Content is King, Traffic is Queen, Conversion is Key

To succeed in the online world, you need to understand the three driving forces comprising a money-making site:

1. Content is King
Your site needs to offer unique content (articles, community, whitepapers, tips etc) or a key product differentiator when compared to the competition.

Website visitors should have a strong reason to choose visiting and recommending your site to others, versus any other site in your niche.

You don't necessarily need to have "the most" content, or "the best feature rich" product. Whatever you're offering simply needs to be unique and compelling enough to appeal to a wide enough portion of your target customer base.

How to get it: Content Writers, Strong community, Smart product positioning

2. Traffic is Queen
Unless you are promoting your own service where you can afford to charge high and enjoy large profit margins, you will need a lot of users to make your site a financial success.

It's hard to determine exactly how many website visitors you will need to make your venture profitable, but a good number to shoot for is 500 unique visitors per day. With a 1% conversion rate, 500 unique visitors per day will generate 5 sales every day. Not a lot by any means, but a good starting goal to shoot for.

How to get it: Link building, PPC, Email Marketing, Article/forum posting, Affiliate Marketing


3. Conversion is Key
Having a high number of unique website visitors per day is great, but if you can't get users to take a desired action that will put money in your pocket (converting website visitors into paying customers), your website will grow to be a cashflow negative hog.

Building credibility and driving users to take the desired action, whether it is pulling their credit card and buying something on your site or clicking on an ad where you are paid per click, is the most critical and often elusive tasks.

Unlike Content and Traffic generation, building a system that will generate a high conversion rate is more art than science. You will have to experiment with different offers, ad placement, price options, page layouts and basically keep changing every element of your site while measuring the impact on conversions until you find a winning formula. Then keep tweaking forever.

A 0.1% increase in your conversion rates could lead to a huge impact on your bottom line.

How to get it: Dedicated relevant per-offer landing pages, Reduce barrier of entry, Build credibility, Offer something free - build trust - then promote your offer, Build relationships, Compete on quality, Compete on Price, Keep testing and retesting every single element of your website and offering.