Lack of traffic to a website is frustrating, especially when you're doing everything "by the book" and not engaging in any methods frowned upon by the major search engine and the primary source o0f all organic search traffic, Google. By that I mean SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactics that are contrary to the search engine's quality guidelines as I'm sure if you have even the most basic experience you'll know what I'm talking about here.
Where Many New Internet Marketers Go Wrong
Website owners who use their websites to make money online are generally termed "Internet marketers" and we make that money from collecting revenue from a number of sources such as PPC advertising (Adsense), CPA offers (affiliate marketing) and lead generation. There are other methods but I'll stick to these as they are probably the most highly used methods of monetizing websites.
So where are you going wrong, assuming you're not getting traffic to your site like you expected to?
One of the prime mistakes new marketers make is to target core, or "shirt tail" keywords as the main focus of their site. Sure, if you want to go after a term like "Weight Loss" there is a huge potential for earning if you get the right traffic. I should know as this was a niche (pronounced "neesh", not "nitch" as I hear all too often) that I excelled in back in the day before Google waged war on SEO and made it very difficult for the average mom and pop marketer to make money where they used to.
But even I wasn't so foolish to go straight after the term "weight loss" right off the bat, otherwise I would have been doomed to failure. I saw many train wrecks happen along the way from 2007-2012 but I wasn't one of them. How did I get to do so well in that niche?
Going After Low Hanging Fruit First
I went after the "long tail" and dominated one after another after another until my site had gained so much authority for those longer, less competitive terms that it eventually ranked well for the shorter, more competitive (and more lucrative) terms. It was literally a case of reaching up to pick the "low hanging fruit" or targeting easy keywords first that started the snowball rolling down the hill.
This is how you can dominate any niche that you choose. Just know that the easier terms can be ranked for faster, but the harder ones take time to conquer!
Of course, back before the not insubstantial impact of Google's now infamous algorithm updates codenamed Panda and Penguin that targeted low quality content and unnatural backlinks respectively, it was all much easier to rank for a given keyword if you knew what to do.
You simply wrote a bunch of big articles all focusing on various aspects of the core keywords in your targeted niche to exploit the "easy ranking" factor of long tail keywords. Then you backlinked the living daylights out of those articles and watched them climb up the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) onto page #1 and into the money!
What Can You Do Now?
Funnily enough, the tactics are relatively similar, with a few alterations to make sure you adhere to the criteria of the current SE algorithm and don't veer off the narrow path of quality guidelines. In short, you still need to write those articles and they better be good.
No more spinning garbage or unreadable gobbledygook, that stuff just won't cut it anymore. After all, what's the point of spending money of the best web hosting if you're just going to fill your site with rubbish?
Articles need to be lengthy, useful, readable and provide a good user experience for real visitors to your page. You need to make sure your website looks good and is easily navigable, while making sure it is hosted on a quality host that provides the best website up time.
If that sounds like too much hard work, then you should probably either consider spending money on outsourcing those articles, or take a look at the job vacancies at your local supermarket.
Here's why you should write long articles:
The more you write, the more variations of your core keywords will naturally fall into the text, so it mot only looks natural, it actually IS natural! The search engine bots will read your content and the algo will determine its relevancy. Because it is keyword rich without being stuffed, it should pass all the internal tests and be marked as high quality.
A high quality article will rank on its own without any backlinks as long as the keywords your are targeting are low competition and not spammy. You can help things along by publishing your articles on a domain that already has some authority and age and then lightly backlinking with a handful of quality in-post links from other sites that are relevant to your niche.
You do that by guest posting or commenting (with useful comments) on authority blogs where the author may (or may not) be curious about your site, go visit and be so impressed by your article that they feel justified on naturally linking to it from their site.
Is All This Work Worth All the Trouble?
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well, right? You want to make money from your work, so don't cut corners. Do your best work and follow it up with more of your best work and you will be rewarded down the line by an increase in SE traffic that you got not by gaming the system but by working with it.
If you don't think it's worth your trouble to do this, your options are to go on doing whatever it is your doing (that obviously is not working or you wouldn't be reading this), or to try churn and burn tactics that usually result in very short lived projects, or give up and go get a real job!
Personally, I like working from home and I like making money from doing my best work online. So I just keep writing quality articles, target long tails and making bank at the end of the day from all the extra traffic I'm generating.
