9 Steps to a high-traffic, high profit blog

Create excellent content for a large, but specific audience You know what’s great about being a website publisher? I get paid to surf the web and check out my favorite sites. What I mean by this is when I visit other sites, even sites I visit for fun and information, I analyze them while enjoying them. I get great ideas from other popular sites that have resulted in a lot of profits. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m not the only niche site publisher using paid traffic. Many popular sites with millions of visitors per month (or day) spend fortunes on paid traffic. Do you think they became the behemoths they are from organic search traffic? Nope. They use paid traffic and ads to get the ball rolling. Yes, even viral-style sites like BuzzFeed.com uses paid ads (I’ve seen their ads). If you want publish an authority site with piles of unlimited traffic, you need to buy traffic. In order to buy traffic, you need to be very smart about your monetization. It’s that simple. Optimize display ads Being smart about your monetization means you need to at the very least break even with your paid traffic and then profit from your email newsletter and/or Facebook fans. While I attract Facebook fans and email subscribers, I make sure I profit from paid traffic. It’s a tremendous profit stream for me. Revenue from organic Facebook traffic and my email newsletter is extra. How do I set up my display ads? While there are many (pretty much unlimited) ad placement formulas, Need to developed a strategy that works very well. Set up a Facebook page While I wouldn’t rely on all of your traffic from organic Facebook page postings, it sure can be a nice source of bonus traffic. The interesting thing is I repeatedly post links to the same URLs on my blog over and over and over and they continuously send traffic. I do post links to many other posts too, but it’s amazing how each month you can promote your best earning (and most viral) content over and over and over with success. Set up internal linking promoting your best earning content don’t take a single visitor to my sites for granted. Need to made many site changes because of suggestions from visitors. Part of creating a site people like includes directing them to plenty more content on the site they may enjoy. I offer numerous navigation options from top to bottom (with display ads and email optin forms along the way). I use ad rotate plugins to rotate links to other pieces of content, videos, related posts thumbnails, etc. This increases their enjoyment and the number of page views. I suggest you read my article setting out 7 tactics I use to drive a lot of traffic to category archive pages. These are great tactics for more page views. My most popular niche site enjoys a 28% repeat visitor rate, which isn’t bad. That means nearly 1/3 of page views are from people who have visited before. Their time is limited and the fact they choose to visit my niche site over and over, is a very good metric. Integrate Analytics with Adsense and use Adsense URL channels You need to discover which posts will generate a great display ad revenue and then focus on driving traffic to those posts. In order to do this, you need to integrate Analytics with Adsense. I also create URL channels in Adsense for most URLs. This way I can see exactly how much each post earns with Adsense. While I’m not the most diligent when it comes to tracking affiliate links, I’m fairly diligent with tracking and analyzing display ad metrics. Ensure you make sharing your content easy anywhere on your website A big part of profiting from paid traffic is turning paid traffic into free traffic. The best way to do this is to get visitors to share your content,Provide plenty of sharing buttons on your site, Add more ad networks to your site Don’t just settle with Adsense. If you do, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. In addition to Adsense, use Media.net ads and recently added Amazon CPM ads to niche sites. Together Media.net and Amazon CPM ads alone can generate $400 to $600 per day in revenue. There are many ad networks you can use. Hunt around. Also, if affiliate and/or CPA offers convert, use them too. While I don’t advocate making your site nothing but ads, if you publish extensive and high quality content, there’s plenty of space for some serious monetization. Don’t forget to attract email subscribers on’t forget to attract email subscribers Remember, leverage your hard-won (and paid-for) traffic as much as possible. Entice them to join your newsletter. Even if the best you can do in the short term is to send subscribers back to your blog, that’s free traffic. Example: One newsletter I publish has 16,000 subscribers. I get a 15% open rate (yeah, I know it’s not good). I promote new posts on my site every 3 days. That’s 10 email messages per month. With a 15% open rate, that’s 2,000 opens per email (20,000 per month). Assuming 3/4 of those opens result in a click to the site, that’s approximately 15,000 page views per month that costs me nothing. Buy Traffic hese days there are so many low-cost, high-quality traffic sources. My 3 favorites are native advertising (a.k.a. syndication advertising such as Outbrain), Facebook ads and Bing Ads. Yes, I send this traffic to regular blog posts and still earn a profit. The fastest way to creating a popular site with plenty of traffic is buying traffic… but it must be done in a way so that you break even or better yet, profit. Once you get your paid traffic running smoothly, there’s no limit to how much traffic you can get to your site. Even if you have a low 10% ROI on paid traffic with Adsense ads, you need only spend $1,000 per day to make $100. But the residual profits are better… you get Facebook fans, email subscribers, revenue from other ad networks, brand exposure, loyal visitors who will visit again. This is how you launch and publish a profitable niche site quickly (at least it’s one way that works for me and many other sites).