It\’s one of the biggest challenges of building a profitable online publishing business. It\’s also one of the most important.
Generating traffic.
There\’s no easy way to do it. Yes, you have to have good content. Without that, you\’re never going to get the sort of traffic that arrives naturally, comes back and gives you referrals.
But even good content isn\’t enough. It doesn\’t matter how good your content is if no one knows you have it.
The problem with generating traffic then is telling your market that your site offers valuable information. Finding that market is easy. Toss a few key phrases into Google and you should be able to see exactly where your potential users are going. Reaching them is the tough bit.
And that\’s why I — and other online marketers — are always talking about niches.
Pick a big topic like \”photography\” and you can be sure you\’ve got a mass of potential readers. But you\’ll also have a mass of competitors. Some of those competitors are going to have marketing budgets that will make the amounts you\’re prepared to put into AdWords look like chump change. Unless you can build up a sales team and a writing team to match theirs, you\’re always going to be struggling to make your URL stand out.
But if you create a site about photography for stay-at-home moms or mountain climbers or whatever it may be, it won\’t be hard all to become a big fish in a small pond.
You can then you start to expand that pond. You can talk about more general topics that are still useful to your core audience, grow a little bigger until eventually — with a little luck and a lot of work — you\’ll be able to take on the sharks in your main topic too.
If you went to end up big on the Web then, start small.
What are your thoughts? Post them below!