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One of the most common questions that our readers ask us is how to increase traffic to their website. To make this as simple as possible I would tell you that there are 2 things you should always be doing: Adding unique useful content and building your link popularity.

Adding Content - When I say you should add unique useful content to your site I really mean the content needs to be 100% original and useful to other people. Writing content just for content sake is a big waste of time, especially if you are the one writing all of the content. When you write useful content people will have a reason to come and read it. People will show it to other people, and people will link to it.

Let me give you a great example of how by writing one good post I increased the traffic to my website by 1000%. I came across a new product a couple of months ago and saw that the product was in my same industry so I looked at the site for a minute or two and then went on with my day. The next day I found a site that was almost exactly the same making the same claims and showing the same pictures of checks and sportscars.

I quickly realized that this new product was a scam. I decided to write an very in depth post about this scam and warning people what to look out for. Little did I realize that this scam was so widespread that thousands of people a month were searching for the name of this new product to find out if it was legit or not.

Because I took the time to write a very detailed post about the product we jumped to the top of the rankings for the product name. The result of this one post was going from a couple of thousand visitors a month to over 20,000 visitors a month. Imagine what your business could do with 10 times the amount of traffic it gets now.

Building Links - Because this is such a hard thing to do people will try to tell you that this is not that important in getting more traffic to your site. In reality, link building has proven to be the most influential factor in the rankings and traffic I have achieved with the internet. Nothing sways rankings more powerfully than good quality one way links that point to your website. (Read more about how to link build here) I acheived #1 rankings in Google with my old SEO website for the term “SEO services” when my site had much less content and far fewer pages than all of my competitors. How did I do it? A consistent flow of good links.

If you want to know my secret to success I just gave it to you. Good quality content and relevent quality links. If it sounds too simple then try it another more complicated way. All I can give you is what has helped me become successful online.

I got an email from my brother-in-law Jeff this morning explaining to me the difference in adsense money he is making on two of his websites. Site A is his old website(his baby) that he has been building for the last year or so and has achieved nominal success, enough to show him that some money can be made on the internet.

On this site he sells an ebook as his main source of revenue and then uses google adsense as well to make some extra income. Well Jeff is no dumby and has been watching what Jesse and I have been doing for the past year and a half and decided to start another site in a much more competitive yet lucrative industry.

He realized that in order to make a full time living online Site A probably wasn’t going to get him there. So he has been running both sites over the last couple of months and has finally started to see some traffic with the new more competitive Site B.

Here is what the email said:

Adam,
There is AdSense Money, then there is Ad$ense Money.

The first image attached shows how much adsense money i made after 18 ckicks on Site A (url omitted)
The second image attached shows how much i made after only 8 clicks on Site B
I knew the value of each industry varied but i had no idea it was by so much!

18 cents vs $1.33

Jeff

He also attached these two snapshots of his adsense earnings:

These are the adsense earnings of Site A:

Here are the adsense earnings of Site B:

Having seen the difference in earnings per click, where should he spend his time? Even if he only gets one fourth the traffic to Site B it will so far outperform Site A that he should spend 90% of his time on Site B. You can also see here that the click through rate for Site B is much higher as well.

Although working on Site A was good for him because it gave him a lot of internet marketing experience and a taste of success, he finally realized that there were much larger fish he could be going after. He also realized that if he was going to work so many hours on a site there should be a bigger payoff. I promise you that his motivation to work on Site B is at an all time high.

The lesson here is that if you have to take the time to work hard on a website idea, why not make sure that there is money to be made in the industry your website is in. The last thing you want to do is spend hundreds of hours on a site that will cap out at making you $1000 a month.

All right I have finally decided to post this. I apologize for making you all wait this long but we had very good reasons which I will not go into here. Considering how much you are paying for the info I knew you would understand. :-)

Now that you have chosen your industry and found out that there is real potential to see if you could make money in that industry, the next step is to go out and find a website that will work for you.

This is when you need to make the decision on whether to buy a website or build one from scratch. In my estimation it is always better to buy an established website rather that build a new one. You let someone else do all of the grunt work and then you step in a make the necessary changes and increase the value of the site quickly.

The only time I would say that it makes sense to build a website from scratch is when you are entering an industry where nobody really knows SEO that well and you are confident that you can quickly enter and move up in the rankings quickly.

The only other reason would be if you look and look and just can’t find a suitable website to buy in that industry and still want to get started.

I have created a video that explains one of the ways we actually go about looking for websites to buy. There are other ways than the one I talk about here but it will give you a good start.

Before I show you the video I need to tell you that we have been contemplating long and hard on whether or not to even continue with this series. We know that some people have begun to abuse the information we have given out and that has disappointed and demotivated us in our efforts to teach others.

The information on internet marketing and website flipping is valid and valuable. We really do want to help others succeed online but there are always those few who ruin it for everyone else.

