Yesterday we saw my
first steps at blogging. Today we look at how I drove traffic to my site. Happy
reading!
So I had five initial blog posts, born in
excruciating labour. Check on them on these links:
Blog Archive
Now, I had
to drive traffic to the site.
The
training material had advised free methods, and that was Traffic Exchanges (TEs).
I got to know TezakTrafficPower, 247TrafficPro, (now HitLink), easyhits4U, etc.
Everyday I would sit in the cybercafé for hours on end clicking. I took only a
few minutes break to buy sandwich and rushed back, as I had monopolized a
computer. I would collect hits on one TE and then shift to the other. Like
every repetitive act I found that boring. But I had an objective to attain so I
plodded on, to such an extent that one of the kids (the biggest noise makers) who
come to the cyberpub to play online games asked me the site address for the
games I played. My burning look made him slink away.
Soon
sizable traffic started trickling to my site, sometimes as much as 600 visitors
a day. Wow! But when I didn’t click fast enough or couldn’t come to click, the
traffic dwindled like a steam in a parched land.
Clicking
was not all boredom however. In the beginning I wasn’t interested in the ads at
all (all I needed was traffic, period!) and gave them little attention, especially
when I got to know to click on several sites at the same moment. So busy was I jumping from one TE to
the other of the eight that I had opened at the same time on Firefox that
reading any ad was not an option. I knew that by the time I clicked through the
eight ads and came back to the first, the counter would have reset for me to
click through once again.
But it’s
hard to hide one’s true self, especially to oneself. I love reading and
couldn’t sometimes afford not to read the ads, especially when the internet
connection was slow. It was then I discovered a goldmine of online business
opportunities. In fact, had it not been for TEs I wouldn’t have known, let
alone sign up for SFI, GDI, GVO, Empower Network and host of other affiliate
networks and teams promoting them. Now, TEs became for me not only a means to
earn some traffic but especially to get business opportunities.
With time I
learnt that I could get traffic elsewhere too: list builders, social sites,
etc. Soon I frowned at the list sites because they gave me no traffic at all
but would flood my box with offers. Their promise of sign ups never materialized
for me a free member. However, like the TEs, I got and still get good business
and advertising leads from them. So, whenever, they flood my box, I don’t get
angry anymore. I sort the grain from the chaff. It is like sifting through the
pile of sand for gold dust.
The only
solution for my traffic problems was therefore to use paying sites. But what a
pain it is sometimes to live in the developing world like Africa!
I had no credit or debit card. No PayPal, Payza, SolidTrustPay or other
account. Even when finally I obtained a MasterCard debit card from a local
bank, that did not solve most of my online payment problems. Only few sites and
merchants overseas accept them because issued “in my part of the world” (as
most tell me). So I had finally to depend on my articles and recently social
sites (thanks to AddThis!) and Google+ to drive traffic to my web site.
Since
creating my blog, I have had to clear a lot of hurdles (The harder the battle,
the sweeter the victory), including Google blocking my site for months for a
supposed violation of their profile policy. (See the blog post here http://it-is-easy-to-make-money-at-home.blogspot.com/2013/06/profile-suspension-on-google.html).
But I’m beginning to see the end of the tunnel. Now, the question is: is it
easy making money at home? From the preceding, my answer is obviously no. But with
hindsight, what I really meant in that name was to work smart not hard.
So, watch
out for my blog post one day announcing I had made good money from home. I know
what I’m talking about!
No comments:
Post a Comment