LifestyleDesignUnleashed

photo credit: paul (dex)

If you’re looking to create an online business that will generate profits for you on autopilot so that you have both the financial freedom and the freedom of time to spend your life following your passions then one essential consideration should be that of how you’re going to get traffic to your website.

The fact is that there are an almost endless number of ways to generate visitors to your website. From advertising in newspapers and magazines through to using online classified ad sites or building up a Twitter following each experienced webmaster has their favorite traffic generation techniques.

All of these methods work to a degree and all of them have both strengths and weaknesses. If you were trying to just drive as many visitors to your site as possible with the plan of simply making as much money as possible from them you would ideally use as many of these traffic generation techniques as possible.

However when it comes to a “lifestyle business” our desires are rather more specialized. Quite simply we want to set up our website marketing in such a way that visitors keep arriving at our site(s) without needing any constant input from us.

So lets take the example of the newspaper advert we mentioned a few moments ago. I have placed adverts in national newspapers and made literally hundreds of dollars from a single advert. The results were impressive and as I was selling a high-ticket item I was able to make a healthy profit from just a small number of sales.

But every week you need to place that advert again because the traffic starts to tail off after just a few days. If you don’t keep investing in paying for those adverts, if you don’t keep on telling the newspaper to run those ads, if you don’t carefully track your results to ensure you’re making a profit then you will fail.

I don’t know about you but if I’m exploring the South American rainforest, I don’t want to have to get on my cellphone every few days and ring a newspaper half-way round the world to ask them to run my ad. And I certainly don’t want to be analyzing traffic stats and ROI every day.

In short, I want to have my cake and eat it. And if you want to build a lifestyle business then you want the same. You want to market your site once and then receive traffic as a result of your efforts for months or even years to come.

In short, a key element of a lifestyle business is the principle of residual traffic.

Because if you can create a website that is good at earning money from visitors, and you can get visitors on autopilot then you’ve essentially created the perfect hands-off, residual-income lifestyle business.

And the effort to run one of these sites on a daily basis, once it’s all set up, is so minor that if your first site isn’t quite making you as much money as you’d like to live your ideal lifestyle, you can simply set up a second or a third. Becase you have the time.

Now again I should mention that I have tried out a huge range of different traffic generation methods over the years and while some have failed, many have been tremendously successful. For our purposes right now though I’d like to simply mention the best methods I have tested for generating predictable, residual traffic, and with predictable, reliable, residual income.

Organic Search Engine Traffic (SEO)

Organic search engine traffic is all about getting your site to appear in the search engines when interested, motivated visitors type in a certain keyword phrase. You have a website about planning a wedding? Then you want your website to appear in the first few results of Google, Yahoo and Bing when someone types in phrases like “wedding planning”, “planning a wedding” and “how to plan a wedding”.

This means that the visitors you get will be highly targeted because they are specifically searching for the topic of your website. They are therefore more likely to stick around on your website and will also be likely to consider clicking an advert, buying a product you promote and so on.

Over time you can pick up hundreds of related rankings which suck in traffic for you every day.

Links From Other Sites

If you can convince other popular, high-traffic sites in your niche to link from their website to yours you can actually receive a surprising amount of traffic.

As an example, I built a site a few years ago that got quite a number of well-placed links from other authority websites and was getting over 200 visitors per day simply as a result of people clicking on links from other sites and appearing at mine.

Of course while links are put up, and some will come down over time, I have found this form of traffic to be pretty steady and reliable over the long term.

RSS Subscribers

If you are a subscriber to this blog then you will know all about RSS. In essence, visitors to your website can “subscribe” to your website and whenever you publish a new article on your website, your subscribers will be informed of that fact.

This means that if you have thousands of subscribers, even if the search engines change their algorithms and you lose all your rankings, every time you add new content to your website you should see a spike in visitors.

Right now with this website as it is so new I am still working on my search engine rankings and receive only a handful of visitors this way right now. Equally, thanks to having quite a few RSS subscribers, every time I publish a new article like this I see a significant spike in visitor numbers.

Email Marketing

One of the ultimate traffic sources is simply to set up your own mailing list. Gather email addresses of interested people who visit your website and produce a regular newsletter for them.

I was on the receiving end a few months ago when someone mentioned one of my websites in their newsletter and overnight I received just over 1,000 unique visitors. Even better that traffic kept on coming for a good week or so afterwards.

Imagine if you had a mailing list of thousands of people and you could send traffic like this to any website or webpage you choose. If a new product is released that you really like, you can immediately send a deluge of traffic through some of whom will hopefully take action on your recommendation and buy the product you like so much.

As a result you earn a commission and I know of people who make a fulltime living in this way. Once every month or so they send out a newsletter which generates several thousand dollars in sales in a 24 or 48 hour period and then they go back to taking life easy for the rest of the month. What could be better?

As you’re no doubt aware, some of these residual traffic generation techniques are actually synergistic – they feed off each other and boost your results. The more links you have, the more search engine traffic you’ll get. And assuming your site is good, the more people who find your website through the search engines, the more will actually link to it from their own site.

This is what I refer to as the “tipping point” of traffic generation. When you start off, you have to put the time and effort in. You have to take some massive action to get your site listed highly in the search engines.

But after some effort, your rankings start to increase. Your traffic starts to increase. Your PageRank starts to increase. Your visibility starts to increase. And then people start linking to you naturally. If you build a great site, once you start appearing organically other people will start to push traffic your way and running your website becomes easy.

In the same way, the more links and search engine rankings you have, the more people will subscribe to your site and join your mailing list and you can see your results moving ever higher as all these techniques feed each other into a traffic-generating vortex.

So just to reiterate; there are lots of traffic generation techniques that work. But when it comes to specifically building a lifestyle business that will provide you with enough income to cover your living expenses yet take up as little time as possible to run I would stick with those golden traffic methods of SEO, link building, RSS subscriptions and marketing to your mailing list. They’re the easiest, cheapest and most reliable ways to generate hands-off traffic (and sales) for your internet business that I have found.

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