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cage · #1 (**permalink**) 08-31-2007, 06:45 PM

I know there are many people out there that know how to make a dollar out of a click and a click out of nothing. I was wondering if any of these people would be willing to share a few pieces of information on how they do it. Lisa has already helped me a lot in understanding "how it works" but I'm still having a lot of trouble actually getting it to work. I just need a little bit of direction. I know I seem like I'm asking to be spoon-fed but it just isn't working for me. I put many hours in to this box, and I enjoy it, but I just feel like I can do this if I just get a little push from someone. I know this is what I want to do everyday, but I'd like to be able to survive while doing it. What am I missing? That SBI tool? Is there any one piece that could be the difference between making it and not?

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Any help is appreciated,
Cage

ppcFanatic · #2 (**permalink**) 08-31-2007, 07:41 PM

Hey cage,

Why not go to the Site Reviews section of this forum and post a link to your site and then we can provide feedback. It would be helpful to know what your topic is (maybe you've posted it before but it gets confusing with so many members. Hard to keep track of who does what.)

Also when you say "getting it to work" does that mean traffic? sales? all of the above? Let us know a bit about what you are trying to do with your site specifically and maybe we can offer some better guidance.

It may also help to put a link to your homepage in your sig file. That way your site automatically shows up in all your posts.

lisa · #3 (**permalink**) 08-31-2007, 08:09 PM

Good advice ppcfanatic. Cage, I'm moving this to the Site Reviews forum so you can post a link to your site. If you're not comfortable with that at least give everyone more details of what you've been doing. That will help everyone help you.

cage · #4 (**permalink**) 08-31-2007, 08:39 PM

That's a pretty good idea, ppcFanatic. I've gotten a couple of forums to tell me what's right and wrong with my site, but each one helps more. The topic of my website is a tutorial website but I'm starting to think I should have started something else first.

As far as getting it to work, I mean all of the above. I can't really get traffic to my website, and for that I blame either my skills as a web designer or my choice of website niche. I really want to get something going that kind of puts me on a bit of momentum to get my juices going. Not because I'm money hungry but to satisfy the feeling that I "can't do it".

I put the link in my sig so it should show up with my first post right? Well If you're going to check out my website, only the PHP section works right now and it's a little bit incomplete itself (from all the reviews I haven't updated yet).

2fer · #5 (**permalink**) 08-31-2007, 09:50 PM

Your site looks good, just need to finish it, flesh it out so that every link leads to a functional page. Traffic will not start until you have a complete site. Your layout is good, the subject is good and with a little more work each day you could get to where sites want to link to you. I would if it was finished.
You can't monetize a site until it is ready to roll. You can add on sections as you go but as long as you show all those sections they need to have something valid showing for every link.
No matter how good a site is the traffic does not start until you are done building and that is a good thing because you wouldn't want to have a few hundred people come by every day at this stage, many would never return. Just think how you enjoy visiting a site where the links don't work; it kind of makes you want to leave and remember not to go back. Maybe save those pages to work on bit by bit and back up to the most complete section only. When that first section is complete you can keep working on the other subjects until you have them ready to add. That way it looks like you are growing instead of like there is supposed to be things there that aren't. One other thing - even if the site was all up and ready to go, traffic builds slowly at the start, you won't have too much traffic until you work your way to the top of the search engines. You have a lot of sites to beat to do that but it can be done...just not in 6 weeks. A website has to be a labor of love, you have to love creating it to put it out there to either grow and fly or wilt and die, but it is up to you.

webdev · #6 (**permalink**) 08-31-2007, 09:54 PM

Cage,

First of all nice site.

As you're just starting i presume, you will not get a lot of traffic from search engines. When i started my PHP tutorial site in May of this year, i was getting 10-20 visitors from google each day. I had 10-12 pages and was only getting < 30 visits a day.

To increase my traffic count,I had to build backlinks because that is the key in getting high quality search engine traffic.

Now, you will ask, how do i build backlinks? At first i was frustrated too because i didn't know about building back links.

I learned from lisa and others here that i can write articles on my subject (on on any subject) at ezinearticle.com and they will allow me to put links back to my site in the articles. ezinearticle.com is a high traffic site. Depending on you niche, you can get a lot of visitors from there through your articles..

Now, you may be wondering how does it work? Well, you sign up at ezinearticle.com for free. Then write a short article on the subject relating to your site with links back to your site.

The moderators will look at your submitted article and if it conforms with their guidelines, they will approve your article and place it on the main page (high traffic page) of ezinearticle.com. Not only will people be reading your article and coming to your site, also the search engines like google and yahoo be noticing your articles with links back to your site which again is the key in getting traffic from search engines.

In the beginning i wrote a few short articles covering PHP topics like PHP strings, functions, loops and so on. Now I get few visitors to my site through my articles.

The second way to get visitors to your site (and lots of them) is to place your tutorials on high traffic public tutorials sites like http://www.tutorialized.com/

I placed few of my tutorials on this site and to this date i have gotten 1000-1500 visitors from them. Again, your tutorial needs to be approved before it makes it on their main pages and it could take weeks before they approve it. But once they do, you will get 50-100 visitors a day from them.

Keep in mind that the traffic from these tutorial sites doesn't last forever. It will die down after few days as new tutorial makes it on to the pages and your tutorials is pushed down the list and eventually disappears.

But the key thing is the search engines will recognize your links on these high ranking sites and they will start to send you more traffic as well for related keywords.

Now, you just gotta keep doing this. Keep writing more content and keep building back links.

I haven't gotten to the point where i have 1000s of visitors a day. I only get few hundred (150-300). But i'm using the technique i explained above to get traffic. Hopefully as i keep building more content and keep building back links, i will keep getting more traffic little by little. Keep in mind it may take a while (1-2 years) to build good amount of traffic to your sites (lol unless you spam sites like digg.com on daily basis like others do with their blogs).

Hope this helps. I'm sure you must have lots of follow up questions

cage · #7 (**permalink**) 09-01-2007, 10:32 AM

Thanks guys, you are really helpful here and I appreciate everyone taking there time to give me their side of the story. I guess I'm just going to keep building my site and trying to get backlinks. My biggest problem is that when you're first creating a website that has 0 fan-base, it's really hard to tell if you're stabbing at something you can't do. Right now I don't even get 1 visit a day, and with that kind of visitation it's hard to tell if it's my writing/teaching skills or if it's just because my site is no where near finished.

When you guys created websites, do you know it's a good one before it's done? Who do you get to tell you if it's good enough? I think the web design is sufficient, but the writing I'm not so confident about.

Thanks for all your help

2fer · #8 (**permalink**) 09-01-2007, 11:41 AM

Writing skills are learned, but to know what to look for, to be sure your writing covers what you want to cover it helps to break down your article. If you have a text editor that can highlight (even bold - italic will work fine) different parts of your aticle you can see it with a visitor's eyes. Read through your entire article and mark everything that is factually instructional. Then go back and highlight everything that is reference information. Use another highlight to mark your own commentary or observations and then look at what is left. This is the part to edit first. If it adds to your article it should either fit into the reference, instruction or observations categories. Those categories can be expanded until you feel that all the information is useful to one of those categories. There is no reason to just cut out all words that aren't in a category but examine them and see if it adds to the article or not. The factually instructional sections should cover all steps; with it highlighted it is easy to see if you left out something that should be included.

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