Welcome to How to Make Money as a Content Creator, the course that covers everything you need to start earning money online doing what you love. I’m James Caran, content creator at WayAway and Travelpayouts. You’ve made it to the final lesson in our 3rd module, How to Get Visitors to See Your Content. And, today, we’re going to dive into paid traffic, which comes from paid advertisements.
We’ll walk through the basics of how it works, the benefits of directing paid traffic to your content, and how you can use it to grow your business! Let’s first start by mentioning that driving paid traffic to your website is not a must, you can start whenever you feel you’re ready to begin investing money into it! The traffic sources we mentioned previously in this module are all free ways to get new users to your pages. You can explore and experiment with organic, social, email, and referral traffic with only the investment of your time.
Paid traffic can get a bit complex, so as a beginner, we recommend either working with a professional or hiring a paid advertising consultant to help you with your traffic experiments since you’ll have to invest your money into it.
But don’t let this stop you. There are many benefits to paid traffic. Just a few of those benefits are:
In today’s lesson, we’ll provide an overview of the most effective methods to get paid traffic!
Even if you don’t start investing your money into ads right away, knowing about different advertising methods online will help you understand a new way to drive visitors to your content! So let’s dig into one of the most popular and lucrative ways to get paid traffic. Through search engines like Google, Bing and more! With this tactic, also known as paid search, you pay to have your page show up at the top of the search results list. How does it work?
In a nutshell, you choose keywords that you think your potential customers will search, and you bid on putting your ad as one of the sponsored search results at the top of the page, and you pay only when people click on your links. The more people want to target this specific word or phrase, the more your ads will cost. To help you learn more about paid search, we’ve shared some useful links in the resources section. Check it out.
To get in front of more people, you can also use contextual advertising. In simple terms, this is a form of digital advertising that involves matching ads to the content on the websites displaying them, which allows showing the right ads to the right people. An example of contextual advertising can be travel backpack ads shown for people who were searching for travel backpacks earlier or reading an article about backpacks right now. To promote your business with contextual advertising, you can use ad networks such as Google Ads or Media.net. Check out the resources section for an article about how to get started with Google Ads!
As we spoke in our last lesson about social traffic, it’s important to mention that social media channels offer a variety of ad types! There are video ads, ads in messenger, image carousel ads, ads in stories, and the list goes on!
So, before you choose the type of ad you create, it is important to understand which type of content performs best organically, and what your audience best responds to. If you use the same content type in your advertising, it’s also likely to perform well. This will help you save time, as you’ve already done all the legwork in your research experiments. The cost to advertise on social media ranges quite a bit depending on the platform you use. To help you learn more about social media ads, we’ve shared some useful links in our resources section.
Another option for paid advertising is community-driven channels. This includes platforms like Reddit and Quora. These websites are very community driven and focused, which allows you to target people who participate in communities related to your niche. So you can target topics based on the discussion board themes your audience participates in!
On the flip side, your potential reach will be limited to active members of these communities. Though popular, Reddit and Quora are still much smaller than social networks like Facebook, or search engines like Google. We’ve included a great article in the resources section of this lesson that breaks down Quora Ads. Check it out for more specific details on the topic.
Our final method of securing paid traffic is through paid mentions and shout-outs. These are essentially backlinks that generate referral traffic, but unlike the methods we described in our lesson about referral traffic, these are purely given out once a payment is made upfront.
No matter which method of paid traffic you use, you will always need to consider your audience. For example, you shouldn’t pay someone reviewing tech products on YouTube for a mention if you’re a Health and Wellness Coach focused on social traffic.
Audience members coming into your website through paid mentions should find the content they want to consume. And this is true with any traffic. The clearer your message is from the first interaction, the more likely it is that you will have a happy visitor and loyal customer.
As you can see, there are many ways to get paid traffic, so you’ll need to experiment with them and see which works best for you! A final tip before we go — make sure you have a significant body of content for new readers or viewers to sink their teeth into!
And that about wraps up our lesson on paid traffic! Let’s do a quick recap of today’s lesson:
Thank you so much for joining me to learn how to get visitors to see your content. Now that you’re well versed in the world of online traffic, let’s move into “How To Make Money with Your Content”.
I hope you found the tips from this module helpful! You can start using them today! If you have some time, our next Module is up next.
