One thing that many site owners don’t realize is that people are actually going to use their website is different ways. One person may be coming to the site looking for a red sweater and one may be looking for a blue one. You of course have no idea unless you are reading your site stats.
You can find out what people are looking for on your site by using a Google search box on your site and review it weekly. This is also a good way of getting keyword ideas for future pages. The reason I am making this post now is because I just found a great converting product on one of my sites that I had no idea I was even selling. You may be thinking how can that happen but it just does when you have too many pages to track.
I had always a few clicks here and there on the page and a commission of $1 from time to time and then Boom the page started getting bigger sales. This happened because the merchant I was referring the traffic to all of a sudden started selling a product my readers actually were searching for. If I had checked my search box stats I would have known they were looking for this product all along. I could have found a merchant that provided it. I also moved the page to the navigation so the reader can find it easier. That is something I would not have done in the past but this particular site it should have been in the navigation anyway.
So check your stats and make sure you know what the readers are looking for. It is something that should always be done but how many of us get caught up in other stuff.
There was many things that I did that made me money online and some are just out there. I use to buy and sell a lot on EBay, mostly baseball cards and sports stuff. I saw many things that sold there that just shocked me like my friend John from Missouri who sold an Orange ring ding box for a few hundred dollars.
In the beginning of EBay, you could make a small fortune off stuff you had in your attic. Now everyone has opened their attic so the market is flooded with junk. The thing with making money online is jumping on your idea and running with it. I saw it from time to time and wish I had these ideas. My friend Joel Comm with his 500 words site was just brilliant. He sold all the words and made a ton of money. You know what he did then? He sold the software that he used to people and made money off that too. Sometimes you just don’t stop with your original idea.
One of my early ideas was when the New York Yankees signed the Japanese star Hedeki Matsui to play baseball in the Bronx. When he hit a home run on opening day he was on the cover of all three New York Newspapers. I went to the store and bought 30 copies of each newspaper.
Knowing he was a huge baseball star in Japan I put up 30 auctions and sold the newspapers for $30 each. Quickest money I ever made online and all I had to do was make an auction page and go to the store.
I only regret that I didn’t save all the email addresses as that would have made a nice list of baseball fans to inform them of other Hedeki Matsui auctions I may have had in the future. I think I took that money and bought myself a boat on EBay. I am not sure if that was one of the auctions that I used for the boat. To sum it up I bought a boat for the price of 30 newspapers.
One thing that I have noticed online is people that just do the same thing over and over and expect the money to flow to them. That is so not me on many levels. I see something and jump on it! Sitting around waiting for the Google fairy to index your site isn’t going to happen unless you do something proactive about it.
My Jump into Affiliate Marketing
When I first found affiliate marketing I didn’t even know how to make a website. Some people still may say my sites stink and in a way I agree.Thankfully making money online isn’t a beauty contest, my sites wouldn’t even be entered in the competition.
I see a lot of people going to websites and asking people to review the sites. This is probably the stupidest thing I have ever seen as you are not only showing your site to someone you don’t know you are also giving the competition your idea. This is a double no-no and just plain stupid.
If you want someone to look at your site find a family member and have them look at it. A fresh set of eyes can do wonders for your idea. That is if you are smart enough to humble your original idea and take their thoughts into consideration.
The trick is to listen to that set of eyes and learn from your mistakes. I normally have a younger member of the family look at the site as they can spot things since they have been online their whole life and don’t have the NON online trust factor pre-installed in their brain.
My affiliate marketing sites are still going strong but you have to expand your thinking all the time. If you know me it should come as no secret that I have been using other contextual ads on my sites for some time now. If you follow the forum at all you would see what I did to create a site from scratch.
I am sure as that advertising vehicle starts to change I will jump on something else. See what else I am up to by following me on twitter.
If you don’t already know I am a big fan of using Twitter to bring traffic to a website. You can use it in so many ways, most of the people on your Twitter followers list are already in the niche are interested in what you are trying to sell or give advice on. Why not use that power?
Last night I attended a live video cast after seeing that Peter Shankman Twitter Skydiver from Helpareporter.com was giving away prizes for answering trivia. Using twitter for sending and answering questions was just brilliant. When I started watching the video cast I sent out a message to the 460 people following me with info about what was going on. One of my followers retweeted this info and had another 5 people from her 800+ list of followers.
Besides being the funniest thing I had seen in a while, no script and anything can happen, heck he even had an impromptu party lol. His co host Brian Shaler was funny just trying to be funny especially when he was the only one on camera. Brian Shaler Twitter
I decided to do a little test and see some results. I have been dying to hook up my computer office LCD to my laptop with the cables I bought a few weeks ago and figured this would be the perfect time. I hooked them up and took a picture of the show being broadcast. I sent Peter a tweet with a link to the picture and he retweeted it. I used the nyfalcon.com addy to upload the picture and placed the tweet using my VinnyfromBrooklyn twitter account.
Checking stats this morning it showed me that by retweeting the message it received 398 hits of which about 50 people actually cropped the url and checked out my site. That is not the good part.
Since I used my Vinny From Brooklyn Twitter Profile
People actually went to the Bio on Twitter and sent another 150 visits to my site Vinny From Brooklyn.
Sure it was not avtually buying traffic but I didn’t really have the time or need to set up perfect landing pages for a campaign like a big company would have. Just a simple test on getting traffic to a site using Twitter. Of course Twitter can be used in many ways, If you think about it I actually borrowed Peters and Brians followers for a few minutes. Almost like sharing an email list to some sorts except it didn’t cost me a dime to actually get visitors to my site. It was all done with viral traffic.
