Everyone loves to read success stories. Even as I work on generating traffic for my own online business, I’ve stumbled many times myself.

But have I given up? No, because I have seen enough success that I know that if I just keep going things will work out. In fact, the reason why you fail is not so that you can give up. It is so that you can see what works and what doesn’t.

So today I’ll be sharing the 6 lessons that I learned about generating traffic for my online business. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes and avoid these common traps that could have destroyed my online business.

1. Don’t Try to Reinvent the Wheel

When I first started trying to get traffic for my online business, I went in search of obscure traffic websites that I thought that other people were using to get traffic. After all, no one is really going to share their best tips openly right?

These sites promised that I would get tons of traffic to my sites and all I saw was dollar signs. But boy was I wrong. Not only did I end up paying tons of money for traffic that wasn’t converting, I also ended up with a lot of bot traffic as well.

Lesson Learned

Avoid traffic gigs on Fiverr. While Fiverr is good for a lot of things, thinking you can buy traffic there is a big mistake.

Instead, invest in traffic sources that other internet marketers are already talking about online. Yes, it might cost you some serious cash to set up a Facebook Ads or Google Adwords campaign but you’ll be better off in the end.

2. You’re Not Superman. Stop Trying to Do Everything Yourself

When I first started building my business online, I tried to do it all myself but I soon realized things just weren’t working.

I mean just try doing this by yourself for years:

• Creating banner ads
• Finding online advertising
• Writing email newsletters
• Figuring out topics for your blog
• Sharing posts on your social channels
• Editing images for your blog
• Coding your website and fixing bugs
• Updating your website with new features and content
• Creating products to sell online

and the list goes on and on. If you want to have a life outside of your online business, you’ll start to realize that doing all of these things yourself simply isn’t the right way to go.

Lesson Learned

Instead, as my business grew I started outsourcing many of the tasks Picoworkers, Fiverr, Freelancer.com and other sites. I also started purchasing templates, banners, and other pre-made items instead of trying to create everything from scratch.

If you want to have a successful online business, you have to cut down on the time you’re spending on your other aspects of your business so that you can focus on getting traffic in the first place.

3. Set a Side a Day to Get Traffic

Once I realized that I was spending too much of my time on other tasks and started outsourcing, I realized I had actually not spent enough time researching how to get traffic for my online business in the first place.

Simply trying one new traffic strategies every month isn’t going to cut it. You need to have a scheduled day each week where you take time to look at your analytics data and decide whether what you are doing is working.

Lesson Learned

If you start doing this, you’ll see a significant boost in your sales and conversions rates. In fact, I went from having sales every few months to getting sales every day because I put in the time every week to figure out if what I’m doing is actually working.

4. Don’t Underestimate the Competition

The competition among affiliate marketers is growing every day. It might be convenient for you to think that you’re the only one out there promoting that Clickbank product, but the truth is that there are dozens, if not hundreds of affiliates out there as well.

In fact, I watched as a competitor took the top spot in a referral contest simply because I got lazy with promoting the offer and started slacking.

Lesson Learned

If you want to make bank, you need to stay dedicated and put in some serious work. You also need to think about what your competition might be doing to outrank you and do a better job every time.

5. Advertising Platforms Can Be Really, Really Strict

Think you can run a campaign on an advertising platform that’s against TOS and have it go unnoticed? Think again!

This happened to me when I first started out without even realizing it. I was promoting a product with paid advertising without realizing that the advertising platform had banned campaigns for certain niches.

I ended up getting temporarily banned and had to rethink my entire strategy for promoting that product.

Lesson Learned

Read the TOS and remember that when traffic sites ask you to follow their rules, it is not just a suggestion. They won’t hesitate to ban you permanently without explanation.

6. Don’t Forget About Organic Traffic

When I first started out, I figured that I would only focus on paid traffic since a lot of online marketers talk about how free traffic was a waste of time (which is not true by the way!).

But what I actually found after a while is that many of my sales and signups were actually coming from sites that had ranked for specific keywords in Google.

Lesson Learned

Don’t forget to optimize your websites for SEO and keep in mind that although organic traffic doesn’t happen overnight, it is still a very valuable traffic source.

Conclusion

Getting traffic for your online business isn’t a set it and forget process. In fact, traffic can be unpredictable and you can experience periods where you’re not seeing sales or conversions.

That is not the time to give up. Instead, build new projects and apply the knowledge that you’ve already acquired to get things back on track. I hope this post helps you and you don’t make the same mistakes I did.

Feel free to share your thoughts about this post in the comments below!