad blindness’, which means even those that would be interested simply skip over your offerings.

But people that are interested, getting an email with your advert straight to their emal inbox, are far more likely to notice an offer there than anywhere else.  And if you have built trust with your list, giving them free info and proving value for money, they are likely to trust you far more – and convert into buyers easily.

That is the secret to the phrase ‘the money is in the list’.  It simply means that by having a targeted list (and untargeted lists are almost always useless) you can drive traffic to your site that you can guarantee are interested people who trust you.

Anyone that has ever tried building a list of subscribers in a niche will tell you one thing – it is hard to get people to sign up.  You need to get traffic (people visiting your site) and you then need to get it to convert.

Whilst there are actually a huge number of ways that you can get traffic, from SEO to PPC to Social Media, it can get expensive to advertise with no guarantee on returns.

One of the best ways of getting interested people to view your subscriptions offer page is to use something called solo ads.  Solo ads is simply a case of paying for access to someone elses list to send them an advert.  This can be very powerful if it is a targeted list within your niche.

Now you could send them your special offer – but doing so only hits them the once.  Far better then, to drive them to your subscriptions page and have them sign up for your newsletter/emails so that you can hit them with offers time and time again.

Leverage

What this is doing is ‘leveraging’ someone elses list to build your own.  Yes it will cost money but if they have a responsive list and one targeted to a similar field as you then it can be worth many, many times more than what you pay.

What you need to do is send through a solo ad that grabs their interest.  You should know what it is that they are interested in (buy talking to the list owner you are buying off) and using that to your advantage.  Create an email sales copy that will entice and intrigue them – and then send them to a page with a ‘free’ offer that they need to sign up to receive.

Where?

Know we know why solo ads are so powerful it becomes a question of where we can find these lists in order to send them out.  There are a number of sources.

- Webmaster forums.  The people that run these lists are often webmasters, and will likely hang out on webmaster forums.  Some will advertise solo ads, some might simply talk about their niche and need to be approached.

- Google.  Many solo ads advertise, and can easily be found on Google.

- Other lists.  Subscribe to other lists in your niche – and then approach the owners with an offer for your solo ads.

Whenever you perform your keyword research you need to take the proper tools with you. It helps if your keywords are something you have a passion about. Passion causes things to flow better.

Some of these tools for doing keyword research that work great are Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder. Micro Niche Finder is one of the WordPress SEO tools that works effortlessly into your sidebar. It is designed to be used with Mozilla Firefox. Market Samurai is also very powerful but is a whole different program. It is not just a tool for keyword research but you can use it to track page rank and check out your SEO competition.

I personally like the Market Samurai tool, but I use Micro Niche Finder now and then whenever I want to work seamlessly from my sidebar. I compare them like one being a Bowie Knife and the other a Swiss Army knife. I call the Market Samurai a Swiss Army knife and WordTracker the Bowie knife. You should check out both of these excellent programs and see which one is going to work best for you, or you can do like me and use both of them.

As I mentioned above you need to have passion for what you are doing when performing your SEO. That’s because when your passion is high, your SEO efforts will come naturally. Doing keyword research then becomes a breeze because you know your topic, and being the expert you are for your topic you will be able to integrate your SEO more easily.

The thing that makes SEO more natural is when you are promoting something specific or you are passionate about your product or service. As long as you can pump out good quality content, your SEO is going to flow naturally. It makes integrating your keywords a much smoother process because you aren’t forcing things. Soon you’ll be an SEO specialist in your own right.

If you want to kick-start your products or services and get them seen by your targeted audience, then be passionate about your SEO work. Your website is no good, regardless of how great it looks, if nobody can find it. So let people know you are around and let them look at your products or services.

Again, when you engage in your SEO work be sure your website is about something you have a true passion for. Things will fall into place much easier then and you will go after your keywords with a much better attitude and carefulness.

We all know that there is money in the list – bringing in targeted traffic that will have an interest in your offerings, and trust you, is the key to making large sales.  Certainly any sort of short term offer, or big product launch is going to sell better if you can instantly drive hundreds if not thousands of interested visitors to your site.

But the thing is – it can be difficult to build a list to begin with.  Sure when it is big enough we can make money with it, but how do you get a list that big in the first place.

A word of warning – do NOT buy lists.  Almost always these are spammy, untargeted lists that can actually get you in trouble and 99% won’t make you a penny.

Thankfully there are a large number of techniques you can use to get people to subscribe to emails from you.

List Building Tips

- PPC and Other Ads.  PPC ads (and ads on sites etc) can be a great way to get instant subscribers.  Simply create an advert using the likes of Google Adwords, and people will click the ads, come through to your email list offer page and if they like what they see sign up.

But this can get expensive – you have to pay per click, or per thousand ads.  You could well be losing money.  If you KNOW you can make money then this is a great method.

- Solo Ads.  This is buying an email on someone elses targeted list (again make sure it is targeted and related to your niche).  Here you use the email copy to convince them to click the link to your list page and sign up.  This can again prove great results, but again you can lose money.  Thankfully the costs are rarely that high.

- SEO.  Drive organic visitors to your site and funnel them in a way that will get them to your subscribers page.  SEO can take time, but it is a great way of bringing in traffic that could subscribe each and every day.

- Give something away!  Not a way to drive traffic but a great way to increase conversions.  A free offer will often get people signing up – after all, for many people exchanging an email address is a great deal for getting something free.   Look at giving away a free report, or other valuable information.

- Forum posting.  Post valuable on busy forums in your niche and have a link to your subscribers page in your signature file for yet more targeted visitors

It used to be that we referred to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as pretty much being backlinks.  Onpage SEO was simply a matter of making sure that we had the meta tags plugged in properly, and then get out them and hammer the backlinks.

These days it takes far more than that.  Our on page SEO needs to be spot on to help us beat our competition.  But this doesn’t mean that backlinks are now relegated to also-rans.  Far from it in fact – backlinks are still an integral part of any SEO campaign, and are the one thing you can continue doing once you have your onpage SEO right.

Enough quality backlinks and you can overtake pretty much anyone in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).  The keyword there though is quality.  The latest Search Engine updates (such as the Google Panda update) focuses far more on the authority of each link rather than on the amount of links you have.

One link from a trusted authority site (in the eyes of Google) that is relevant to your site or article is worth thousands of small, untargeted links.  When you add in the right anchor text (the text that the link sits behind) you start getting a huge SEO boost.

Why?

Authority sites are Google’s way of getting around all the spammy links out there.  Profile creation and the like could hammer thousands of backlinks to one site in a matter of hours.  But in doing so they are simply created on a nothing page.

There is no way such links should count more than a contextual link from a news site such as the BBC or CNN, or a link from a high ranking blog that does so to show information you have on your site.

The why is pretty obvious from the search engines point of view.  So now it is up to you to catch up.  Rather than spammy links work on getting just a few authoritative links.  They’re worth far more.