Hi from Oz
I notice on this part of the forum a lot of questions about promoting or marketing a website, generating traffic and making money from things like Adsense. As a full time Internet marketer I have learnt a few key things that will make your online business successful.
Promotion and Marketing: Whether you are online or offline the principles are basically the same and it is sad to watch people get online and think they can be successful without applying these basic principles.
It is important to network with others so you can glean from their experience. Start talking to other successful business people both online and offline. Go to meetings at your local chamber of commerce, find small business groups - this can usally be done by approaching your local gov institutions. You will be surprised at how much information you can gather from all these sources and then apply it to your Internet business.
Make your offer something that people will talk about. Word of mouth is still the most popular form of marketing because everybody does it. When was the last time you went to a picture or restraunt or looked at something on the internet because one of your friends or associates recomended it to you?
Traffic: Measure your marketing efforts and streamline your site to optimise those things that work. Many people think that lots of traffic will mean lots of sales and this is not actually true in most cases. It just gobbles up your bandwidth.
The secret is targeted traffic. I have a site that used to get a 1000 visitors a day however I only made a few sales. The average tyime a visitor spent at my site was 30sec. I spent hours working on getting that traffic but obviously lots of people simply came saw and went.
Now my site only gets a few hundred visitors a day and they stay on average over 3.5 min and my sales are a lot higher and I only spend a very small percentage of the time I used to on generating this traffic. The secret - Test change, and test change and test again.
Making Suplemental income: Things like adsense can be a good supplemental income booster but remember they also take visitors away from your site and you do not benefit from other sales of product.
Sometimes it is better to set up your own add campeign using affiliate programs etc so if people are directed to another site you will make a sale. This can generate great supplemental income. I make almost 30% of my income from other product sales and referals. After all why promote your competition on your site unless you have a super competitive product or service or can guarantee that the visitor will hunt you out again. Is it better to get a few cents from Adsense or a full sale of your product.
Hope this helps a bit.
Quentin
