50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 6

36. Chase new fads and hot topics.


Some affiliates monitor popular TV programs and news items. When a hot topic catches their eye, as fast as they can, they create a new web page, a new blog or new website discussing the new product or new fad. These fast-moving affiliates are the ones who get to capture the early rush of traffic.


37. Chase new affiliate programs.


Monitor new affiliate programs and quickly create a new page, new blog or new website to cover the new topic.


38. Find new topics in your logs - and where your traffic is coming from.


Study your referral logs to see what phrases people are typing into search engines. SEO specialist Brett Tabke says: "If your site is about 'oranges', but your referrals are all about 'orange citrus fruit', then you can get busy building  articles around 'citrus' and 'fruit' instead of the generic 'oranges'". Here's another reason you MUST have a decent tool to show you your traffic stats. You need to know where your traffic is coming from. You need to know which of your many traffic generating experiments are most effective. Then you'll know where to allocate your time and energy - on the winners. If your web host doesn't provide you with good stats, one option is to use AWStats. It's free. If you're comfortable with letting Google know just about everything about your site, you can also use Google Analytics


39. Join business associations which list members' sites online.


There may be business associations in your niche which publish members' websites online. It's worth checking. Try a Google search for "business associations".


40. Add a forum to your site.


A forum has big advantages and big disadvantages. A popular forum can attract a large number of repeat visitors to your site. It can enhance your credibility as an expert. A forum can also involve a great deal of work. Before you decide to launch one, carefully consider who will moderate it, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Who will remove the spam? Will you have three moderators working in different time zones around the planet? If you are going to moderate the forum yourself, who will take over when you want a few days off? The most effective way to launch a forum is to add one to a popular site. It takes a lot of time and energy - and usually money - to launch one from scratch. Also, if you do launch a forum, make sure you have a way of enticing forum members from your forum to your newsletter or to the rest of your site. If you don't, they'll just take part in discussions and leave, burning up bandwidth without generating any revenue for you.


41. Write free reports or white papers.


Write a free ebook or free report (you can use free Open Office software to create one in PDF format), and ask website owners and newsletter publishers to give it away.


42. Write brandable reports.


Write a report and allow other affiliates to put THEIR affiliate links in it and give it way. What you need is a nice win-win arrangement.


43. Do something funny.


Put zany, funny stuff on your site and ask a friend to submit a link to it to BoingBoing.net to get the publicity ball rolling. If possible, try to make sure the topic of the article is related to the topic of your niche. Remember that you want TARGETED traffic to your site. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net blog says the blog gets 1.7 million visitors a day.
(Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/05/01/1146335641312.html Reporting a link to BoingBoing is very simple.


44. Be outrageous or controversial.


Here's a traffic tip from Russell Beattie of RussellBeattie.com:
"Take on Apple. Writing something bad about Steve Jobs or a new Apple product is the sure-fire way to get the zealots in a state of fury. Two days later and I've got 2000+ individual people visiting that post about the iPod photo, over 52 comments and lots of emails. This is to be expected of course, but of the two or three times that I've done it and gotten such a response, it still surprises me." Mark Daoust says: The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites, an article recently published on Site-Reference.com, single-handedly brought in over 200,000 unique visitors in less than 24 hours. Initially it was featured on Slashdot, and subsequently it was featured in hundreds of blogs and forums, and thousands of new websites added a link to the article.


45. Use gimmicks.


If people see something odd on a website, they'll often tell other people about it. You can also alert newsletter publishers and blog owners and suggest they mention your gimmick in their newsletter.