You’ve built a beautiful site with terrific content, a veritable treasure chest for people in your market, and yet you wait in vain as no one comes along to avail themselves of your site. You’ve got a bad case of no traffic, and unless you find a cure, it could be fatal. Since nobody wants that, let’s take a peek at some surefire ways to get visitors to your site.
Paid Traffic — This can be far and away the fastest way to get visitors to your site. You can have a pay per click advertising campaign up and delivering visitors to your site in a matter of a couple of hours. The upside is you’ll have nearly instant visitors; and the downside is that it will cost you real cash. PPC traffic can be a great thing, but you really have to keep an eye on your costs and return on investment (ROI). It’s definitely not for the faint of heart, or for someone who has a very limited budget.
SEO — Using search engine optimization to increase traffic to your site works very well if done correctly. Optimizing your site for certain keywords, having the proper theme, building inbound links and in general making your site an authority in your niche is all well within the realm of possibility. It merely takes a lot of careful planning, consistent effort, and some time. It’s definitely not for those who are seeking a quick hit. This will appeal to those of you who intend to build a business over time, and are looking for rankings that will stick.
Social Networking – Another of the “free” methods, this one will do wonders for you if are able to create and cultivate a following. Being the go-to person in your niche will deliver loads of traffic your way, and using the various social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and others to accomplish these ends are very doable. Also, making sure your site itself is set up to be as Web 2.0 friendly as possible will make things far easier as you try and funnel traffic to your site.
Article Marketing — If you can write, or if you can outsource, article marketing is a great way to generate not only visitors to your site, but some great links from authority sites and good rankings in the search engines. Producing quality content that is interesting an helpful is a terrific way to not only position yourself as an authority in your market, but also to catch immediate visitors from those who read your articles on the article sites themselves. All this costs you is time, if you write them yourself or a small investment if you outsource it.
Videos and Podcasts – If you have the ability to create useful videos or podcasts, and promote them in the correct ways, this can bring boatloads of traffic to your site. Today’s tools make it very easy to create these, and if you have a hook or an interesting take on things, your video could go viral and you’ll be having bandwidth problems! We should all be so lucky!
There are many other ways to generate visitors: classified ads, link building, forums, commenting on blogs, guest blogging, Web 2.0 sites, joint ventures, contests, ad swaps, content syndication, trackbacks, and more.
The key here is to pick a method or two and get started, and not try and hit all of these at once. Give something a shot and stick with it long enough to see results. You’ll be glad you did!
