Site Traffic – How You Can Generate Traffic To Your Site

Free Site Traffic Generation

Site traffic generation is difficult to discuss with out talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so, I may rant about SEO through this post but will try to keep it to a minimum as that’s another topic in its own right. But you can read more about on-page search engine optimisation in our other post here

Warning!

This might end up being a very long post but I am just typing stuff as they come to me based on what we tend to do when we decide to generate traffic to our sites. We may not use all the methods on every site we promote every time but we’ve used and use them as and when we snap out of procrastination Also, note that there may be other methods not covered here but these should be good  enough to see you genereting that much needed site traffic.

Most of these can be done for you through out sourcing or you can get the “paid for traffic” as many do but although I may hint on that kind of traffic, our main traffic generation is free andbased on SEO as well as positioning. By positioning I mean presenting our offers in front of those that may be interested.

Oh!

Feel free to point out any typos you see in this post because I’ll sure not review it for correct tense or sentence construction – Its my Easter break. There’s a good excuse

Word Of Mouth – Referals:

Use your contacts to spread word about your online business whenever possible. Your friends have their own contacts and most might even do a bit of blogging too so it helps for them to know about your venture.

This of course for when you’re out at a party or any other social gathering. Talk about your internet marketing to people you never know who may be interested in any way eother to promote, to joint venture or even spread the word for you.

Article Marketing:

Publish articles in article directories and ezines about your niche. Always have a great descriptive resource box  with a keyword rich anchor text to your niche offering. Not all article directories perform the same but they most likely all help you build more links to your site (off-page seo) whic is a good thing. It helps to track where your traffic is coming from so you can best assess what promotional method, resource box, headline, article length & content etc is more responsive. You can use google analytics or and detailed results site-hits-counter both free.

You can also use ezine marketing by submiting classified ads (paid for adverts) The response tends to be good as the ezine is usually only ever gets distributed to those interested in its niche. So, you’ll be tartgeting prospects who have already shown as interest in your market offering.

Clasified ads can also be placed in Craigslist, US Free Ads, The Yellow Pages and MySpace Classifieds among others.

Video Marketing:

The quality, topic, lenght (10mins max for youtube) title and location of your video are important factors in how much traffic it’ll generate to your site. It all starts with a good quality video camera in a nicely lit place if recording yourself and not a screen capture. Be normal in your message delivery unless you’re acting of course – I once saw a clown video that was really funny actually. Don’t hype what you’re talking about just state the facts as best as you can to inform those viewing the video. Be human and offer value in your message or promise value with your recommendation – fill a need or build desire. Say what you’d like the viewer to do at the end of the video. You can mention it at the start and the end or just at the end. This should also be stated in the text by the video – your video description which should contain a keyword rich link to your site.

The title of the video should relate to what the video contains and the category in which its been placed or submitted. Nothing puts off a person who has read one title only to find that what’s being offered are online drugs

Use your well researched keywords as your video tags and insert one or two in your video title. Have your site’s URL in the video. Some put this at the end of the video but we some times put it in the video as a watermark so its visible through out. Don’t hide the control buttons if you have that ability. Many gurus are doing that these days on their promotional videos but because I am time bad most times, if I give that video 5 minutes and it’s still rolling, I just close the browser. Its just frustrating to make me feel forced to watch it to the end with out having any control – but that’s just me

You can use MetaCafe, MySpace, YouTube but there are many more online video sites. The more you spread the word the better for your sites both in backlinks and eye balls. Community sites are great too so go out and test those too but don’t try mmore than one as you might not be able to keep up or dedicate enough time to the community you’ve buit.

Content Publishing Formats:

We’ve talked about a few above but to get more eye balls (and links), you need to further your reach.
Publish your content on or as Articles, Audios, Videos, PDFs, Blogs, Standard pages, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Facebook, software, seminar, webinar, rss etc.

The more forms you make your content available, the wider the audiance you’ll reach hence more traffic. With Google now reading the words in your pod casts, this will help confirm your site’s specific niche. This will also guarantee very fast indenxing. This post is going to be in the Google index in about 10 minutes max and that happens with all the posts here. That’s key to product launches or affiliate marketing because then searchers can find you right away instead of waiting for days to get indexed.

