50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 7

46. Position yourself as a personality or expert.

Positioning yourself as a personality or expert in a particular field has all sorts of advantages, one of the most important being that it can help you get links to your site without having to ask for them. It also builds trust, helping encourage people to buy from your site. Positioning yourself as a personality or expert - or both – is much more challenging than building an anonymous mini-site, but the rewards can make it worth while. It's also a way of future-proofing your business because it makes your site stand out from all the hundreds or thousands of other sites in your niche. Once you start receiving a bit of publicity, people who are writing articles or books will want to interview you. The resulting publicity leads to more interviews... It has a nice snowballing effect.

47. Combine joint ventures AND email captures.

Ebook authors do joint ventures with website owners and newsletter publishers not just to sell products, but also to get a huge rush of website visitors and to collect email addresses. Consider how most ebook authors do joint ventures. They write a book or create a product, contact a few dozen newsletter publishers giving them a review copy and ask them to promote the book for a generous share of the revenue. Depending on the quality of the preselling and the quality of the sites salesletter, about 90 to 99% of the people who arrive at the site leave without buying anything. What a dreadful waste of hard-earned traffic! More cunning marketers create an email capture or NameSqueeze page. They give away a useful free report or mini-course. If visitors want it, the only way to get it is to hand over an email address. Their free report or mini-course then promotes the ebook. It's extra work, but this technique captures many more email addresses (for more repeat visits) and increases the number of sales.

48. Place a link in Yahoo! Answers "sources".

At Yahoo! Answers, the people who answer provide free answers. Answer some questions there. In your answers, you can list "sources" (links) for more details. The "asker" can vote a particular answer the "Best Answer" and that answer is given special prominence. Other users can vote, too. If you click on the "Report Abuse" link and check the available categories, you'll see that "advertisements" are banned. However, I've spotted some affiliate links posted as sources. Rather than posting an affiliate link, I think it would be more useful - and natural - to link to your own website, perhaps to a newsletter sign-up page or to a page offering a free report.

49. Add sticky content.

Sticky content, says Wikipedia, is website content:
“which has the purpose of getting a user to return to that particular website. Webmasters use this method to build up a community of returning visitors to a website". Examples of sticky content include chat rooms, forums, web mail, Internet games, weather, news, horoscopes, and recipes. This is a HUGE topic. Try a Search in Google for "sticky content". This technique works brilliantly for many websites. Look for opportunities where you can encourage other people to add free content to your site. Also, remember that sticky content isn't just words. It can be photos, audio, and video.

50. Buy ads in newsletters.

People reading online newsletters are often skimming, not reading carefully, so you'll need a bold, eye-catching ad. Instead of merely advertising your website or an affiliate product, send people to a page where you offer a free report or mini-course in return for their email address. You'll get more bang for your buck by doing this. Instead of just building the affiliate vendor's business, you're building YOUR business.

50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 5

26. Publish a mini-course.

This technique encourages visitors to keep coming back to your site. Publish a short (or long) informational email mini-course. Provide genuinely useful content. Starting gradually, after you've won the trust of your readers, weave relevant affiliate links into the messages. Also, give your readers reasons to visit your site, giving them links to related articles on your site. These pages can contain both affiliate links and AdSense ads.

To retain your readers' interest, at the end of each message, give them a little teaser telling them what they'll get in the next message in the series. The autoresponder service we recommend is Aweber With only one subscription, it allows you to publish newsletters and autoresponder courses from different domains. Some smart marketers using this technique don't send the mini-course via email. They just send out a memo announcing when each new part is online. Doing this helps you evade spam filters - the shorter the message, the more likely it is to get through. Also, it gives you an opportunity to get eyeballs in front of the affiliate links or AdSense ads on your site.

27. Make helpful posts in forums.

Join forums in your niche and promote your site in your signature. Be careful. Read the forum instructions first or you're likely to annoy forum moderators and forum members who have been there for years. Lurk and learn. Some forums allow signatures. Some don't. Some won't allow words like "See the link in my signature". Tread carefully. You also need to remember that many affiliate agreements specifically say that posting an affiliate link on a forum is regarded as spamming. Ignoring this rule can get you dumped from an affiliate program. You could lose any commissions you've earned. Build your reputation by posting genuinely, helpful, useful comments. If you think carefully of ways to provide truly USEFUL content that people will talk about, you'll automatically end up with lots of free, one-way links to your site as people recommend it without even being asked to do so. Do a search in Google for yourkeyword + forum yourkeyword +"message board".

