Website Traffic Starting Points

This page is for those new to generating website traffic. More established users should view the Categories and Recent Posts listings for advanced strategies.

Question: I’ve uploaded my pages, but don’t know how to get traffic to my website. What’s the best (and cheapest) way to start?

There are lots of ways to begin driving traffic to your website or blog, but some are easier than others. Here are fifteen free methods which, if used in combination, will usually generate considerable traffic:

1) If you have only basic computer skills then one of the best methods to begin with is Article Marketing. Write some articles about your site, your services or your product and submit them to article directories such as EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Be sure to include links back to your site, and read about how to use these directories properly.

2) Basic SEO is also a lot less complicated than most of what you read online would have you believe. Find keywords at WordTracker.com that apply to your site and make sure you include them (sparingly) in your text. Use one main keyword per page plus one less important keyword, repeated approximately once per paragraph but only as part of natural-sounding text. (For ‘keyword’ here read ‘keyphrase’, as keywords (phrases) with 3 or more words in them are liable to work better.) Make sure you include your keyword (phrase) as part of the page title, with the keyword at the beginning of the title e.g. “Lawn Cutting Services: How to Keep Your Grass Green” where the keyword is: Lawn Cutting Services.

3) Getting links to your site is also of great importance as part of the leading search engines’ algorithms take the number and quality of links pointing to your site into account when ranking your pages. So, use the best content you can to encourage natural linking, and help it along by setting up pages about your site at free places such as Squidoo and HubPages.

4) Submitting your sites to directories and search engines will also get you more incoming links, but beware of submitting to Google as this can sometimes slow down being listed.

5) Posting ads to classifieds sites is also an easy and popular method of generating traffic used by many. Craig’s List is one of the best known classifieds sites

6) Issuing Press Releases. There are sites where you can issue a press release about your website or company, and have it picked up by hundreds of other sites. To do this well make sure your press release is newsworthy. To get the maximum benefit you may have to pay for wide distribution, however.

7) Start a blog related to your site. Link to your site from your blog (try to make the links a natural part of your blog posts rather than separate items). Better, start two blogs. Have them based on different platforms so that the links from them to your site are on different IP addresses. But make them real blogs with real, relevant content. You can start a blog at Blogger and another at WordPress. Or you can use the free WordPress software on your own hosting space (as TrafficFolder.com does.)

8 ) Start another website about a subject related to your primary site, but with a different focus. Again link to your primary site from the new site, but not back again (one way links are stronger than reciprocal links). Better, start two new websites (or three?) Keep the content real and as original as you can. On some pages, which saves time, you can reproduce syndicated content from sources such as EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com already mentioned, but write your own introduction to each article you produce to decrease the duplicate content aspect of your page, and only use syndicated articles when you have something real to say about them and a good reason for using them (such as ‘the article author has said it better than I could’.) You will be doing the article author a service by spreading the article with its connected author profile box and links. But only ever use content that really IS available for such syndication, otherwise you will be infringing copyright and breaking the law.

9) Contribute articles from your blog to Blog Carnivals. If you are not sure what blog carnivals are you can find out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_carnival and you can find an extensive list of blog carnivals at BlogCarnival.com.

10) Write about something so completely new, even perhaps a little outrageous, that people will want to comment on what you say (and of course link back to you to reference your original post). This is known as providing ‘Link Bait’. But be very careful, it is not really for the beginner who is not used to etiquette online. Certainly, under no circumstances say anything libellous, defamatory or extremely controversial. You want people to link back to you, not get yourself or your site banned.

11) Post videos to YouTube. Making your own videos may sound daunting but these days, with all the online tools available, it isn’t. Many online videos that exist to explain how to do something on the web only show a computer screen moving between different windows as the explanation unfolds. So there is no need for you to appear in the video yourself if you are uncomfortable with that idea. You can use your own voice over the images, but if you really don’t want to do even that you can include explanatory captions, typed in a WordPad window for example, or use ‘screen captions’ which are part of CamStudio. CamStudio is an open-source, free software program for making videos available from CamStudio.org. You can even get computer-generated characters to do the acting and speaking for you at Xtranormal.com. Here at TrafficFolder.com we used this facility to make the video ‘How do I Get My Site to the Top of the Search Engines?’

12) Make audio how-to tutorials, upload them to your site and submit your page to audio search engines. You can re-use articles you have written for this purpose. Sound Recorder is part of Windows. You should find it in Accessories on your programs menu, depending on which version of Windows you have. Mac users can download a free audio-recording program available at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/voicecandy.html.

13) If you are selling a product set up an affiliate program and let others promote and sell your product for you. But make the commission generous (at least 50%) or you won’t get many affiliates interested. If you are selling a digital product, such as a pdf how-to manual, even a 90% commission level will make you a profit because you will be selling copies of your product that you would not otherwise be selling, and each copy costs you nothing to make. Ideally have the affiliates’ links be at your own URL to maximize incoming links, however a simple solution to sell your products using affiliates that does not use your URL is ClickBank

14) Give away a viral ebook from your site. A viral ebook is one where you invite those who receive it to give it away to others. You can give them an incentive to do this by letting them rebrand any affiliate links you have in the ebook, yet your name and website URL remains in one part of the ebook, such as the title and introduction. So your ebook — if it contains useful information — should reach many people, and they will see your name and URL, and so visit your site for more information.

15) Start a mailing list. You could use your viral ebook as an incentive to get people to subscribe. Use a proper autoresponder with a double opt-in to verify that your visitors really do want to subscribe and then you should avoid accusations of spam — you can prove your mailings are not unsolicited. Aweber is probably the best known. But only send out useful information to your list or people will soon unsubscribe. Follow the principal that you are there to give good, free information to people and they will respect you for it. Then, when you want traffic to your site you can email your list about something new at your website and your list members will go there to find out more.

Warning: Whatever website traffic generating methods you do begin with, don’t be tempted to try PPC (Pay-Per-Click Advertising), most widely known in the form of Google’s own PPC, Adwords, if you are a beginner. This is a sure way for the inexperienced to lose money, and quickly. Both PPC and the Internet have changed radically over the past few years, and Adwords is now only for the very experienced. You have been warned!

This page gives just a brief taster of some relatively easy website traffic generating methods available to the newbie, but in only the briefest detail. These topics will be dealt with in more detail elsewhere on this site.

For more articles and information to help you get traffic to your site go here: Website Traffic Starting Points

Feel free to ask me questions about any of the traffic methods described above – just type your question into the comment box below…

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