How to get money while you are at home through online platforms

 

They say, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." This proverb applies to many website owners who rely on a single, unsecured external source to attract traffic.

The main concern of all website owners is to attract traffic to their websites. It is not an easy task in light of the great competition, especially if your website is new.

So you may try to get traffic to your website by any means, even if it is not sustainable.

Once the owner of that external source changes it, adjusts its algorithms, or even closes it, all the effort put in by the website owners is lost, and most of the traffic is lost.

Types of traffic sources

The types of traffic sources for your website can be divided into two main types:

Traffic sources that you control

These are the sources you use to get traffic to your website, that you control and don't have to pay to use, such as your own app, your blog, your social media accounts, or your YouTube channel.

You have complete control over this type of traffic source, meaning that you will not be afraid that a third party will delete it or change its working mechanisms in a way that affects you.

Rather, you can rely on it in the long term and use it as an integral part of building your marketing plan while you are assured that it will not change or stop.

For example, a website's blog is one of the traffic sources that you control. Because you own it and control how and how often you publish it.

If you attract a thousand visits per month from the blog, you can rest assured that these visits will last for a long time, and will probably increase, and you will not have to pay for it or fear that the blog will disappear, for example, or change its publishing policy, you own it.

External Traffic Sources

Traffic sources that do not fall into the first category, that is, that you do not control, pay to use, or are associated with a particular service or algorithm.

They are unstable and unreliable sources controlled by other parties

For example, but not limited; Pay-per-click ads, social media ads, influencers, and more.

Why should you focus on your own traffic sources?

Your strategy for getting traffic to your website should build on the resources you own and ensure that they won't disappear or change, as this will help you plan ahead.

If you have a mobile app or a YouTube channel, and you get 5,000 visits per month from them, you will be able to build your long-term marketing plan on them.

People will keep coming to your channel and watching your videos, and they will keep downloading your app, so as long as your YouTube channel is up and running, and as long as the app is there, traffic from them will keep flowing to your website.

And since you're the one in control and the owner of them, you can rest assured that these two traffic sources will last for a long time.

This is very important, because it gives you the ground on which to build your future plans, which will serve as the stable and stable foundation for your business.

People often ask me: What will change in the next ten years? It is an interesting question, And we hear it often. But no one asks: What will not change in the next ten years? The second question for me is more important than the first because you can only base your strategy on the fixed things. - Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

Building plans and strategies, whether it is for a giant company the size of Amazon or for a small website, should be built on fixed things and not changing, because plans based on changing things that you do not control will not benefit you anything, and you will be like someone who wants to build his house on quicksand, and your building may collapse in any time.

If you depend on an external company or service to attract visits to your website, the owners of that service may decide to raise the subscription fee so that you are unable to pay it, or they may decide to close their service from the ground up, and this will waste all your efforts and lose you a lot of visits that you were getting from that tool or the service.

How can updates from external traffic sources harm your project?

It's becoming common to hear about a company suing Google because it lost customers because Google updated its algorithms.

This is not Google's fault, it is a private company, and no one can stop it from updating its policies as appropriate for it.

The fault lies with the companies that did not prepare for the future and were keen to diversify their visits, but rather relied entirely on one source that they did not own and did not pay attention to the sources they owned.

Here are some examples of updates or actions to external traffic sources that have hurt a lot of websites in recent years:

Facebook updates to reduce the organic reach

In recent years Facebook has started to shift little by little to a new policy.

Before o this was easy for companies and entrepreneurs to reach a large number of Facebook pioneers, it was enough to post good content that people interact with and Facebook will connect you to a large segment of potential customers.

This policy has begun to change in recent years, with Facebook now prioritizing content posted by friends and family members.

It has become difficult for companies and entrepreneurs to reach people through the natural, or organic, as it is called in the world of social networks.

The reason for this shift is clear: Facebook wants companies to switch to paid advertising to spread their content and reach customers.

This is exactly what happened, as the proportion of ads on Facebook increased by about 35% in the last quarter of 2017 alone.

This means that if you are a website owner, and you rely on Facebook to get traffic to your site organically, you will lose those visits and will now have to buy Facebook ads.

