My sites are getting no traffic - can you help me?

websites not pulling in visitors at all :(

[notgoodenough yet]

I have two or three websites which are about 1 year old.

They receive virtually no traffic at all - perhaps 20-30 users per day would be an average, and i'm sure this includes the googlebots too.

I have submitted each of my sites to google, and this suggests that my sites ranks ok for some keywords, but virtually no one is clicking through to my website, even when it places in the top 10 for that keyword.

I have spent the last year learning how to create a website and have spent the last several months reviewing SEO techniques including creating good copy, using good meta-tags and page titles.

I still need to put much of this into practice.

Before I invest hundreds of hours updating my websites, can anyone help me with good practice to get traffic to my website.

I don't have the faintest clue how to get a lot of good links to my site, and I am still investigating this, but how can I start to generate good traffic to my website?

How many users do you get per day, i've seen posts where people get 12,000 views in 24 hours (I wouldn't get that for all of my 3-5 sites combined in 1-2 years at the moment)

What is a respectable number of users per day, and what are the best strategies for ranking highly in the search engines.

Any help or insight, even snippets, would be useful.

[piatkow]

What is a respectable number of users per day

It all depends on how specialist a niche you are serving. On some sites 20 per day would be good, while others would think 20,000 a slow day.

[vivalasvegas]

No one will give you a magic formula on how to get traffic to your sites. Answers to these questions are everywhere on this website. You're saying that your website ranks well for some terms in Google. But how many people search for those terms? You shouldn't focus on ranking well for one or a few terms/phrases. Focus instead on dominating a niche, on ranking well for most terms covering that niche.

Here's what I did when I started my newest website back in 2007:
-I used some keyword analyzer tools to find a good niche. By good I mean high number of searches and medium competition;
-Then I built the site in about 2 months (design, on page keyword optimization, etc)
-Then I started the long ongoing process of marketing the site (asking for links from other sites, posting links to it on discussion forums, etc)

So, as you can see building a successful site (I am now getting 200 k + uniques a month) is not a complicated process. You need to do some planning, work hard and be patient.

[notgoodenough yet]

Cheers Guys,

I created my sites without researching niches, without giving a thought to keywords, and without implementing any serious SEO. So I shouldn't really be surprised that i'm not getting the traffic.

In all honesty, my niches probably aren't popular enough (in one case) or too competitive (in another case).

Back to the drawing board I think :)

[SteveWh]

If your sites are about topics you enjoy, keep improving your skills and building good content, and wait and wait and wait and wait.

If you want to build commercial sites with big traffic, you might end up building sites in competitive niches that you really don't care about much yourself. As others said, you'd need to identify high traffic niches, do keyword analysis, and build the sites from the beginning with the goal of maximizing traffic. And then wait and wait and wait and wait.

1 year may seem like a long time, but it's barely a start. Don't give up or scrap the site. Keep improving your skills and building the site, or building new sites, and in 3-5 years you might start to see some results from the work you did early on.

[notgoodenough yet]

So this really is one long road to traverse.

Of course I will never give up the sites that I enjoy creating, but is it possible to create sites that will generate a decent income within 1 year - or am I living in a fantasy world?

I presume it is most-definitely possible to create commercial sites that will generate a good income inside 12 months, but how often to committed people achieve this?

I have read countless stories that tell of people monetising their websites with great results. Now I am happy to work hard and put in countless hours in chase of perfection and success - but is this a game I can win at?

Can I really make a living out of creating niche websites?

[piatkow]

Can I really make a living out of creating niche websites?

Present tense? Maybe not. Out of the ones that you have created in the past, which have proved successful and which you are maintaining with good content to keep them that way, then you probably can.

Perhaps I am being rather pedantic there but on the other hand maintaining an income stream is as much about keeping the popular stuff popular as it is about finding new topics, if not more.

[SteveWh]

So this really is one long road to traverse.

Yes. Or another way to think of it is as a project that can have a very long lead time, during which the waiting time is better spent creating new content and continually "moving on" rather than trying to flog your initial content into a popular position with various marketing efforts.

I have read countless stories that tell of people monetising their websites with great results.

More likely you've read a few hundred or maybe a few thousand at most, out of the 100 million to 1 billion websites that exist. (Just a guesstimate.)

This thread, "$100/day or it's all over", might be of interest. [webmasterworld.com...] I suspect the outcome of that effort to be making a living from a website within a given time frame (90 days, in that case) is typical.

During the time of that thread, I found numbers elsewhere on this forum that led me to an estimate that making $100/day from websites requires 30,000 pageviews/day, every day, all year.

It's not easy to create content that can bring in 30,000 new people who haven't already seen it, every single day. And personally I don't believe that any level of SEO or promotional efforts can achieve that level of traffic and maintain it consistently. The content itself has to be so compelling that it acts as its own magnet.

So I don't think that dreaming of making a living from websites is an unrealizable fantasy. It's possible, just like it's possible to write a book that's in the Amazon.com top 1000 sellers, but there are undoubtedly many more people attempting it than will ever achieve it, and there are many many people who underestimate how much work is involved and how long it can take. Worse, the hard work is no guarantee of success. It's not like an hourly wage, and there is no minimum wage.

It's probably better to think in terms of thousands of hours of work rather than hundreds.

[notgoodenough yet]

Cheers for all of the interesting responses.

I'm beginning to think that the best way to monetize a website is to have an novel and useful product to sell. Advertising is probably just a sideline for most web-producers?

For those making a decent wage from advertising, how many (if any) would you say are benefitting from false and fraudulent clicks on their adverts - through robots and the like?

[SteveWh]

I think selling something yourself is likely to bring in more revenue than advertising, especially when traffic is low.

It would be going too far, though, to generalize that to most web-producers. There are certainly members in this forum whose primary income is from advertising, but most of them have been in this business for years, 10+ years in some cases, and have built substantial traffic. What works for them now might work for you in 10 years, but maybe not now.

Google, at least, is very good at detecting click fraud. Furthermore, many ads are pulled into pages with JavaScript, and robots don't run JavaScript, so the ads aren't even on the pages they receive. My guess is that you should not expect any noticeable "benefit" at all from fraud, robots, or even accidental clicks. Benefit is in quotes because at least with respect to AdSense, one should be afraid of the risk that it might happen, not hopeful for the rewards if it does.

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BTW I just reread that entire "$100/day or it's all over" thread, and discovered that although there's bits of very interesting and useful advice in it from WW members, the flow of it isn't as attention-holding now as it was at the time. Furthermore, he did make a fluke $45 sale in the first 90 days, which makes it nontypical, IMO. More typical would have been no earnings at all, or pennies, and considerably less traffic than the figures he reported.

[edited by: SteveWh at 6:07 pm (utc) on April 7, 2009]