A few days ago a friend of mine asked me to look at his blog and make suggestions; it was fine.. nice simple lay-out, good content… it was really good.
In Cebu, there are a lot of nice looking blogs and websites, but its sad because these sites don’t get a lot of traffic at all,many of which aren’t properly indexed or have not been crawled at all by search engines.
By the way my friends blog site is www.mabinihall.com.
What I told him though was, since he has his blog going already and with enough content, what is lacking is website traffic. People are always so surprised why I can tell if the site is getting traffic or not, there are actually many ways of checking. But that isn’t the point of this blog, what I am getting to is, I told him one secret to getting traffic, and that is the same secret to actually getting your site listed on search engines, which in turn contribute to more traffic.
I’m feeling a little generous now, so I am thinking I will probably give you some tips on how to bring traffic to your blog, or your friendster, myspace or multiply accounts. These are techniques that I learned the hard way, through trial and error and significant expense too, hehehe… and now your going to get these simple techniques absolutely FREE!
So here are ways to get traffic to your site, and also get your site listed on search engines… its actually more of traffic generation; I am not even touching on the aspect of search engine optimization which is a key factor in also getting listed and ranked well on a search engine. So here goes.
If you have money to spend, you can do the following (in the order of highest to lowest cost)
1. buy a high PR blog or website and use it to link to your blog or other sites
2. buy links on other sites
3. sign up for a link exchange program
If you notice of the common denominator is getting links to your site, if you do not want to spend, you can do the following (it takes effort and patience).
1. comment on other people’s blogs and leave your url in the url field
2. create other blogs on sites like wordpress.com, blogger.com or other free blog sites or free sites and create posts linking back to your site, they don’t necessarily have to be links, i think the advantage here is you are able to use as anchor text the keywords you are optimizing the linked site for
3. comment on forums or participate in forums
4. comment on myspace, friendster and other social networking sites.. always leave your url
5. submit to directories
6. write articles and submit to high ranking article directories like ezinearticles.com, this method does work, and its free too.. you just have to write a good article though hehehe..
7. register and submit your site to social bookmarking sites… stumbleupon, digg, delicious and all those other similar sites
8. upload a funny video or whatever sort of video on youtube.com, if you have some basic editing knowledge, get your site address on the video
9. go to yahoo answers and try to come up with good answers to questions
10. viral marketing strategies, write a report or ebook that you distribute for free, this ebook would have links to your sites and if you have a little knowledge in page building, come up with a tell a friend page where peolple can refer their friends by entering their friends names and email addresses into a form…
let me tell you how i did this for one site… i create an ebook, and gave out the first two chapters free… it is in a way a sampling of the product, if they think it is crap they surely won’t download the rest of it, but if they think its good stuff, they would want to download the rest of the book, for them to download the rest of the book however, they have to fill up a form which refers their friends to your site and ebook download page.. that is the part I mentioned earlier
probably the most effective is just buy a high PR site if you have the money, but if you don’t have it, commenting on blogs, forums and leveraging on Web 2.0 would do but then you would need time and patience
Roy
cforms contact form by delicious:days
August 14th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Internet Marketing Strategy is so diverse, thanks for your work on this site - keep it up!
Michael
Internet Marketing Strategy Tips - Daily updates for internet marketing strategy, tips, tools, and advice.
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:28 pm
5 Free Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic
I don’t know about you, but when I first entered the world of internet marketing I thought I could just submit my newly finished website to a few search engines, then sit back as the visitors flocked to my site.
I imagined that people would arrive on my website, as if by magic, purchase goods, and perhaps come back again for more.
A week or so later I came down to earth with a big bump.
I realised that it would take a bit of time and effort to see the results that I was dreaming about!
Since my reality check, I have learned all about the weird and wonderful ways of internet marketing.
In this article I will tell you about my top 5 free ways of increasing website traffic.
All these methods are completely free and if you spend some time on them you will find that they work consistently.
(1)Writing Articles
Writing an article on a subject related to your website and getting that article published has two major benefits:
- People who are interested in your article will read it and often click on the URL in your resource box find out more. This gets you another free targeted visitor. Targeted, because that reader wants to find out more on the subject of your article, which is hopefully related to the subject of your website.
- Every publisher of your article must also publish your “resource box”. Adding a resource box with your URL to all of your articles will increase the number of links leading back to your website, which in turn helps to increase your search engine position
For a list of directories to submit your article to, see Article Submission Directories
(2)Forum Networking
There are many discussion forums on the internet, on every topic you could possibly imagine.
Most discussion boards allow posters to attach a “Signature” with their post containing additional information about themselves, such as their name, URL and sometimes even an advertisement.
By visiting a few forums regularly and participating in the discussions, asking and answering questions, you can build up trust with other forum members, whilst at the same time getting free exposure for your website.
Just try to make a useful contribution to the forum - be sure to read the forum rules and don’t spam!
(3)Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking has two main benefits for you.
Firstly, the more links that you exchange, the more chance there is that someone will follow a link from another site and land on your website.
Secondly, your website will be perceived more importantly by search engines.
The more links you have from other sites, the greater your chance of getter ranked more highly by all the search engines.
Here are some Dos and Don’ts to help you get more out of your link exchanges.
- Do link with sites that will be of interest to your visitors.
- Don’t link with pages that have unorganised link directories with hundreds of links on each page. This won’t benefit you with increased traffic or search engine rankings.
- Do link with sites that have a clearly labelled “Link Directory” from their main page. You aren’t likely to get much traffic from a hidden or hard to find link directory.
- Don’t use link farms or FFA pages. You are unlikely to get extra traffic using these methods and the search engines may penalise you.
- Do use link directories to help you find link partners. You can find some Link Exchange Resources here
- Do stay organised. Use link exchange software, or a spreadsheet to keep track of the link exchanges you have requested and the contact details of the webmasters.
(4) Email Signatures
This is a very simple, but often forgotten way of increasing your website visitors.
Most of us are sending lots of emails a day, but many of us just sign them with just our name, or perhaps nothing at all.
Instead, why not end your emails with a short signature containing your name, a bit about your website along with the URL?
Keep the signature short (4 lines), to the point and avoid hype or SHOUTING.
You may be surprised at the extra visitors you receive through doing this. It’s amazing how curiosity will lead the recipients of your email to click on your link!
(5)Using Traffic Exchanges
Finally, this is one easy way to guarantee instant hits to your website. You can build up credits for free by surfing or building up a downline to surf for you.
The downside of this method is that the visitors you receive from traffic exchanges are not as targeted as the visitors that you will receive via the other methods that I have described.
The reason for this is that people surf traffic exchanges for one reason - to earn as many credits as possible in as short a space of time as possible!
This gives you a challenge - how do you attract the attention of someone who is looking at your web page for 20 seconds or less?
Here are two tips -
- Know your market - spend some time surfing on the exchange that you are advertising on and pay attention to the types of web pages being advertised. Make sure that the pages you advertise are going to interest your target market.
- Use a short, simple attention grabbing page that can be read in a few seconds - there is no point advertising a huge page of text that takes 5 minutes to read. The chances are, your visitor will get bored and click on the “next” button without giving your page a fair chance.
Regularly invest some time in each of these 5 traffic generating methods and you will see your web statistics moving in the upwards direction before you know it.
About the author:
Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster and owner of How to Start an Internet Business To learn more about how to promote your website download your free 30 Days to Success Ebook