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How to Generate Website Traffic
By Aiden | Wednesday
Generating Website Traffic is a very important part of internet marketing. You can have the best web site selling the best product or service, but if very few people visit your site, you will make very little money if at all. I heard someone compared it to opening a Wal Mart in the middle of a desert.
There are several ways to generate traffic to your web site either using paid or free methods (also known as organic traffic). With the paid methods obviously you have to spend money to generate website traffic, and these include PPC (pay per click) advertising, network advertising, and ezine advertising. When you’re first starting out, it’s better to learn and use the free ways to generate traffic because they’re… free! :) So you basically have nothing to lose. Believe me, it’s easy to lose money very quickly on paid traffic methods unless you really know what you’re doing. There are special courses offered on using PPC and other paid methods for those interested.
So here we’ll just focus on the free ways of generating web site traffic, and there are several of them. It may take more than one post to cover them all, but let’s just start with a few today.
Creating a blog
Blogging is a great way to get more traffic to your website. Yes, you’ve heard this before. Search engines love blogs. First of all because blogs are dynamic; whenever you add a new post, the contents of your pages change. So you can see why it’s important to post often to your blog. The second reason is that blogs are interactive since you can (and should) allow others to post comments on your blog, thus adding more content to it. Isn’t it great when you can get other people to add content to your web site for free? :)
Getting links from other sites
Search engines find a new web site through a link from a different site. This is the best way of getting your new site indexed (instead of submitting it to the search engines). So the more links from other sites your website gets, the more popular it is with the search engines, which in turn will increase your website traffic. There are several ways to (yeah, I know there are a lot of ways to implement all these traffic generating techniques, and that’s good! :) ) obtain links to your web site which include…
Exchanging links with other web sites
When you find other websites in the same niche as yours, you can contact the owner and ask if they would be interested in exchanging links with you. This is a win-win situation because both of you will benefit from getting more web site traffic.
Submitting your web site to directories
You can submit your website to several directories to help drive traffic. Some directories require a reciprocal link, some don’t. A one-way link carries more weight than a mutual link. Therefore, I would concentrate on those directories that don’t require you to link back to them. Click here for a list of directories.
Submitting your site to social networking and online bookmarking sites
This is also a great way to increase web site traffic by getting one-way links. There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind about social networking and bookmarking sites in order to make them effective. First, you need to participate in their communities by voting on other people’s sites, posting your comments about their submission, etc.
Second, don’t just submit pages from your own sites. Every now and then you should submit other sites that aren’t yours. That way you won’t be regarded as a spammer who uses their site just to increase traffic to your website. This can actually get you banned! So be careful and do this wisely. A few of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites are Digg, StumbleUpon, Propeller, Del.icio.us, and Technorati.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories
This is one of the most powerful free traffic generating techniques. First you need to write an article pertaining to your niche (or have someone else, like a ghost writer, do it for you) which is at least 250 word long. Then you add something called a resource box at the end of your article which contains brief information about yourself and a link to your web site. Now you submit your article to a few article directories such as Ezine Articles, GoArticles, and Article Dashboard.
This way, besides getting one-way links from the article directories themselves, you will also get back links from other web sites that use your article, increasing your site popularity. Eventually you will increase your targeted web site traffic from this powerful traffic building technique.
For more powerful tips on generating website traffic, check out Killer Traffic Tactics. If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to submit them below.
Topics: Web Site Traffic |
July 5th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Great advice,Thank you.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Hi
As I ride the waves looking for new traffic generating ideas, and conceptualize with what I have found on your site, I am very pleased!
Thank you for the info, I already feel it is going to be very useful and I am excited to experiment with it!!
I will let you know how it all works out with my new blog I have started.
Thanks
S.