You own a website and may even give advice there or share information of some kind. Whatever you are doing, if you are not using it to make money, then there is an untapped market waiting to be yours.

Website Traffic

This involves people visiting your website. What you want to count are your unique visitors, people who visit for the first time. Repeat visitors are great for sales but to gain interest, the more people who visit, the better.

In order for a business to make money it needs traffic. These people will do something for you on your website that will enhance their life and make money for you. There are a variety of ways to do it, but for any method you use to be cost effective, you will need traffic.

One way to gain traffic is to have a focus. This is your niche. This will determine which traffic comes your way and if they are going to buy whatever you decide to offer on your website.

Now, turn your attention to your content. That is why your traffic is there in the first place. If you haven’t already, optimize it for a wider readership. This involves targeting certain keywords in your articles, blog posts, headers and picture text. Not only will your content get ranked higher for those keywords, but your website also will. If you haven’t done so already, register your website with the major search engines.

Monetizing Your Website

Now that you have made a few tweaks to gain more focused traffic, you are ready to start making money with your website. Here are some ways you can get the job done.

* Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – This basically means that you are posting ads that people will click on. Whenever someone clicks on that ad, you get paid. Depending on who you are using for your service, there are other ways to do this besides just the click-through rate. One you can start with is Google AdSense.

* Banner Advertising – This is a way to get noticed. If you have a good fan base and have networked with others in your business niche, this can work for you. Sell advertising space at the top of your website. You can also sell on the sides, but keep in mind that the top half of your webpage is where people’s eyes tend to gravitate.

* Affiliate Marketing – You not only advertise for others and sponsor their products, but you also get access to lots of helpful tools so you can do just that. Earn commissions on your click rate as well as sale rate depending upon how the affiliate program is set up.

* Paid surveys – Companies will pay you to offer surveys to your visitors. Each time one of them takes the survey, you get paid.

There are many other ways to monetize your website but this is just the beginning. Once you have started, try other ways to make your expertise work for you.

A blog makeover may be just what you need to take your blog to the next level, but transitioning from an old design to a new one can sometimes be shocking to regular readers. Here are a few tips for doing a successful blog makeover to make sure the transition is a pleasant one and that your readers will like your new design:

Start with the “Why”

Perhaps the most common mistake blog owners make with makeovers is to do a makeover when one isn’t necessary. It is easy to get bored of a blog’s design when you are looking at the same thing many hours a day. Your users, however, who may just spend an hour or two on your blog a week, won’t get bored of your design as easily. Before you launch a makeover, it is crucial to ask yourself why. If you have a good reason, such as you are rebranding yourself or you need a more corporate-looking website, then be clear about that goal as you begin the design process. Don’t change a good working design unless there’s a real business reason to do so.

Stage It and Work Out the Bugs

Don’t just push a makeover live. Instead, stage it in a subfolder. There are several WordPress plug-ins that can create a staging blog for you on a subdomain. Alternatively, you can just copy your entire website to a new domain and work with it from there. This allows you to work out the technical and design bugs before the new design goes live. Oftentimes makeovers may seem to work perfectly on the surface, but invariably there will be one or two bugs in the system.

Get Some Feedback

Before you push it live, get some feedback from your loyal readers with whom you have a personal connection, and some of your friends as well. Ask them for their overall first impressions. Then ask them to browse the website to determine how easy it is to navigate, whether they got stuck anywhere, and if they have any suggestions. Once you have the answers, make a round of changes before going live.

Watch Your Statistics

After your blog goes live, watch your statistics. See if your bounce rate or length of time stayed goes up or down. If people are staying longer on your website, that probably means people liked your new layout and found it easy to use. On the other hand, if people are leaving quickly, that probably means they found your new design harder to use. Watch your statistics carefully in the first couple of weeks after a new design goes live. The numbers can tell you a lot about your visitors’ reaction.

In summary, start your redesign process with a purpose. Create the design, then stage it and work out the bugs. Ask for feedback from fans and friends. Finally, watch your statistics after you push your blog live. Do your makeover this way and you will eliminate most of the problems that often come with a major website overhaul.

There are many ways to increase traffic to your blog. You can advertise your blog, you can optimize your content for the search engines, and you can take advantage of social networking sites such as Digg. In fact, social networking interaction is often the easiest and most effective traffic-generation tactic.

When Using Digg, Submit Your Most Compelling Blog Posts

Submitting everything you write to Digg is a good way to alienate people. If you want users to take you seriously, then submit only content that is entertaining, very informative or useful.

Submit Other Content, Too

Digg is a social networking website. As you might have already experienced on other social networking sites, individuals who only promote and don’t interact don’t have too many fans. Once you have registered with Digg, install the Digg toolbar on your browser. Spend a few minutes every day submitting relevant and useful content. This is a key way to build your profile and to interact with other users.

Build a Compelling Profile

Simply being a Digg user and contributor will drive some traffic to your website. People will want to know who you are and what you are about.

Install Digg Buttons

Integrate Digg buttons into your post and blog. You can prompt visitors to “Digg this.” Each time a post is submitted, it moves up the results. You reach more people and increase your search engine ranking.