28. Write keyword-rich press releases.

Write keyword-rich press releases and submit them to such places as PRWeb, URLwire, BusinessWire, PR Newswire and Market Wire, publicizing your new site, or a new section of your site. Press releases can give you a burst of immediate traffic AND provide long-term links to your site. They may even result in journalists phoning you for an interview. A few years ago, the main aim of a news release was to catch the attention of an editor or journalist. These days, you're often aiming directly at Internet users. When writing the news release, keep the reader in mind all the time. You must catch the reader's attention very quickly, using phrases that entice the person to read the article AND click on a link to visit your site - either to the main page or to a special landing page. Write the press release as though you're writing an article for a newspaper. This means you must have a short, snappy introduction. Write concisely. Write the most important point in the FIRST sentence. Then write your second most important point, and so on.

29. Create a lively blog or blogs.

You can create a blog easily and free, without knowing any HTML. When you add a new page to your website, mention the new page in your blog. Make friends with other blog publishers and get links from them. Here are some good tips on how to increase the chance that someone will

link to your blog post:


http://www.howlinkable.com

When you post a message in your blog, your blog software should automatically send a ping to the main blog search engines, such as Technorati, and other sites. Learn how to do this. Here's a nifty tip. You can get your lastest blog post listed in Google quickly by using Google Sitemaps. Services such as Feedburner.com allow your blog's feed to be distributed easily to your site's users. They also allow email subscription of your feeds.

30. RSS: Make it easy for people to read your blog.

Some people will visit your blog to read it. Others will use an RSS reader on their computer or a web-based service such as MyYahoo! You can make it easy for such people to subscribe to your blog by adding a special little RSS, XML or MyYahoo! graphic to your blog. Some websites add a dozen or more such special graphics to their blogs.

31. RSS to email.

Some people don't like using RSS readers. They would prefer to get your blog posts via email. You can help them do so by using RSS to email services such as FeedBlitz, Bloglet or Rmail.

32. Remove broken links.

Remove all broken links from your site. Search engines don't like them. You can get free link checking software - Xenu's Link Sleuth - which you download and install. A web-based link checker I've used for years and recommend is LinkAlarm.com. It's very easy to use. If you're fortunate enough to have built your site using Site Build It! you'll have discovered that it has a free link checker which automatically advises you of broken links. That's a wonderful bonus. There's another good - free - way to check for broken links. If you create a sitemap using Google SiteMaps, one of the benefits is that Google will tell you about pages it can't crawl and links it can't follow. You can see where problems are occurring and fix them. Using Google SiteMaps is also a reliable way of making sure that Google knows about every page on your site.Site Build It! also automatically creates your Google SiteMap for you. You don't have to lift a finger.

33. Attract new audiences with your own podcasts.

A podcast is a sort of audio blog, distributed via RSS. The audio files can be downloaded to iPods or any computer or MP3 player. People can subscribe to your broadcasts via RSS feeds and automatically receive them. If you create your own informative, useful podcasts, you can reach a whole new audience. You'll need to get your podcasts listed in podcast directories such as Podcast.net. Make sure you use an eye-catching title for people scanning the directories. Large, popular directories of podcasts can be found at Feedburner.com and Apple's iTunes Music Store

34. Use reliable web hosting.

Use a good reliable web host. If your site is down when Google's robot comes visiting, your site is likely to disappear from the index. Many really "cheap" web hosts can end up being very expensive. If you have a bunch of sites, use several different web hosts. It's a form of insurance in case of disaster. Web hosts sometimes go out of business without warning. Use backups.

35. Analyze and tweak your internal linking.

Consider how your pages are linked. Changing your linking structure can increase or decrease a page's PageRank, which can give you a little boost in search engine rankings on your most important pages. There's a logical, sensible reason for doing this. You WANT more links to your important, income-generating pages and fewer links to obscure pages. Some webmasters use rel="nofollow" tags on links to certain pages, reducing PageRank flow to those pages. To me, this seems risky - surely Google would regard it as behavior aimed directly at search engines, not humans.

50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 4

16. Distribute USEFUL articles to article directories.

Write articles and submit them to article directories. Make sure they're USEFUL, interesting articles, not fluff. Other websites will pick up these articles and use them on their site .If you've added a link to your site in the "About the author" box at the bottom of the article, you can get hundreds or thousands of links to your site. You also boost your reputation. When writing the article, you need an eye-catching heading. You also need to give people a strong incentive to visit your site. Here are some ways to do that:

•Give people a link where they can get a free report.

