Simple ways to build up your traffic

by (Warrior Forum) qkz283

This information was written due to seeing similar questions on this forum over and over again. It starts out pretty basic, but there is some good information within it.

What is traffic and why do you want it?
Well, traffic is the people that visit your website. The more people that visit your website, the better. If you are selling or promoting a product, you always want targeted traffic. This traffic could be converted into customers.

If you have a personal website or blog that you like to share things on, then you want to get in front of as many people as possible. In any case, more traffic is never a bad thing.

How does traffic work?
Traffic can come from a variety of sources. Anywhere you can promote your website, there is potential traffic available. There are typically two types of traffic, however. Traffic that affects search engines and traffic that does not. Both are useful, but depending on your goals, one method could be better than the other.

Google for example, uses a system called “nofollow.” If the links you are creating around the web are nofollow, then they will not affect the rankings on some search engines. If the links you are creating are “dofollow,” then they will affect the rankings on Google and other search engines. Generating these “dofollow” links create what we call backlinks. The more quality backlinks that you create to your website, the better you will rank. Backlinks are only useful if you use them correctly and responsibly, though. This is one of the common methods for Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

This post will focus on both methods for building traffic.

Optimizing your website
On your actual website, you want it to be optimized for the search engines. We won’t spend too much time on this, but we’ll discuss some of the essentials. Firstly, you want to use standard compliant code. An example of using compliant code is keeping your html and css separate. Also, you should create a sitemap so that your content is easily indexable by the search engines. Another thing to look into is the robots exclusion standard. One of the most important aspects of optimizing your website is creating good titles and links. You want both your page title and links to be easily read by search engines and humans. For more on this, check out the Wikipedia entry on “permalinks”

More information on optimizing your website can easily be found on Google. Try searching for “search engine optimization”

Content Management Systems, such as the popular Wordpress, have plug-ins available to make this much easier. That is why many people prefer blogs, because they are typically liked by the search engines and easy to work with. We will talk about why blogs typically get good rankings later on in the post.

Optimizing your links on other websites
Remember backlinks? An important part in making backlinks work for you is creating them correctly. When you leave a link on another site, you need to pay attention to what is called the anchor text. The anchor text of a link is just as important as the permalink, as they are easily indexed by the search engines. Your anchor text should include your keywords. For example, the words someone would type into Google to find your website. The same is true for blog posts, your anchor text should include the title of the blog post.

Using Keywords Effectively
Now that we know how links use keywords, let’s talk about the article itself. When you write an article, you want to use keywords. The better keywords that you use the better chance that your target audience will find your website. Write naturally and descriptively and the keywords should flow by themselves. Before you can do this however, you need to find a good keyword domain name related to your website.

Putting everything that we have learned so far together
Now we know how to effectively setup our website for traffic. We also now how to promote our website through links on other websites. The main section of this ebook is coming up, which is where to promote. I cannot tell you how many times I have had people ask me how to get more visitors to their website. What we have just learned is the very first step to building traffic and the most important. Now that we know how, we are ready to learn where to go to generate this traffic! 

Places to promote and build traffic to your website
Once again, what we have just setup will eventually get you some organic (natural) traffic, but these tips will help get you there faster and better.

I’m going to go through a giant list of quality methods and websites to use to begin building traffic to your website. Let’s take a look:

Word-of-mouth: Obvious, huh? This is a very powerful method for generating traffic because it is personal. Setup a new blog? Tell your friends, family, and co-workers.

Pinging: If you have a blog and just added a new post, you should ping your website. Pinging will notify various websites and search engines that you have just updated, therefore you will be indexed faster. A good place to do this is Ping-o-Matic! Be sure not to ping more than once!

Email: Email is a very significant marketing tool. Send emails to your friends and people that know you, but don’t spam.

Build a List: Using the various methods that you are learning now, you could begin to build a list. Offer a free ebook or product, persuading people to sign up to your newsletter. In between the quality content that you send to your subscribers, you can send them links back to your websites. An auto-responder service that’s real popular is Aweber. There is a very limited, free version of GetResponse available.

Hold a Contest: Before you gain a loyal audience, you can give people some extra incentive to visit your site. Create a competition, such as the top commenter wins $50.

Write and Submit Articles: Write a really good article related to your niche and then link back to your website in the author information, or resource box, that appears under the article. Article Marketing is one of the major ways people utilize free traffic. One of the most popular and powerful article directories is EzineArticles. Some other good ones include GoArticles and Isnare for mass submissions.