Use Your Resources

The more Digg votes your posts receive, the higher they move in up the results and the higher up they are, the more people see them. This in turn drives traffic to your blog which is your ultimate goal. Don’t hesitate to ask for Diggs from your readers, customers and prospects.

Optimize Your Submissions

When you submit a post from your own blog, optimize the title and description with keywords. Choose the right category for your niche and consider including a photograph.

Make Friends

Digg is a social networking website and that means interacting with other members. Get online and chat with fellow Digg members. Ask for reviews or votes and reciprocate when fellow members connect with you.

Digg is a great way to promote your blog and drive traffic. It’s free, powerful and can be your most effective traffic-generation tool in your marketing strategy.

StumbleUpon is a social networking site that connects you directly to others who share the same interests, and can be a fantastic tool to drive traffic and grow your business. However, in order to gain the most benefit there are a few key strategies you can utilize.

#1 Identify Your Goals

Goals help you stay on track. They also help you know when a strategy is successful and when it needs to be fine-tuned or eliminated. So what do you want to accomplish with your StumbleUpon tactics? For example, “I want to increase website traffic by ten percent.”

#2 Create a Strong Brand

It’s important to make sure you are representing a cohesive brand personality or image whenever you communicate on StumbleUpon. Your profile is also a significant brand builder. Here are a few tips to strengthen your brand through your profile:

* Post a picture – Just like other social networking websites and even your website and blog, it is important to demonstrate that you are a real, live human being. It’s also a good way to share who you are.

* Choose topics strategically – Choose topics that are relevant to your business.

* Connect with like-minded Friends and Followers – Connect with your industry gurus and experts. You can also connect with your competition this way and upload other social networking contacts.

#3 Schedule Your Interactions

Most often when people join StumbleUpon and other social networking websites, they create a few key posts and then they forget about it. If you want to reach your goals, you’ll want to participate on a regular basis for it to be effective.

It is important to know that this is a task that you can outsource. You don’t have to spend your valuable time networking. If you are managing the task on your own, set aside a few minutes every day submitting sites to StumbleUpon, interacting and reviewing. Submit regular content that offers value and helps build your brand and awareness. You can make this step significantly easier by installing a StumbleUpon toolbar on your browser.

#4 Strategic Content

Of course you will want to submit some of your own content. However, you want to make sure the pages you submit are strategic. Don’t submit everything, but rather only content that you believe will help you reach your goals. Create content specifically for your StumbleUpon audience.

#5 Testing and Tracking

When you are creating your StumbleUpon goals, make sure you also create a way to test and track your results so that you will know if your efforts are successful.

#6 Integrate

Include StumbleUpon into your other marketing efforts. For example, add StumbleUpon buttons on your website content pages to motivate Stumbles and reviews.

#7 Advertise

Once you have a solid StumbleUpon system and are achieving the results you desire, take a look at StumbleUpon advertising. Like Facebook and other social networking advertising programs, it is highly targeted and may be more effective than other advertising programs.

StumbleUpon offers businesses the ability to build traffic, awareness, SEO and much more. Create your goals and a strategy to achieve them. Implement systems and tactics and then test for success.

The quality of your website backlinks is one of the most important factors to ranking in search engines. Search engines look at links as endorsements. If one website links to you, that’s essentially a “vote” for your website.

If you get a “vote” from a high quality website such as Amazon.com or Apple.com, that’s counted as much more important than getting a link from just any website on the internet.

Without good backlinks, your chances of getting ranked for even semi-competitive keywords are almost zero. With great backlinks and great content, your chances of ranking for competitive keywords are much, much higher. Let’s take a look at the two most important factors to determining a link’s strength: relevance and authority.

Relevance

Getting a link from a website that is related to yours is counted much more highly than a link from a website that is not related to yours because search engines know that is how links are naturally supposed to work. Related businesses refer one another. People make recommendations to people with similar interests. If you suddenly get a bunch of unrelated links, search engines start to get suspicious. In other words, if you run a cooking website, it’s much better to get 50 links from other cooking websites than 200 links from clothing and violin websites.

Authoritative

In addition to relevance, Google also looks at the authority of a website when determining its link power. After all, if link count was all that mattered, anyone could just start 200 new websites and link them all to one site to get them ranked. That’s not how it works. Those websites need to have already built up credibility in Google’s eyes in order for the links to really count.

One way Google measures a site’s authority is through PageRank (PR). PR is a simple way of ranking how many websites have linked to that site. In turn, high PR sites can then link to another site and give them more of a boost than a low PR site.

PR isn’t all that matters, however. The website’s age, the amount of content, the time users stay on the site and how often they come back all come into play. In fact, over the last couple years, Google has significantly downplayed the role of PageRank in their algorithm because so many marketers have started trying to use PR to game the system.

Backlinks: The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this: try to get as many links as you can, from the best sites in your industry. You might not be able to start with the biggest sites, but start with websites that you admire and respect and work your way up to larger sites from there.