There are many different ways to drive traffic to your websites. This article will cover the ten primary methods of traffic generation that most people use to drive visitors to their websites.
A note about traffic generation – you do not have to use all ten methods to drive traffic to your site. Many people find that it is best to concentrate their efforts on 2-3 methods and become proficient and consistent in their efforts with those techniques. Oftentimes, if you spread yourself too thin using too many methods, you will find that you are unable to maintain the consistency of effort necessary to succeed. Therefore, find the methods that work best for you and master those before moving on to other methods.
Search Engine Traffic (SEO)
Search Engine Traffic is any traffic sent to you by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Visitors are directed to your site based on the search engine’s result set for a keyword or keywords. This type of traffic is great, if you can get your website high in search engine rankings. Search Engine traffic takes time and effort to develop, and requires both on and off-page optimization techniques (which are outlined in this blog.). If you are attracted to this method of traffic generation, realize that it can potentially take months of effort on your part to achieve a high ranking on Google and Yahoo, and then then there’s no guarantee of success. But, if you can get the coveted #1 listing for your keywords on Google or Yahoo, you will certainly see a lot of traffic.
PPC Advertising
PPC advertising is ideal if you want to drive traffic to your site very quickly and don’t mind paying for it. If you do use PPC advertising, making sure you have some method of capturing the prospect’s contact info (name, email) to make the most of this traffic. Remember, once your ad campaign stops, so does all the traffic.
Article Marketing
Article Marketing is a great technique to use to build traffic to your site, increase your search engine ranking, and establish yourself as an expert. See my earlier post about article marketing for more details. Article marketing is something you’ll want to establish as as long-term strategy – traffic will grow over time and number of articles published, so you must be diligent. It is recommended that you publish at least one article per day consistently over several months if you want to see real, long-lasting results from this technique.
Press Releases
Press releases are a little-known and incredibly powerful method of marketing your products and services. Want to get noticed by 10,000 people minimum overnight? Put out a press release. Ever notice that on a Google result set, press releases are listed above the first result on a search? That’s the power of press releases. The key with press releases is to make them news and not marketings peak. For example, a press release about how great your product is would not acceptable, but a PR about your charitable contributions, or an independent survey done by your company confirming an authority source on some important issue in your niche would be.
Link Building
Link building involves contacting other websites that are complementary to yours and getting them to link to you. You’ll effectively ‘steal’ some traffic from their site, and you’ll increase your own Google PR. Link building has always been a traditional backbone of traffic generation, but has been overshadowed in popularity by other techniques. Again, this is a long-term strategy, and you must be consistent in your efforts if you are to be successful with this method.
Blogs
Blogs are a great way to generate traffic to your website. By establishing yourself as an expert in your field and giving your product a personal front (you), you are helping your customers feel comfortable about buying from you, and creating a fantastic venue from which to drive traffic to anywhere you want. Alternatively, posting intelligent commentary to a posting of the blog of an expert in your field is also a good way to generate. Make sure that your comment is relevant and useful – don’t just spam a link to your site in your comments or you’re likely to get deleted.
Videos
Videos are an incredibly powerful way to drive traffic and grab attention for your products or services – just look at the success of YouTube. You can get literally tens of thousands of people looking at your videos within a day of your posting them on YouTube – more if your videos go Viral.
Forums
The Forum model is much like posting comments to blogs. The idea is to post a link to your site in a forum posting or reply, but you have to make sure that your post is relevant or useful, or your post will be deleted and you bill be banned from the forum. So, the best forum strategy is to invest some time in establishing yourself as a forum expert before you start adding links to your site in your posts. It will be much harder for forum administrators to kick you if you are an established and contributing member of their community.
Paid Links / Ads
Paid links on high PR authority sites in your niche are also a great way to drive traffic to your website. They will give you direct traffic to your site, as well as raise your Google search traffic due to increased relevance of your website for your keywords because of a one-way link from a high PR site.
Social Networking / Web 2.0
Social Networks are currently one of the hottest ways of generating massive traffic to your websites. With some intelligent manipulation of profile pages of MySpace, Squidoo, FaceBook, and others, I’ve seen friends not only get on page one of Google for their keywords in a day, but also get several different entries listed on the Google results! Used intelligently, social networks can drive massive traffic to your websites.
