What is the one important thing that’s needed to make money online?
Many online marketers believe that the only way to make money online is having a lot of traffic to their websites. But this is not entirely correct. As much as an online marketer needs people or visitors, he or she must also build trust with the visitors and also ensure lasting relationships. You can make money online only when you can convert your traffic to a sale and that sale into repeat sales.
We also know that not everyone who comes to the website will buy from you. So, it is important to know where people are coming from — in other words, the sources of your traffic. When you are able to track your traffic sources, you will know which of them convert to sales and which do not.
There are many sources of traffic that can be tracked using Google Analytics, including:
# Organic Search Traffic
# Referrals
# Social Media marketing
# Email Marketing
# Paid Search
# Direct Traffic
# Dark social traffic
Organic Search Traffic
Organic Search Traffic doesn’t come just from search engines. You need to take your keywords into consideration here so you know where your traffic, leads, and customers are really coming from, so that you can develop better-informed content strategies. This is difficult today because of Google’s SSL encryption, whereby keyword information is now encrypted or hidden. This makes it a lot harder to understand which of your keywords and terms are working.
Referrals
Referrals as a marketing tactic can mean a lot of different things. This is because we define a referral as any website that sends traffic to you through inbound links. As such, different software and tools track different things here. For instance, they may or may not include social media websites and subdomains. This information is important whenever you’re trying to determine which web properties are of benefit to you when it comes to co-marketing, SEO partnerships, and guest blogging opportunities.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is another important traffic source. It not only includes someone finding your website through a social networking link, but it also includes someone tweeting out a link to your website or posting a link to your website on their Facebook page. Whenever you engage in this type of marketing, you should make sure to add a tracking token to make it easier for you to analyze everything later on. Some other important sites to remember to use here include Reddit, Tumblr, Digg, Mix.com, etc.
Email Marketing
Email marketing needs to always include links back to your website. These links need to include tracking tokens so that you can know where the person is coming from when they view your link. The nice thing about this type of marketing is that you’ll be able to see just how much traffic is being sent to your website from your campaign.
Paid Search Marketing
Paid Search marketing, or a PPC campaign, allows you to track how much website traffic is being driven to you. This is found in a report from the website where you’re purchasing your clicks. You’ll want to pay close attention to this report to make sure that this traffic is actually converting, so make sure to always include tracking tokens.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is the traffic that arrives at your website outside of one of the aforementioned channels. For instance, whenever you type in your domain URL and hit enter you arrive at your website through means of direct traffic. In other words, there’s no referring URL here so whenever you see an increase in your direct traffic you can be happy that the number of people who know you by name is increasing.
Dark Social Traffic
Dark social traffic may also fall under the category of direct traffic. This is traffic that a lot of analytics programs can’t capture since it lacks referral data. Typically, it comes from things like emails and instant messenger programs. Just how much of this traffic you actually receive will somewhat depend upon how diligent you are in using tracking IDs. The good news is that this type of traffic should decrease more and more over the course of time.
Tracking your traffic sources
Regardless of what type of marketing you are doing, you should always make sure to create tracking links so you know what your traffic sources are. When you’re ready to create a tracking URL, you will discover there are a lot of programs online today that will help you do so. One such tracking software is Bitly. Bitly.com is free, easy to use, and provides tracking statistics that you’ll be able to keep an eye on.
First of all, you’ll need to set up an account. Then you can follow these steps to create a Bitly tracking link:
Let’s assume we are tracking the traffic from our YouTube video.
# Open a tab in your browser and search for the YouTube video that you uploaded earlier.
# Open a second tab in your browser and log into your Bitly account.
# Open a third tab in your browser and open up your website.
# Select the URL of your website in your browser.
# Paste this code into Bitly to create your new link.
# Make sure that you add a note to the link inside of Bitly so that you will be able to remember exactly what you are using this link for. The note can be something as simple as “YouTube Video1”
# Copy and paste your new, shortened Bitly link into the description field of the YouTube video with a call to action text, such as “click here to learn more”.
In conclusion, the main aim of digital marketing is to make money. If you know where your money is coming from, then you know where to get more of it.