How to Build an Online Empire

Posted by admin - 31/05/07 at 03:05:35 pm

Show me website traffic, and I’ll show you a thousand ways to convert, monetize, and otherwise exploit it. You had better believe that. Most of us can make that claim. But, if you have a single website and you live, eat and breathe to advance your Alexa rating and lift your Google ranking, you may suffer from traffic-on-the-brain, otherwise known as can’t-see-forest-for-the-trees disease.

Nobody ever said your traffic had to come from a single source. With domain names coming cheaper than a Starbucks Latte Grande, and hosting accounts available for the equivalent of a couple of biscotti a month, there is no excuse in the free world for not having at least three websites and a blog or two. Got a MySpace page? Advertise your websites there. And oh, by the way, why do you only have one MySpace account? They’re free you know. So is Facebook, CherryTap, Xanga, and a host of other social networking communities. Got an email address? You should be promoting your websites in your signature file. Got a car? Get a bumper sticker or some Pidplates and stick your web address there, too. Got a hobby or a passion? Find some chatrooms and Google groups and start contributing. Favorite blog? Leave comments. These are all ways to get permanent links to your Internet real estate out there. And each will help boost your search engine ranking, link popularity, Alexa rating, and yes, the Holy Grail of webdom, your Google rank.

The point of all this is to generate traffic any way you can. And remember, it’s aggregate traffic that matters, not traffic at any one website or blog. This isn’t a contest. Well, it is a contest, but if you are dead-set on building traffic on a single web property, then you’re in the wrong league. What you need to be doing is building a collection of properties; an Internet Empire.

Note well, every little nugget of truth and value I have offered above has a single thing in common: each requires you to DO SOMETHING. That’s right, they all require work. Ergs of energy must be expended. Keyboard keys must be depressed. Time must be invested. Another commonality, however, is that each is completely free or nearly costless. So, get with the program, cancel that get-rich-quick program, and get busy. There is no silver bullet to making an Internet monument out of your one website, but with the regular and thoughtful investment of your online time, you can claim a significant amount of web traffic in aggregate, which can amount to the same thing, or nearly so.

One of the tricks to making this work is that you have to maintain a focal point to all this traffic. The one site you have today is probably that focal point. It’s the ultimate destination of your erstwhile Internet customer’s journey. Mine, for example, is QuickEStore, where I sell a shopping cart program I wrote. About half of my traffic comes from the referrals I get from various payment gateways that are integrated with my cart - AuthorizeNet, PayPal and others. But you would probably be shocked to learn what a large chunk of my referral traffic comes from sites that are utterly unrelated to e-commerce. Sites like ScriptMySpace and http://iamfacingforeclosure.com.

ScriptMySpace is a free MySpace profile editor I wrote, where MySpace users can get codes, backgrounds, and layouts for their MySpace pages. It gets 6-800 unique visitors a day. So I stuck a QuickEStore banner ad on the homepage. Iamfacingforeclosure.com is a site that is run by an infamous Internet investor and blogger named Casey Serin, and it gets on the order of 6,000 visitors a day. I bought an ad. By placing links to my main attraction, QuickEStore, on these other two sites — completely unrelated to e-commerce, mind you — I have boosted traffic at QuickEStore significantly.

Many hosting companies now offer Google AdWords credits for new accounts. Don’t leave these on the table, either. Sign up and create a campaign, even if only to expire a free $25 credit. Finally, if you are hosting Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft (yes, they are now in the game) ads, make sure you are taking advantage of the “alternate” ads feature, whereby you designate the ads that display if and when the ad service or campaign you are running does not have a suitable ad to serve on your page. The alternate ad for each of your services should be an ad for your own personal Internet focal point; your main attraction. If you do nothing, the default alternate ad will be one for the ad service you are using, or a charity.

Now, it’s time to get busy. So, get blogging, writing, commenting, posting. It’s all good!

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May 31, 2007 | In Web Traffic |

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