Organic Search Engine Traffic:

This one is mainly based on your SEO which includes all the above (off page seo) and the good old onpage search engine optimization.

Dont spend eternity looking for the perfect keywords for your niche just get the best 20 keywords you have, group them into 4 and target those 4 individually in your articles. As you find more seemingly profitable keywords, build content around them and in time, you’ll rank for most of those keywords. With site hits tracking, you’ll know which ones the search engines believe to be more relevant to your site and you should continue to build more content around those ones.

Remember not to keyword spam but use these keywords in a more human and natural way through out your site. Place them in the title of your webpage(s), meta-description, meta-keywords, name of your article, body of your article, the resource box of your article and these should also be used in as the anchor text to your article. Link directly to the article and also to the home page with different but related keywords. You remember we said to pick 4 – right?

Okay, those 4 would only give you 5 articles but then you can mix them again and generate another 4 articels. You could no doubt start adding other keywords taken from your site hits counter logs.

Blog Commenting:

Comments on other blogs helps generate you free traffic and a backlink or trackback too. The best blogs to comment on are obviously the ones with a high page rank and have a DOFOLLOW tag so you get as much link juice as possible. These pass pagerank basically – A good thing

The best approach is to comment on blogs within your niche and use your keyword as your name with your site URL of course so your name (keyword now) will link back to your site with your preffered on topic anchor text. Note that some blogs dont allow this so look at previous commentors’ names to verify its okay or your comment will be deleted – Oops!

Please, please help yourself by not appearing like a useless comment spammer. Comment sense. It’s really frustrating for one to write a post they feel is fit to publish only to find that someone has come along and commented “Nice post!” with a nicely themed backlink to their site

That comment offers nothing of value to the blog and its visitors hence will only server to waste the blog owners’ time and frustrate them that much more. Needless to say, it’ll be deleted and show you in bad light to the blog owner – Phew!

Okay, blog comments should add value or at least look to build on what has already been said. You can also ask a question relating to the topic being discussed. If it makes sense, your posts will be accepted every time and you might even form a good relationship with the blog owner.

There have been cases where blog owners have guest bloggers, review your blog and comment about it, or even joint venture with you on your product or theirs as you’re both in the same market.

To ease your search for relevant blogs with good page rank and the dofollow tag, you can use our free blogsearch tool.

If you find a blog that fits your niche, then sign up for their feed so you can get updates when they publish a post. The point is for you to be first to comment. When you do this, most of the other commenters after you will see and read your comment. If it makes sense and you seem like one who has something to say, they’ll visit your site to sniff around.

Video Commenting:

Comment on videos posted by others on video sites. Again, dont forget that link and offer value and relevance. Same principle as blog commenting.

Google Images:

This is one area that very few utilize but comments to these and also submiting your own nicely categorised and tagged images generates good backlinks and traffic.

Affiliate Marketing or Joint Venutres:

If you have a product, you can leverage the power of affiliates and JVs to promote for you for a commision. Yes, its some sort of paid for traffic but in the end you’re building your list of customers and subscribers who you know are happy to spend.

This is powerful but only works if you have your own product.

Product Give-Aways & Competetions:

Agian you must have a product to give away to take part. This will build your list and that list will form your traffic pool and future affiliates or JVs.

Create widgets and distribute them, although we hear traffic exchanges work, we’ve never used them so you can test them out and advise us here.

I know of many more ways but as I said before, these should be good starters.

Okay, I have to be honest with you now. I am tired and people want to party as its Easter so I’ll continue on this only as a way of answering any questions you may have via the comments feature below

We’ll be releasing an A-Z video series of doing this whole online marketing stuff for you once we finallize some work we’re currently doing. Multi-tasking is not the best approach here. Those who comment on this blog, will be contacted first for beta testing when we go live with that. We’re thinking some time in May 2009.

It’ll cover the tools we use and other sneaky methods to beat the competetion in no time.

Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Do you have any Site Traffic Generation question or comment?

Have a nice Easter