There is no use having a great website without having any traffic. There are many, many ways of generating traffic to your website, and you will be shown the most common and best working here.
Search engines
Search engines are the absolute best way of getting free and highly targeted traffic to your website. The traffic is highly targeted because they used your keyword as a search term. That means they are looking for what you deliver. It is a great way of attracting targeted customers.
You do not have to submit your site to the search engines.
They will find you. The search engines have small computer programs called spiders, robots (bots) or crawlers which crawls the web via the hyperlinks (links). This is the way it will find your site, and you will be better off getting your link on the page of a site which is already indexed in the search engines and has a bit of PageRank.
You can do this by either exchanging links or you can go ahead and just buy a textlink on a site. That will get your site indexed pretty fast. Ranking well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) is another subject and that will be covered in the SEO part of this book. Read also the free article SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen Directories
Directories can be valuable in the terms of gaining page rank, but usually they do not drive massive amounts of traffic. The effort to submit your site to a few good directories will still pay off though. You need links into your site, and you can find great directories that will include your site. Both free and paid. In the resource section you will find links to di rectories that are good.
PPC, Ar
Link exchanges
Link exchanges are a way to gain incoming links and also to gain link popularity that will both affect the search engine results and drive traffic. How to do link exchanges is explained extensively in the part on SEO. But do not get to caught up in this to early in the process.
You can use all your time to do marketing of your site when it is up and running. First create the content of the site.
Forums/Blogs/Message boards/Groups
Visiting forums, message boards, blogs or participating in groups and contributing to the discussions is always a great way to get people interested in you and your site. You are usually allowed to include a link to your website in your profile or in your comment.
But do not misuse it to submit messages just to have your link posted. Give a valuable contribution and ask questions only about things that you have a real interest in. And do not be afraid to participate, newcomers are welcome in most forums and I will give you the links to a few great forums in the resource section.
Article Submissions
This is a great way of doing promotion for your site and is a way that I have been using very successfully myself. Usually when you submit an article at an article directory, you are allowed to include a resource box on the end of the article.
In the resource box you can write information about your self and you are usually allowed to put in a link back to your site. You need to write good articles though. Nobody wants to visit a site that is mentioned in a badly written article.
If you have written a good article on a subject that is interesting to many and related to the topic of your website it is very likely that the people that took the time to read the whole article will also visit your website. If your website is good they might look around for more material written by you, and perhaps they even bookmark your site to come back later.
For more information on article marketing please visit:
http://www.internet-marketing-startup.com/
PPC
Buying traffic from the pay per click can be a good option when you get cheap pay per click prices. This option is more relevant when your site has quite a few pages and you are likely to get some clicks on your ads or you have products to sell. This option is not advisable if you are not making money with your site. The only thing that could defend it is if you are building an opt in email list. Newsletter and email marketing is covered in an own part of this article.
Make your site sticky.
By that it is meant that you make the site interesting enough for people to want to return there or interact. A returning visitor is the best feedback you can get, that means you are doing something right.
Everything that lets your visitor interact with your site will make it sticky. Ways to make your site sticky:
Newsletter
Shout box
Guestbook
Message board
Forum
Chat
Comment area
Reviews
Article Submission
Polls
Tests
Quiz
Sweepstake
Your own affiliate program