•Tell them where they can subscribe to your newsletter.

•Tell them to visit your site for Part 2 of the article.

•Tell them to visit your site for a more comprehensive version of the article.

Distributing articles to directories is tedious and time-consuming. You can either do it manually or you can speed up the process - and receive a very helpful instruction manual - if you use ArticleAnnouncer. It's expensive but good value. Another popular way of distributing articles is to use the Article Marketer service to do all the hard work for you. iSnare is another good one. Here are some popular article distribution sites.

http://ezinearticles.com http://www.goarticles.com http://www.netterweb.com http://www.articlefinders.com http://www.articlecity.com

One annoying thing about this technique is that some unscrupulous website owners will publish your articles without linking back to your site. Oafs like that should be tarred and feathered, I reckon. Over all, the advantages outweigh the minimal disadvantages. Some people publish an article on their site and a few days later submit it to article directories. I'm cautious. I believe the search engines will eventually get much tougher on duplicate content, so I believe a safer approach is to distribute articles which are markedly different from the ones you publish on your site.

17. Write articles directly for other sites.

Getting high quality links to your site is hugely important. Ideally, you want links from "authority" sites - sites which have a lot of links to THEM. As well as reading what search engine optimization experts say, study what they actually DO. One common tactic they use is to write expert articles and get them published on related websites. When they do this, the links they get to their site are beautifully on target - those links come from a page which is all about search engine optimization - which perfectly matches the theme of their site. To a search engine, such links look much more important than a boring link which is just one of dozens on a page in a little mini-directory tacked on to a mini-site.

18. Submit articles to newsletters which are archived online.

Submitting articles to newsletters has been popular since the early days of marketing online. In the "Internet marketing" niche, publishers tend to be swamped with offers to publish articles. Other fields aren't so ridiculously competitive. You're likely to have more success if you take the time to establish a relationship with a newsletter publisher. Also, if you're prepared to write an article exclusively for one newsletter, your offer is more likely to impress. Subscribe to each newsletter and study it carefully. Study the online archives. The article you offer needs to be genuinely useful.

19. Include keywords in your online profiles.

Whenever you create an online profile anywhere online - on your blogs, on a forum or on sites such as LinkedIn - always use carefully chosen key phrases. This increases the chance that people will find you, either via search engines or, for example at LinkedIn, via the site's search facility. Profile links probably aren't very valuable in Google's eyes, but they're quick and easy to set up. You can often find forums in your industry by going to Google and typing in keyword +forum.

20. Get one-way links and a few reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links aren't as important as they used to be. They should not be your major traffic-generating strategy. They ARE still very useful, especially when you're getting a new site established in the search engines. Also, here's one of the many warnings from Google:

"Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links are links to your site that develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links are links to your site placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines."

Source: http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/

Google's webmaster guidelines say plainly:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

21. Publish articles on your site and invite other sites to publish them on their sites, with a link to you.

Some websites make it very easy for other sites to reprint their articles. At the end of each article on their site, they publish a note giving people permission to reprint the article providing the source box at the end is published, too. (Caution: Although this technique apparently works well for those who do it, I don't use this technique. My goal is to have almost all unique content on my sites. I wonder if the technique may not work quite so well sometime in the future. I could be wrong, but I speculate that as search engines become more and more clogged with junk sites, search engines will get much tougher on duplicate content. Sites which don't publish duplicate content will benefit, I believe.)

22. Submit your newsletter to newsletter directories.

Search in Google for...

ezine directories, ezine directory, newsletter directories submit your newsletter to newsletter directories. It's time-consuming and you probably won't get a lot of traffic from this technique. If you have more money than time, outsource this task. You could hire a student to do it.

23. Publish a mini-course.

This technique encourages visitors to keep coming back to your site. Publish a short (or long) informational email mini-course. Provide genuinely useful content. Starting gradually, after you've won the trust of your readers, weave relevant affiliate links into the messages. Also, give your readers reasons to visit your site, giving them links to related articles on your site. These pages can contain both affiliate links and AdSense ads. To retain your readers' interest, at the end of each message, give them a little teaser telling them what they'll get in the next message in the series. Some smart marketers using this technique don't send the mini-course via email. They just send out a memo announcing when each new part is online. Doing this helps you evade spam filters - the shorter the message, the more likely it is to get through. Also, it gives you an opportunity to get eyeballs in front of the affiliate links or AdSense ads on your site.

