Driving Traffic to a Website with No Clear Focus

"I'm totally new to this game. I have a website up, LookForBargains.com, with the intent to carry my affiliate IDs to eBay, Google, and Clickbank. My intent is to boost my monthly income and help with college bills for my daughter. I'm most interested in marketing strategies to direct people to my site. Am I on the right track?" -- Marty Bernstein

Apparently you've purchased a "look-alike" shopping portal site (Cool Little Website from Digital Graphiti, Inc.). If anyone clicks on the ads or buys a product, you get paid. It's entirely dynamic and nearly like the site of every other person who purchased Cool Little Website," except that it contains your affiliate links to Clickbank, eBay, Commission Junction -- and your Google AdSense account. Pretty cool -- so far. The problem lies in generating traffic to the site. There are three main ways to get people to a website: (1) search engine optimization (SEO), (2) pay per click (PPC) ads, and (3) e-mail. Unfortunately, none of them is likely to work for you. Here's why.

With search engine optimization, a small business can get high search engine rankings if its site has a well-developed focus, a clearly-defined niche. Your focus is so broad that you're not likely to rank high for any search term. When you search ["DGI INC." ebay clickbank] for your direct competitors, other purchasers of Cool Little Website, you find 167,000 webpages. Not very encouraging.

If you were to bid on PPC ads to drive traffic to any of your webpages, you'd probably pay more than you would receive in revenue. To drive traffic via e-mail marketing you would need a legitimate list of e-mail addresses to avoid violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Not cheap unless you have already developed a list.

In conclusion, this site won't help your daughter through college. The Cool Little Website sales page makes it sound like you can earn thousands of dollars by investing only $97. Unfortunately, life doesn't work that way very often. To find a niche where you can earn some money, I recommend you carefully follow each step in the guide provided with Ken Evoy's Site Build It! (http://sales.sitesell.com) or read my low-priced Research Guide to Online Niche-Finding (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/niche-finding.htm). It is possible to earn a good living on the Internet -- many thousands of people do -- but it's not a slam-dunk. Anyone who tells you differently is just trying to take your money.