Outsource Articles: Want to multiply the amount of articles that link back to your site? You could consider outsourcing your articles to rapidly increase your authority across article directories. Places to do this include Elance, GetAFreelancer, and Guru. Watch out for quality though, if they will write you fifty keyword articles for $10, then stay away. But also be fair, don’t rip people off who are willing to help you. Build a relationship.

Write Letters: This is actually pretty effective. I have taken some of my past clients, and sent them a letter in the mail promoting a new product that they would enjoy. If the offer is quality, you’ll definitely receive some phone calls and emails. This can further your relationship and help you brand your name.

Web 2.0 Sites: Have you heard of Digg or StumbleUpon or the legendary Fark? This method is probably the other best way to drive traffic other than article marketing. If you don’t know, web 2.0 sites typically are ran by the users. Meaning all of the content is user-generated. You can submit your blog posts or websites to these services. Be responsible and don’t spam. A giant list of these type of sites can be found at AddThis.com, which can also help your users easily submit your content for you. SocialMarker is a service to submit to multiple sites at once.

Video: Videos can be a great source of traffic. YouTube is probably the most recognized and the most useful source of traffic. Make sure your videos are useful, and you use descriptive titles and tags like we talked about earlier. YouTube videos seem to rank in the search engines very well, so make sure you leave a proper link to your website somewhere around or in your video. TubeMogul is a site that can mass submit your videos, because YouTube really isn’t the only video site! You can create an awesome video with Animoto or create a screen capture with CamStudio.

Podcasts/Audio: Did you make some good videos? Or did you discuss one of your blog posts in audio? Submit your audio file to podcast directories, such as Podanza. Or use PodPusher to mass submit.

RSS Feeds: This is mostly useful for blogs, although any website can have an rss feed. Here is a list of 55 Active RSS Directories. For more boost, you could submit your Ezine Article feed to get that ranking even higher in the search engines. Of course you could also submit your actual blog. Basically, this will get your website links spread all across the web, and your full articles as well if you so choose.

Buy Ads: I had to fit this in somewhere. If you want to quickly drive traffic to your site, you can use Pay Per Click advertising. A popular PPC provider is Google Adwords. Yahoo and Microsoft also have popular PPCservices. Make sure you do some research on this first, because it is easy to lose money fast. Check out some tools like Spyfu, Wordtracker, or KeywordSpy to see how others’ ads are performing in the same niche.

Other types of ads include CPM, which you pay a fixed price per 1000 impressions. Visit some of the sites you are interested in advertising on, the information will be there if they offer this type of advertising. A popular network is Federated Media.

Other types in less detail: Adbrite offers Cost Per Click ads and BuySellAds is a popular ad network for flat monthly rates. There is also Ezine advertising, such as the popular DEMC.

Buy Leads: This method is looked down upon by some of the top Internet Marketers, but it can be effective. Places like Rent-A-List or CustomLead can rent you a list. What that means is that they will use their exisiting list of subscribers and send them to your website. The amount of targeted leads that you buy affects the price.

Forum/Email Signatures: Do you visit a lot of forums related to your website? Make sure to place your link in the signature, which appears under each of your posts.

Comment on related sites: Find some other sites in your category and leave some useful comments. Although it is not necessary, here is a list of Do Follow Blogs. A lot of blogs turn off follow in the comments to reduce spam, but many sites offer a “Top Commenters” section that does provide the link love.

Social Networks: This is another favorite among the best Internet Marketers. A lot of free traffic can be driven to your site using these networks. When you add friends, you are essentially building a list the same way that you are on a website. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Seesmic are all places that you can network. Make sure not to spam though, long term relationships and personal branding is more important than quick traffic. At Ning, you can even create your own social network to help with your branding efforts. Grou.ps is another good one. And here is a service that lets you easily update all of your social networks at once: ping.fm

Exchange Links: If you found a website that you really like and that you think would be beneficial to your own readers, exchange links with them.

Write Guest Posts: Volunteer to write a nice article for a website or blog, and the owner will gladly link back to your site in exchange for all your hard work.

Directories/Classifieds: You can submit your website to popular directories, such as dmoz. If you have a product that you are selling you can also use craigslist, which is another very popular method.

Joint Ventures: If you have built up a list or want to sponsor a contest for someone else, joint ventures can be very worthwhile. A Joint Venture is when you find someone in the same niche as you and you cross promote to each other’s list.

Answer Questions: Helping people will definitely build a nice group of followers for you. Answer questions on Yahoo! Answers or Wiki Answers, but be sure to leave your link!

Offer Free Stuff: Create an ebook, wordpress theme, wordpress plugin, embeddable widget, or something else related to your niche. Give these away for free, with your website mentioned in them. If you create a wordpress theme or embeddable widget, you can gain some backlinks if people use them on their own sites. Have you ever seen the “Theme created by so-and-so” link in some people’s templates? If you have the skills or can outsource, create a free iphone/touch application branded with your site.