24. Write testimonials that are worth using.

When you read an ebook or newsletter or some product which you find useful, write a quick note to the author. Sometimes, your quick note will be published as a testimonial, with a link back to your site. Joe Vitale has taken this tactic to extraordinary lengths. For examples, trying doing a search in Google for

"joe vitale" +testimonial

Don't go crazy over this technique. Remember that every single thing you write online builds - or damages - your reputation.

25. Post free ads on forums which allow it.

I doubt if posting free ads will produce much benefit, but if you have lots of time you could try it.

50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 3

11. Try This Page Titles Experiment.

Here's a good way increase your traffic. Go to Google and type any phrase into the search box. Look at the titles of the websites in the top 10 rankings. Which ones catch your eye and tempt you to click on the link? Some are dreadfully stodgy, boring. Some are merely a long list of keywords. Some are good. Some are junk. Good titles are written for search engines AND humans. Now look at the titles on your site. Start with your most important pages.

 Rewrite them to make them more eye-catching. Now go to Google and do a search of your site like this “site:example.com”. Study the page titles. If you own a large site created over many years, you may be horribly embarrassed at just how BAD some of your page titles are. Do you want to find some examples of good titles? Simply go to Google and do some more searches. Don't stick to your industry. Type in all sorts of different phrases and study the titles that appear in the top 10. You'll soon be brimming with ideas on ways you can improve your page titles.

Checking how enticing the information is in your meta description tag can help, too. Some search engines display this information in their search results. If you have a well established site, you may have written many of your page titles and meta descriptions years ago when you knew less about marketing than you do now. If so, it's time for another look at them.



12. Organic SEO - a Few Key Points.

Search engines are getting cleverer all the time. You can try to outsmart them but to me it makes more sense to work WITH them. They're gradually getting better at sifting out low quality websites and ranking them poorly. So build high quality websites containing genuinely useful material that other people want to link to. The basics of good search engine optimization are fairly simple. Here's a very quick summary:

•You need to make it easy for a search engine to figure out the topic of your page.

•Find appropriate keywords or key phrases and use them in the title, in the page heading, in the introduction, throughout the article, in the meta description, in alt tags, at the end of the article, in links on the page, in bold or italics, and perhaps in a list on the page.

•Use key phrases in your file names, for example: keyword1-keyword2.html.

•Use synonyms and word variations naturally throughout the page.

•When linking to your pages, use appropriate keywords in the anchor text (the words people click on). Do this for links throughout your site, and also on other people's sites which link to yours. Vary the anchor text.

•For internal links, it's better to use text than graphical links.

•Create a logical navigation system so that humans and search engines can easily find the content on your site.

•Get links from other sites to internal pages as well as to your main page.

13. Submit to The Main Directories.

The more high quality links you have to your site, the more impressed the search engines will be. Start with major directories such as...

Yahoo!


DMOZ.org


sbd.bcentral.com

...and move on to...


Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsOurYear
LookSmart (probably too expensive) BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind

Be sure to read the submission rules carefully at each site. This will slow you down but it increases your chances of getting your site listed. Listings can last for years, so it's worth while taking your time to get the details correct.

14. Submit to Niche Directories.

Search for smaller, specialist directories in your niche. For example, if your site is on a health topic, look for health-related directories.

How to find niche directories:

• Go to Search It! (It's a very handy free research tool.)

•Scroll to the Search Category, "Specialty Hubs and Directories"

•Choose one of the 4 options in STEP 2

•Read the "Click Here for Information..." help before proceeding

•Complete STEPS 3 and 4, and then click on Search It!

•Read the tutorial. It tells you what to do with the search results

•Get your search results. You should be able to find relevant, themed hub sites and directories which will list

your site. Some charge a fee, some are free.

15. Submit Brief Hints to Newsletters and Blogs.

A brief, useful hint published in an archived newsletter can give you a link to your site for many years - perhaps even a decade or more.

You can also submit tips to blogs.

50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 2

In the previous part 50 ways On how to drive traffic to your website,  we described 5 ways to drive traffic to your website. Now I will tell five more ways to drive traffic to your site.



