Making Money With A Website

byAndrew-74

7.3K followers

Updated 7 years ago

Today I thought I would talk about making money with a website and some of the methods that I have tried to drive traffic. Some of the methods that I have successfully used have both pros and cons, which I will also tell you about. I thought I would share a few of the methods that I use and perhaps you might want to share something yourself in the comments section?

Targeted traffic equals more sales

First of all, one of the most important things that I have learned over the years is that getting targeted traffic makes all the difference. Some people believe that the more traffic they get, the better their affiliate sales will be. This is NOT the case! Getting targeted traffic is the best way to start making money with a website. If you need extra information, this article talks about how to get free targeted traffic.

You might also wish to read this blog post on the best targeted website traffic that shows just how little traffic you actually need to make affiliate sales.

SEO Vs Social Media

Here at Wealthy Affiliate we look for "low hanging fruit" by targeting specific keywords that we can easily rank for. This is a great way of getting targeted traffic, but it doesn't happen overnight. SEO can be quite a long process, but really worth while doing simply because its totally free traffic and completely targeted to your blog posts, so long as you select relevant keywords to target.

The fastest way of getting traffic to your blog pages that I have found is social media. Over the years I have experimented with quite a few social media sites and would like to share some of my findings with you here.

YouTube Traffic

Videos are a fantastic way of getting your content ranked within Google. YouTube videos rank much more easily within Google over everything else. You can create a video and see it ranked within the search engines within minutes sometimes. The great thing about YouTube is that you can include your website URL or even an affiliate link. I have actually made affiliate sales with nothing more than a YouTube video.

But there are a couple of downsides to YouTube too. Personally, I hate speaking on videos! In the past I have legally used videos created by other people. Often when an affiliate product is launched, the creators supply a promotional video that you can upload to YouTube. These are great, but you tend to see a lot of people using the same video.

Its also really easy to get your account terminated on YouTube. A couple of years ago I had an account that contained nothing but promotional videos. After using the account for several months it was suddenly shut down. Where there is competition, you will always find someone who is willing to try anything to get rid of you. On YouTube you only need to get flagged a few times by your competition and your account is gone. Especially if you are using videos that technically aren't your own.

Google Plus

I have been posting to Google Plus for a couple of years now. I can't say that Google Plus gives me a lot of direct traffic, but it does play a part in making money with a website. Posting links from Google Plus to each of your blog posts is a good way of increasing your position within the search results. I've done experiments with Google Plus and I can confirm that having social links pointing to your posts does help. It also appears to have more of an effect if you get more +1's within Google Plus.

Google are taking more notice of social signals these days and this is a great ranking tool. If you haven't already used it, you can share your Google Plus accounts on Wealthy Affiliate. This is a great way to boost your following. You can share your Google Plus accounts here.

One thing that you should avoid with G+ is sharing affiliate links. You can learn more about affiliate links and Google Plus in this post.

Twitter Traffic

Twitter is my favorite social media site for driving traffic. This is also my top choice for making money with a website too. Driving traffic with Twitter can be really easy but you first need to build up a good following. If you are not already on Twitter then I suggest you join right away.

In order to get targeted traffic from Twitter all you need to do is follow people, companies and websites within your niche. Post content on a regular basis and share your blog posts with images that catch the eye.

On Twitter you can build up a very large following quite quickly, so long as you are an active member of the community. But be warned, Twitter will close you down if they think you are being spammy or in their words are "using aggressive marketing techniques".

You will get more followers and more traffic if you follow people, like other peoples content and share other peoples content. Just be aware that Twitter has a VERY sensitive algorithm that will freeze your account if you do anything a little too much.

Although Twitter can be really hit and miss, I have had some really good results with it. Since you can post affiliate links directly onto Twitter I have even made sales by simply posting a quick link onto the site. It happens rarely and now I mainly use it to drive traffic to my authority site.

Any others?

These are some of the main methods that I have used to drive traffic and make affiliate sales. I would love to hear about your methods and systems for driving traffic as this is a really important area that we all need to get right. Any input would be appreciated on this post as it can only help the Wealthy Affiliate community further.

Have a great day guys!

Regards,

Andrew