Worse, due to the increased demand for Facebook ads, they have become more expensive and may not be able to match their prices.

And if you rely on it alone to get visits to your site, you may lose everything.

Google updates in May 2020

Google adopts many algorithms to rank websites in search results pages, and these algorithms are not static, but Google constantly updates and modifies them.

After each modification, we usually see a change in the order of the websites, some going up, others going down.

One of these important updates that caused a shake in the ranking of websites, is the May 2020 Core Update, which lost several sites a lot of traffic, especially sites that are active in areas such as tourism, travel, health, real estate, and others.

The following graph shows the areas that experienced the worst drop in their site ranking due to the Google update: 

Image Source

The closing of Google Plus platform

One of the most famous examples of the danger of relying on external sources is the closure of Google Plus, Google's social platform.

Many companies and projects invested in this platform to attract traffic from them, and when Google closed it, those visits evaporated.

The companies I relied on lost many visitors overnight.

You should focus on the traffic sources that you own and give them priority in your marketing strategy, because they ensure sustainability and continuity, make it easier for you to plan for the future, and protect you from fluctuations and the whims of companies or platforms that deal with them.

However, this does not mean that you should neglect the external traffic sources.

Any source that helps you to get visits to your website, you have to take care of it, and work to increase your website's visitors from it.

What we mean is that you make your focus on the sources you own and give them special attention, they are the ones that will remain, and the other sources, as important as they are, may disappear at any time.

Ways to get traffic to your website through the sources you own

Website Blog

Creating a blog can help you get direct traffic to your website, as it is one of the pillars of content marketing that allows you to attract traffic and convert them into permanent customers.

The blog is one of the traffic sources that you own, because you have complete control over it, it is a constant and permanent source that allows you to get traffic to your site, whether through search engines, social networks, or external links published on other websites.

If you do not have a blog, you should create it as soon as possible, because you miss a lot of opportunities to attract traffic and expand your website.

If you have a blog, take care of it, and be sure to publish useful articles that attract visitors and convince them to return to it repeatedly.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most successful marketing strategies ever in terms of return on investment, as for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you will earn $38 in return.

So it is a very profitable investment. Not to mention, it's one of the traffic sources that you own and control.

To begin your email marketing journey collect a large number of email addresses.

There are many ways to collect email addresses, some common, legitimate, and some illegal.

We advise you to stick to the long-term methods even if the results are slower, but it is better in the long run.

But remember not to overdo it and not to send too many messages, so that your messages are not classified as spam, and this may cause people to unsubscribe from your mailing.

You can hire a professional digital marketer to help you build an integrated email marketing campaign that includes creating a newsletter, preparing message content, and helping to collect email addresses.

An email marketing strategy can also help you maintain existing visitors to your site, which is much easier to balance out with attracting new visitors.

Focus on your existing visitors, try to communicate with them via email, and make the experience of using your website enjoyable by providing useful content and providing a good user experience.

YouTube channel

YouTube is the largest video publishing platform, and it features a subscription system that allows channel owners to deliver the videos they publish to their subscribers in an instant.

This feature is important, and it means that as the number of subscribers to your channel increases, the number of views of your videos will automatically increase.

We don't expect Google to change this policy anytime soon, so we can count YouTube channels as a traffic source that you control.

If you have a YouTube channel, take care of it, and constantly develop it, because it has a double benefit, on the one hand it will help you create your own community on that platform, and on the other hand it will be a constant source of visits.

At the end of each video, you can invite your subscribers to visit your website to see an early version of your videos, read your blog or purchase your products.

Phone app

People spend most of the time on their phones using apps.

If you have a successful application, then it is a perfect opportunity that you can take advantage of in getting traffic to your site. In addition, you can use some features that are only available on the phone, such as the push notifications feature that allows you to instantly notify users of your app and invite them at any time to visit your site. Which is not available on normal websites.

Make sure to diversify your site's traffic sources. The best combination to increase your site's visitors is by combining your internal sources with external sources.

In this way, your website or project is not held hostage to another company that may stop the service at any time or increase its price and evaporate all your efforts.