How to Get A Million Visitors to Your Website

In this e-book you'll find the complete transcript of the interview Louis Allport had with Neil Shearing specifically on just one subject: How To Get At Least A Million Visitors A Year To Your Website!

Here are some quotations from the e-book:

Neil started on the internet selling a little report called "How To Make Money On The Internet" (which he now thinks is a really cheesy title!) ... and that was just to make a bit of extra money while studying at university.

Five years later, Neil's online business has grown so much that he now has 4,000 affiliates ... 2,500 customers, and over 32,000 people subscribed to his newsletter. What's most amazing is that it all started from a business running off free web space!

Hi Neil ... I remember you saying that you get at least a million visitors a year to your
web site ... I wanted to ask you exactly how that happens and how other people can copy that
success. So what would be your first steps, what would you recommend?
Well it’s not any one thing, it’s obviously a combination of lots of different things that pull in
traffic. I don’t do much advertising myself so I couldn’t say one way or another whether that brings in
a lot of useful traffic.
The two main things I rely on are the associate program that I’ve had since about 1998. I’ve got
about 4,000 affiliates now so they send me a lot of traffic. So starting an affiliate program actually
works very well.
And search engine strategies -- I get a lot of traffic from being listed in Yahoo and listed in
Google and they send me a lot of traffic so between the two of those and recurring traffic from when
I mention something in my newsletter I use a link to the Scam Free Zone even if it just redirects
somewhere else, and links to customers when I email my customers I put links in there that go
through the Scam Free Zone.
So I would say those three main things: the associate program, search engine traffic, and
residual traffic from just emailing my lists.
Okay. It’s interesting you say you don’t actually do any advertising. When you were
starting out a few years ago did you do some advertising then?
No, I was just too tight to spend any money on advertising so I really didn’t, I just optimized a
few pages for the search engines and then it snowballed from there.
I didn’t do too much search engine optimization, I’m not completely skilled at that, I just
optimized a few pages and that brought in traffic and then gradually built on it by launching new
products which always generated more traffic because the affiliates would then put up more links
and things like that. It just snowballed really.
I do actually do a little bit of advertising though, I shouldn’t say I don’t do any because
someone will probably say "Hey, I know you advertise".
I have a sponsored listing on Yahoo, and that’s probably responsible for quite a bit of traffic but
I don’t actually track that, I couldn’t say how much I make from that whether it’s profitable or not
because they only send traffic to the root domain name, so I haven’t actually analyzed that traffic.
Could you explain what exactly is a sponsored ad in Yahoo and how do you use that?
Well first of all you have to be listed in Yahoo so you have to pay their listing fee just to get into
the directory.
That’s about $200, is that right?
Page 3
It’s $299 for them to review your site. You don’t pay to get listed, you pay for the review
because that allows them to say "No" if they want to. And I think it’s now $299 per year so I only paid
$299 once -- it was just a flat fee ... now it’s $299 per year.
Then once you’re in their directory you can pay to "sponsor" that section of the directory. And
depending on how much traffic that section gets they will charge you pro-rata so if it’s a very, very
highly trafficked area of the directory you’ll pay more to sponsor it than a back-water area of the
directory.
I think I pay $100 a month to sponsor the Business Opportunities directories web site. Then
you get an enhanced listing at the top of that part of the directory.
So -- are you sponsoring keywords or is it just sections of the directory?
That’s right, it’s just sections of the directory, so wherever you’re listed, say they put you under
business opportunities you can apply to be a sponsored listing within that part of the directory and
they’ll tell you how much it is and if you’re happy you can say "I want to sponsor that part".
Okay. And you pay -- is it on click-throughs? Or views?...
It’s a flat-fee per month so they put your link and the description...