3 Month Plan for Building Traffic to a New Website
Here is my down and dirty 3 month plan for building traffic to a new website. Of course, these are just general things as every niche will be different and you will want to devote more time to certain websites than to others but generally speaking here is a great action plan for building traffic to a new website.
Day 1
Register a great domain name using tools like our type in traffic finder, dictionary domain name finder, geo domain name finder, etc. etc. (Shameless plug yes – unimportant definitely not. Understanding how to choose a good domain name is a crucial first step to success).
Day 2
After the nameservers resolve and you have set up your hosting account then your goal is to put up some nice meaty, on topic, original content on the home page and on 3-5 additional pages of your site.
I like to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to do my research. Typically I will try and map out the site architecture from the very beginning and maybe even plot out a publishing schedule. Break the site up like this: long article focused on the main site keyword for the home page and then build the main navigation menu using related keywords from the Google tool and place a fairly long article on each of these menu sub theme pages.
Pay particular attention to making sure that these 5 or so pages of content (excluding your privacy page, site map, XML site map pages, etc, of course) are very high quality well written articles that you would have no problem showing a “real person” and asking them to link to.
Day 3-15
The goal for the first 2 weeks is to try and participate in the community that your site is in.
This means leaving well thought out comments (making sure to include your site URL) on blogs in your niche, posting on forums in your niche, and contacting webmasters to try to establish a presence in the community and introduce yourself and your site.
Set up Google Alerts for your site’s main keywords so that you can participate in blogs that are related to your site’s main keywords.
Work though a list of “DoFollow” forums and use the site Comment Hunt to find good sources for links that do not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
The main priority is to start to slowly build up lower quality backlinks (you do not want to make the mistake of creating an unnatural linkbuilding profile by acquiring too many high PR links right away as that may appear manufactured in the eyes of the search engines) and perhaps more importantly start building some traffic from referring links on other sites.
Day 16-30
In addition to your continued participation in the community you now want to start to add more content to your site. Aim for one new article every other day at a minimum for these 2 weeks. Be sure and structure your internal linking structure to achieve maximum benefit by using anchor text wisely.
Day 31-60
In addition to all of the above it is now time to start writing unique content and publishing it not only to your site but also to other sites. Start off publishing articles to article directories like ezinearticles.com and then begin to use some of your newly acquired webmaster contacts that you hopefully gained by participating in the community of your site’s niche to offer to write guest articles and guest posts for that include a link back to your site.
Day 61-90
In addition to all of the above it is now time to think about some creative ways that you can start to attract some high quality links. Widgets, tools, high quality reports, controversial content, and other similar types of interesting and valuable content are all things that can attract both quality and quantity of links if done properly.
Get Started!
There you have it. This is of course an overly simplistic view of just very basic things that one can do to build traffic for a new website but I think this rough outline is certainly helpful because if you are like me then it helps to have some sort of goal to shoot for. What are some things that you would add to the 3 month plan?
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Nice tips. How would you recommend developing a large portfolio (about 500 domains) into decent mini-sites targeted towards nich topics when you need to make them earn cash asap in order to be able to afford upcoming renewals.
/cheers Johan
A lot depends on your budget of course but probably what I would do is find an affordable copywriting service and pay them to write a quality home page article for each site and then use a combination of Wordpress, WP Auto Installer, and WP Cloner to quickly build WP sites.
This way in a relatively short amount of time you can have 500 sites built with a unique quality home page article that can help your site to start to get indexed and hopefully pick up some long tail search queries.
After getting all of the 500 sites built with just a very basic looking WP theme, a unique home page, and the standard privacy page, site map, about us page, contact us page, xml site map page, etc. (most of these standard pages can be created quickly using a WP plugin) then you can start going through the list of sites and customizing.
Your goal is to start with the sites that you think will make money the quickest and then work down the list customizing the template, choosing your method of monetization (affiliate program, Adsense, etc.), and spending a little bit of time to market the site and at least get some quick links pointing to the sites so that they will get indexed by the search engines.
If you have chosen the right domain names and niches then you will start to see a very small trickle of visitors here and there to the sites based purely on domain name strength and home page article quality alone. This should give you enough revenue to plow back into your business and pay reg fees, repeat the process with new sites, and scale up your efforts by hiring copywriters, developers, link builders, etc.
Hi Joel,
thaks for your reply. Yeah, that sounds like a good approach and similar to the one Im currently using. I’m not using any copywriters though, instead I write my own content which slows the process down. We’ll see what happens in a few months.