Author: Suzanne Morrison
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
(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 getting 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 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.
Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster
and owner of How
to Start an Internet Business. To learn more about how to promote
your website please download the free 30
days to success Ebook
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