We have decided to create a Prosperly membership and allow only members to access the video for step 3. The membership is free but we need to be in complete control of who gets access to this free information.

If you still wish to proceed and don’t mind becoming a member at Prosperly then click on the link below:

Watch step 3 video

Link Cloaking

What the heck is link cloaking? To be as plain as possible, cloaking affiliate links is the art of showing your visitors an internal link when they mouse over an affiliate link so that the visitor doesn’t think they are leaving your site.

For example, one of the websites we used to run was a site that provided leads to online universities. We used a third party affiliate company to gather the leads. So when someone came to our site and wanted to request information from University of Phoenix they had to click on the “request info” button.

When they would do that they would be taken off of our site and to the third party affiliate company where they could fill out the form to request info. The url would be something like http://www.affiliatesite.com/affid=1234?schoolid=366.

So in order to make a more user friendly experience we started cloaking affiliate links by creating a php redirect that when they hovered over the “request info” button it showed the url destination to be http://www.oursite.com/univeristyofphoenix.

This type of link cloaking created a less stressful user experience so they would be more likely to click on the link. They still ended up on the same affiliate page but we found out that more people would click through to the page with the affiliate links cloaked.

Link Cloaking To The Next Level

After awhile we saw that there was a disconnect between the design of our site and the design of the affiliate pages we were sending our visitors to. We really wanted to create consistency as much as possible so we wanted somehow to keep the same design of the site on the affiliate page.

Since we couldn’t control the affiliates website we went to the next best thing. We used an iframe to keep the form where they request information on our site. This creates a smoother user experience.

When you set up your affiliate pages using this link cloaking technology your website visitors don’t ever have to know that they are dealing with an outside website. Because the user experience stays completely seamless they will be more likely to fill out the form and thus we would make more money.

So if you are looking for a great way to cloak affiliate links, this has been one of the most successful ways that we have done it. The biggest thing to take away is that ultimately what we are doing is taking away any mental roadblocks our users might have before they get to the form. Good luck with your link cloaking strategies.

Well we got back on Monday from the System Seminar internet marketing conference put on by Ken McCarthy. Jesse and I went with a good friend and neighbor Mark Butler who is also making his name in the internet marketing world. The three of us are like minded so we had some long in depth internet marketing conversations.

I will give you my feelings towards the conference at the end of this post. But first, here are my 10 take-aways from the conference which by the way cost me $1000 just to get in.

1. It is very important to get to know your visitors. Find out what they want and what their needs are. If you know their objections, it is very easy to overcome them. Use feedback tools like Kampyle.com to get the voice of your visitors.
2. The most important thing you can do is develop a relationship with your visitors. You do this by providing a lot of value to them. If you do this properly you will gain a following. Once you have a following you can really make money online.
3. A good internet marketing strategy is to develop a sequence of products that you push to your visitors. A good example of someone who does this is Dave Ramsey. He has an entry level book you can buy. Then he has a home study course which is more expensive. After that he has financial coaching which is even more expensive etc. He just moves his customers through the sequence. Sure there is a drop off as the prices get higher but obviously you don’t need as many customers when the ticket price is high.
4. Use Google’s Website Optimizer to test. I know I have said this time and time again but let me reiterate this. You need to always be testing to increase conversions. A Google representative in charge of Optimizer came to the conference and was one of the speakers. He really renewed my desire to test, test, test. Surprisingly, when he asked the attendees how many people used Website Optimizer, there was only a handful of the 200+ people that did.
5. Pricing is relative. Always test your pricing. You can increase your revenue dramatically simply by increasing your price.
6. It’s all about the list. When I said before that you need to create a following the best way to do that is to build your email list. Do whatever you can to get more and more people to sign up for your email list. Provide them with real, valuable content that will keep them loyal to you. Make your email sign up prominent on your website. Make it as easy as possible.
7. Here are 4 books you should buy and read: My Life In Advertising, Tested Advertising Methods, Web Design for ROI, Landing Page Optimization
8. Be proud of your product. Don’t be afraid to tell people what you offer. If you provide value they will want to know what you offer.
9. Don’t discount your product. Make it a bargain by adding value to it with bonuses.
10. 90% of what we heard at this conference we already knew. There wasn’t a lot of specific information being given out so I really felt bad for the beginners. I would advise against attending this seminar in the future, especially if you are beginning.

The biggest benefit for us was the time in the hotel room in the evenings when Jesse, Mark and I would bounce ideas off of each other, give advice and strategize with each other on our own businesses. That time was way more valuable than the actual conference. I highly recommend that you find some like minded individuals that live near you and start meeting for lunch once a week. It really will help your business.

PS - We ate at Gibsons Stakehouse in Chicago (rated #1) and it was probably the best steak I have ever eaten.