Sunday, February 20, 2011

Internet Marketing Traffic Methods

By Joshua Bouton


Every online marketer must put in the time and effort to send high quality traffic to their sites. The sad truth is that just having a great website is not enough. More than that, you need to give people a reason to visit your website. It will require some knowledge and work to learn how to drive traffic, but it's really not all that hard to do. If you're really serious about your business, you'll set aside some time each day to work on building traffic. Once you get the ball rolling, though, you might find that some traffic will happen through methods that have nothing to do with you, like word of mouth! But let's talk about some strategies you can use to kick-start some traffic to your website, or blog.

It's best to avoid submitting your site to Google using their submission form, but it's fine to do that with the smaller search engines which is a good idea for different reasons. Using SEO might get you picked up organically, but the quickest way to make sure that your site is indexed on the major search engines is to use Web 2.0 methods. Manually listing, or submitting, to secondary search engines can be time-consuming. The reason for doing this is the major search engines will view those backlinks, which they'll be, as a sign of more popularity, plus you'll get added traffic from them. There are tons of ways to get backlinks, and some are certainly more valuable than others. But the name of the game is "natural," or appearing to be natural to Google, so having a variety of backlink sources will only help you in the eyes of the major search engines.

Seek out writers and website owners who can contribute relevant content such as articles to your site and ask them for contributions. Offer them a link back to their own websites in exchange for a few hundred words on your niche topic. This exchange can benefit you in two ways. Outbound links also contribute to your page rank. But you'll also be acquiring an inbound link as well. When someone knows that their content is on your site, they may want to brag about this on their own site, and this way you'll be getting a link back to your website. Doing this can bring you visitors who found out about you from the contributor's site, and you will also be building both your inbound and outbound links!

Have a good and memorable domain name. Believe it or not, having a good domain name really does matter. Pick a name that is simple and not hard to spell. Just as word of mouth is important for an offline business, so it is for a website. Domain names with strange spellings, hyphens are that are very long tend to get forgotten or ignored. What you are aiming for is having lots of people visiting your site and then recommending it to others. The shorter and simpler the domain name is, the less chance people will make a mistake when they want to forward it; they are also more likely to remember it and be able to repeat it verbally. So you want to have an interesting domain name, but not one that's too offbeat!

With so many different ways to generate traffic, how do you decide which ones to put your efforts into? Our recommendation is that you focus on one traffic building method per day. Give each method a fair chance to work; if you don't see results in several months, you can try something else. When you find that something is working, you should then work at this method harder to bring you even greater success. When you have a website, you want to bring as much traffic to it as possible; you really can't have too much. In order to make sales, you need people coming to your site; more visitors means more customers!




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