Before any website can get sales, it must get traffic. The whole “build it and they will come” doesn’t work with the internet. I used to own the domain name “vwbus.com” and it got about 40 to 50 visitors a day by people simply typing that in to see what was there. That is the exception to the rule, however. Most sites have to leverage other sites with existing traffic in order to get started. Here are a few ways that you can get some free traffic and leverage these sites that can get you the traffic.
Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get free traffic, but like any other website, you still have to get traffic to the main blog. However, blogs have a major advantage over regular websites because they have an RSS feed built in. Also, depending on which blogging platform you use, there are some instant advantages because if you use wordpress.com, the domain tends to rank very well with the search engines. Also, Google owns Blogger.com and has a tendency to “hang out” on their own properties looking for new updated content.
Social bookmarking is a great way to get easy links back to your main website and depending on the type of social bookmark site you’re using, you’ll have the opportunity to get a lot of traffic back to your website. Digg.com is one of the examples of this type of site that has the capacity to drive a tremendous amount of traffic back to your site. If you are interested in looking more into the social bookmarking scene, do some research on the top 100 “diggers” or “stumblers”.
Some other sites that can help you get traffic and rank well on their own are sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. If you have done your keyword research and know what keywords are getting searched for, you’ll have an easy time finding keywords that are getting searched, but have very little competition. Using these keywords in the title of your Squidoo “Lens” or your Hubpages “Hub”. Using the keywords in both your title and again throughout the page you create then doing some additional social bookmarking links back to your “Lens” or “Hub” and watch it get ranked in the search engines.
The single best free traffic source is article marketing. In the eyes of the search engines these article websites have a very high authority and rank very well with the search engines. This also means that links from these article pages are usually very relevant. Because you are the one that writes the articles or at least controls the content of those articles, the links back to your pages on your site will be very relevant and the search engines will reward you with higher rankings.
Posting on forums is another great way to generate links back to you site. Find forums within your niche and start contributing to the conversations. Make sure that you’re posting on forums that allow you to add a signature with a link. Also, whenever possible, view the source on forums and see if they add a “nofollow” attrib within the link code. If they do, that forum won’t do much for your search engine optimization, but will work for getting clicks back to your website.
There are a lot of blogs that you can add your comment to. These comments can be used for the search engine benefit by using your keyword phrase as the link back to your site. If the blog is a “popular” blog where many people add comments, the webmaster or blog owner may have a setting that prevent the search engine from giving credit for that link. In those cases, you can use the more popular blogs to link back to your site and simply get some clicks back to your site. This puts some of the pressure on to write comments that encourage the clicks.
There are several things that you can do to help you get traffic to your site. These are only a handful of ways you can use. The more time you spend trying these things out, the more you’ll learn and the better you’ll get at getting rankings and traffic.