Marketplaces: If you’re in the right niche, you can use popular marketplaces like WarriorForum, Sitepoint, or Digital Point to list your product, website, or service. Although these are related to the Internet and Marketing niches, you can find marketplaces relevant to your content. Don’t be afraid to search around!

Create an affiliate program: If you are selling something, offer an affiliate program to your buyers. This way you have an entire marketing team! In return for their hard work, they get a percentage of each sale they bring you. Clickbank is a popular marketplace for affiliate products. Rapid Action Profits is a popular complete package for managing sales and resellers.

T-shirts and other gifts: If you send one of your favorite bloggers a t-shirt or free product, then they may post about it on their site. For example, the popular Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney posts a new entry every Friday for people who sent him a t-shirt.

Create other blogs, squidoo, hubpages: Most of the time these methods are used for gaining more backlinks. You can setup another blog on blogger, wordpress.com, or Typepad with links back to your site. Do the same with Squidoo and Hubpages. Be sure to read the difference between these types of services so that you don’t violate any rules. Squidoo is a different beast than blogs.

Business/Virtual Cards: Yes, people do still use the old, paper business cards. This adds on to the personal networking that I was talking about way up there. If you are more high tech or want to save some trees, try sharing your information with a vcard.

Buy Traffic: This is another method that may be questionable to some people. But, you can use a service like VisitorBoost to buy a specific number of targeted visitors from certain countries and interest groups.

Wikipedia: Find an article that fits your website? Edit the external links at the bottom of the page, but be extra sure it is definitely related. And another tip, add your link to the middle or bottom, not the top. You have a better chance of remaining on the list this way. 

Tutorials/How-to’s: Tutorials and how-to’s are always popular. You can use EzineArticles to write one of these, but you can find more targeted websites. Such as if you are in the computer-scene, you can submit your tutorials to Good-Tutorials, Pixel2Life, or Tutorialized.

Polls/Graphs: Surprisingly, you can get traffic from commenting on polls or graphs. Check out icharts.net/portal and answers.polldaddy.com

Scribd/Docstoc/Slideshare: These are services to share on-line presentations. Convert your ebook, article, or anything else to presentation format.

Create an automated niche site: Use a script like SteadyNiche to create an automatically updating site, which you can link to yours. Or you can use Wordpress and one of the many plugins, like WP-o-Matic, to automatically pull in rss feeds. You can then use another plugin, such as WP-Affiliate, to add in your own links to the articles that are pulled in.

Newspapers/Flyers: People also still read these, too. Did you ever hear about the company that plants all those dating signs everywhere?

Offer Free Ads: As you are building your sites traffic, offer free advertising to people who will mention your site on their blog or website. Don’t worry, when you build up your traffic by using all these techniques, you’ll be able to charge for those ads! Just keep at it, it takes some time!

Text Messages: This goes with the email marketing and business cards, but give it a shot too. People these days check their phone more than their email it seems.

Viral Marketing: Create a game or video that gets everyones attention. You can be really creative here.

DIY Startup News/KillerStartups: If you have more of a service that anyone can use, think about submitting your press release to DIY Startup News or KillerStartups. There are a lot more of these around as well, try searching for free press release websites.

Press Release: As mentioned above, there are a lot of press release websites. Some are paid and some are free, but a good paid website is PRWeb.

Optimize: To make sure your site is up to snuff, use services like Google Website Optimizer, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Yslow. Also check out the W3 Validator.

FeedFlares: If you are using FeedBurner, you can also enable FeedFlares. This will make it easy for your readers to share your links and bookmark them just like they can on your main site. 

Understand Your Traffic: If you start getting traffic, you definitely want to know where it is coming from. Use a service like Google Analytics or Mon.itor.us to track your visits.

Increase Your Usability: Services like Lijit and Disqus makes your website more enjoyable and user friendly.

Google Trends: Some people are skeptical of this method, but I can say that it does work. If you check out trends and write about something that’s recently hot or a growing search, then you can capitalize on these searches if you act fast enough.

Trackbacks: If you want to discuss a blog post that you came across, make sure to link to the provided trackback url. This will show your link underneath of the blog post that you discussed on their blog. Even high profile websites, such as TechCrunch, allow trackbacks.

If you have any other ways of generating traffic, please share them here. This could be a very useful resource.

EDIT - As mentioned in this thread, this is simply a list of ideas. Find the methods that work best at delivering quality, targeted traffic for your niche and focus on those. It is more trouble than it is worth to do all of these simultaneously.