If you want to make money online, it’s important to understand how most web traffic comes in. I realized this when I started writing novels for a living. I knew how to write well, I was getting good reviews, but I simply wasn’t able be great at it. I don’t read, and I was writing for an audience of voracious, presumably female readers. Knowing I needed to get into another business, I tried to reverse engineer my way to success. I learned the basics of digital marketing, and figured out the basic formula to printing money with the internet:
Traffic * price * conversion rate = revenue
This might seem like complicated math, but it’s actually pretty simple. Traffic is the amount of people that visit whatever webpage you have. Price is how much you make per sale. If you’re making money with ads, the “sale” happens whenever a user visits your webpage (aka, automatically). Your conversion rate is what percentage of people make a purchase (again, 100% if you’re making money with ads). If you can figure out this equation, you’ve figured out making money online.
Knowing this formula, it’s easy to see that traffic is the key to online money-making success. This led me to the next logical question. How can I get lots of traffic reliably. I scoured the internet. I learned about different business types and searched endlessly for ways to get value out of the web content which I create. I learned about RPM, and that the best way to get a high RPM out of my blog would be to sell products. But it wasn’t lost on me that the lifeblood of an online business is traffic. If you get enough traffic, you can make all your money with ads, and you don’t have to think too hard about selling products. So, I set about the task of trying to figure out how to get enough traffic to make a living solely from ads. If I could do that, I should be set.
Getting enough traffic to earn a living from ads is a struggle. Most ad networks only pay between $5 and $30 per thousand views. In order to make a living just from ads, you need to be a a force to be reckoned with, pulling in more than 100,000 views per month. This is what caused me to start a blog. I used to read blogs a lot when I was younger. I know they used to get traffic, and upon doing some research I realized that they still do. But how did these blogs get their views? I looked around, checked people’s Twitter profiles, WhoIs databases, and different types of web analytics tools. It didn’t take me long to find out the answer.
This might sound trite, obvious, and perhaps disappointing for someone who was looking for a secret tip or hack to instantly make millions of dollars. But I really just gave away the sauce. Most online interactions begin on Google. If you want to get traffic to your site or project, you want to leverage Google. Over 90% of new online experiences start with Google, and Google is known for bringing in more than 10x as much traffic as social media. Like it or not, the way you drive traffic to your site is with Google. It’s how everyone finds everything. You might find a specific traffic source that works for the niche or product that you’re looking to sell, but where do they get their traffic from? If they’re growing, they’re getting results from Google.
Creating content that ranks
The best way to take advantage of Google is to create content that ranks high on Google. This can be done quickly, but there are no shortcuts. In order to have content that ranks on Google and gets lots of traffic, you need to make a splash in a niche that people are searching about. This is because the main factor behind your Google ranking is the number of backlinks your videos have. If you make a viral video or write a popular article, you will draw backlinks, and you will get attention from Google. Bloggers and other content creators complain a lot about phenomena such as Google updates, but they usually either don’t write that much or create spammy content. Users want to find the websites that they like, and from what I can tell people tend to get a fair shake out of the content which they produce, provided that they understand that content’s value.
So basically, your goal with content creation is to make a dent in the universe. The most effective way to do this right now appears to be using YouTube and TikTok videos that also rank on Google. This can be quite tricky if you’re a normal person, because you’re going to be competing with professional videographers. That’s why I like writing articles. You can also get a decent amount of traffic on TikTok if you can figure out what people are searching for. It functions as a supplement to Google for Gen Z and Gen alpha users.
Taking advantage of content that ranks
If you have a product, service, or some content that can easily be promoted, you can take advantage of webpages which get a lot of traffic from Google. Good examples of this are YouTube Videos, Quota Questions or Reddit posts. If you can identify pages that get a lot of traffic, leave a comment. The responses you give can yield great results if you can avoid being labeled a spammer. I don’t do this. I prefer to just work on the traffic source that is my blog. I’ll probably write until I’m making about $40,000 per year, and then diversify into IT or SEO consulting. But using comments and other responses to promote your products is a tried-and-true strategy, and you’ve certainly seen it employed before. Think of all those spam comments that you see…everywhere.
Forums work for targeted products
A lot of people use forums to drive traffic to their websites. If you can find professionals working in your field, you can advertise on the forums they use and sell them products or services. You can probably reverse engineer which forums are popular by learning a lot about your industry and searching (you guessed it) Google.
Sometimes the simplest things are those that work the best. No need to overcomplicate things. A solid, functional weblog or a decent YouTube channel are more than enough to make a decent living online. You just need to have a monetization strategy in mind. Without that you’re going nowhere. If you have money to invest in link building and PR, you should. But it is possible to rank on Google when you’re starting from scratch. I did it with my Andrew Tate article once, and I’m certain I’ll do it again with many more. My article on the state of young men is getting traffic after a little over a week. It’s simple if you learn the game. Focus on SEO if you want to make money online.
Thanks for paying attention.