6. Choose your name wisely

Choose a memorable domain name. If you're launching a new site, choose a name people will remember easily. Ask Yourself "Will people remember my domain name?"Try to choose a name which won't be confused with similar names. You don't want people typing your competitor's domain name when they’re trying to find your site. NameBoy.com has a handy tool to help you choose domain names. Also, you can find a surprising number of good deleted (expired) domain names at Whois.net

7. Buy the wrong domain name, too.

If you think people may confuse your domain name with a similar name, try to buy that name, too.Here is an example sometimes when newsletters mentioned AssociatePrograms.com they put the "s" in the wrong place and called it "AssociatesProgram.com". So when that wrong domain name became available, buy it. Now, if you muddle up the name and type "AssociatesProgram.com" you're automatically redirected to “AssociatePrograms.com”. It occurred to me that people in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, who think "programs" is spelled "programmes", might also have trouble getting my domain name right. So I bought AssociateProgrammes.com, too. It also redirects to the correct domain. A good domain name registrar will make it very easy for you to redirect one domain name to another. 000Domains.com is one that does.

8. Make your domain name easy to read - especially if it's a .NET

Which of the following is easier to read and understand? www.incomefigure.com or www.IncomeFigure.com. See how using a capital letter at the start of each word makes the second domain name easier to read - and easier to remember. Whenever you mention your domain name anywhere, ALWAYS present it in its most readable form. A good place to start doing this is in your email signature file. If you're unfortunate enough to have bought the ".net" version of a domain name because someone raced you to the ".com", help people to remember your site by writing it like this...

Example.NET

Being MEMORABLE helps you get more repeat visitors.

9. Use appropriate keywords in your image file names.

You can get hundreds of visits a month from people who are searching for images. I'm not sure how valuable those visitors are, but I didn't have to do anything very special to get them. Google Images - http://images.google.com - makes it easy for people to search for graphics online. To take advantage of this, when choosing the file name of an image on your site, use an appropriate key phrase, for example, "book-ends.jpg" if you're promoting book ends. When you search in Google Images for "book ends" I discovered that the very first search result was for a page which did NOT contain a graphic of book ends! Instead, the page contained a "book ends" LINK to a book ends graphic on a second page. It if suits the design of your site, you may want to experiment with this technique. I'm not sure how much use traffic to images is, but if it's ADDITIONAL traffic you can get simply by choosing image file names carefully, it's worth having.

10. Do REALLY SERIOUS keyword research.

If you want to get LOTS of traffic from search engines, you need to find out the exact phrases which people are typing into search engines. There are free tools available for this, but they're not nearly as useful as the more comprehensive paid tools. For example, if you're using the Overture keyword tool for your research, be warned, its results can't be trusted. The Overture tool is useful to give you a quick rough guide, but NOT for serious research. "The harder it is to discover a certain search phrase (getting traffic), the less competition you will have in the SERPs (for that search phrase). If a keyword research tool is free and popular, how many competitors will you have for the phrases you discover there?"

50 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website - Part 1

Even if you are the smallest blogger in the world or one of the biggest blogger you would be still looking for new ways to bring traffic to your blog. In this article I will tell you top 50 ways to drive traffic to your blog to your blog these methods are completely free and easy to implement.



1. Your Content Matters The Most

The most important thing of your website or your blog is your content. Your content should be updated regularly and remember not to compromise on your quality. Yes, that is correct if you have written a quality content, it will automatically force the reader or the viewer to come back again and again. People will not visit your site if you don’t write quality article and new customers won’t come back.

2. Your Design and Your Layout

Most people complain about not having much traffic. But they don’t see is whether there site is worth visiting or not. First impression is the last impression. That is correct the person visiting your site will look at it first and then will go further. So choose your design and layout wisely make it user friendly.

3. Guest Blog

Offer to write a post on someone else’s site. Even better, have the post already written up and then let the blogger know you have a post ready to guest blog on their site, if it’s okay with them. When you write your guest blog post, find a post on your own blog that’s related and link to in your guest blog post. A link for you on their blog, will definitely increase your site traffic.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Websites, unlike other marketing tools, have to be publicized. When you write a radio commercial, you pay a radio station to run the ad when you design a brochure, you give it away. But when you publish a website, you must promote it to drive in business (visitors).

An excellent way to lead people to your site is to use a specialist. If you can't afford the cost of professional search engine optimization (SEO) however, you can do a good portion of it yourself.

In its most basic form, SEO is the practice of making a site available for the search engines to index in their database. Once your site has been optimized for the actual keyphrases your customers are searching for, you can be found in the page listings on Google, Yahoo! and other engines.

In addition to SEO, there are many other ways you can promote your site that are effective and free

5. Social Networks

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ are some examples of most popular social networking websites. Make an account there if you don’t have, synchronize your website with them. Follow people and like most popular pages. Keep updating there and definitely you will get good amount of traffic from there. These are very powerful tools if used correctly and wisely.