Driving Traffic to Your Website or Blog for Free
Driving traffic to your website or blog is still the hardest part of making money online. There are many factors to consider after you build the site, but also what tools you have integrated into your site as well. The idea of driving traffic to your website, and not having the process cost you a cent has never been more achievable than it is right now! So don’t wait! Follow these pieces of advice and start your marketing campaign today!
Social Media
Social Media is vitally important when it comes to driving traffic to your website. There are several places that you absolutely must have a presence on the internet before you can even think of competing with today’s competition. They breakdown into the 2 following groups: Social Networking & Social Bookmarking.
Social Networking
Social Networking websites are an improvement on forums, where people create profiles and connect with other people to share their information, ideas, photos, videos, and comments. This is the fastest networking solution ever invented. People are now connecting all over the world at a rapid rate. Make sure you are connected for your website’s sake!
Facebook
http://www.facebook.com
Facebook is the ultimate social networking site that is on its way to achieving 1 billion users. Having a fanpage for your website is crucial for traffic generation. Facebook is an excellent tool for sparking conversations with your viewers. A fanpage facilitates a forum where your viewers can read, share, make comments, watch videos, view photos, and write reviews about your website, increasing the buzz around your website, and if linked properly, will send a flow of interested people to your website. Make sure you have like buttons throughout your website for Facebook users to share your content.
Twitter
http://www.twitter.com
Twitter is the ultimate micro-blogging platform. People tweet in a 140 characters or less anything from information, news, quotes, questions, demands (even though those don’t go over well) to pretty much anything you can say quickly. Sharing your knowledge on Twitter will gain you followers, which will in turn establish you as a trusted authority in your field. It starts off slow, but soon you can post your websites pages as news into your twitter feed, and drive people to your website. Make sure you have a Tweet button integrated into your website’s pages so Twitter users can tweet your articles.
LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com
LinkedIn is a powerful professional social network, which allows people to connect to other people in their profession and share their contacts with one another. This is powerful for people looking for you expertise. By promoting your content to the right people you can definitely attract influential people to your website. Make sure you join discussions that relate to your profession, and add a LinkedIn share button to increase your traffic results.
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com
Who doesn’t like video? In this day and age where everybody can take videos with their phones, videos have almost become mandatory for website promotion. I’m sure you know what YouTube is, probably watching cats do crazy things. Did you know that having a customized, properly branded YouTube channel with interesting videos that users can subscribe to will greatly increase your traffic. People love watching TV. Just makes sure your videos provide some entertainment value, and are not a commercial.
Google+
http://plus.google.com
The newest contender to the large social networking platform, Google+ is still in its beta stage, but growing at a rapid rate. Google has taken the approach of improving on both Twitter and Facebook’s design, making them a force to be reckoned with. Adding people to your circles (groups) and sharing your content will help attract users to your website. Make sure you have the +1 button added to your website for these users so they can promote your content on their profiles to their circles. A cool feature to this social networking site is the Hangout feature, which will allow your views to video chat 10 at a time (you +9) with you about your site’s content. Never before have Q&A sessions been easier than now!
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking sites are different from the networking counterparts due to the fact that users will not interact with each other, but instead promote content that can be bookmarked to their profiles and shared. These sites are not nearly interactive or exciting as the others, but still are great for people wanting to catch up on the latest news in their fields of interest.
Digg
http://www.digg.com
Digg is a simple social bookmarking website, where people “digg” articles they find on the internet and follow other peoples bookmarks. Making sure you have a digg button on your website will help people share your content’s link on this platform.
Stumbleupon
http://www.stumbleupon.com
Stumbleupon works exactly like Digg, where people bookmark articles on the internet for others to read. Having a Stumbleupon button your website will allow people who have registered with this site to share your content easily.
Now I know your thinking: that’s a lot of buttons! If you are limited in the amount of space you can use for social media, then try the Addthis button – http://www.addthis.com. This social media sharing platform integrates 350 (currently) different social buttons into one tiny widget, making it easy to spread the word about your website.
Search Engine Optimization
Having your website tuned for search engines will certainly help bring targeted, organic traffic to your website. By now I’m sure you’ve heard it all. Great keywords, good page titles, alt tags for images, and great navigations will improve your website rankings! Buy now! Just $2000 and $200 a month with our sure fire system…yada yada yada. Don’t get sucked into that junk! These things may help a little, but it is now 2011, and there are more effective and important ways to improve your websites visibility in search engines.
Backlinks
The days of link-trading are over and will not even count towards your authority score that is given to you by search engines. So don’t bother. These days, backlinks (true one way links from websites to your site) are the way to go. Participating in blogs, guest authoring, and just having good content will move you up the rankings in no time! This process is not easy or short, but true success never is. Stay true, spread the word, and in time this will be the most successful form of SEO you ever implemented.
However, if you are looking for the quick route, this link can help get you started. If you click the link, it will take you to a URL submission tool that will list your website with over 2500 websites! They are mostly WHOIS websites and won’t offer any targeted value, but will get your back-linking started.
Lots of Good Content
Sounds easy, but in actuality this process is very long and hard, but will bring the most rewards. Having great content will get shared, and that will bring people to your website. Then they will enjoy the content, and share it with others, etc… This is half of the process. The other half is the amount of content you have indexed. The more pages you have indexed with search engines, the more chance they will show up in results, increasing your chances of people clicking on your links, and visiting your website. This is a pretty straight forward process, but time consuming.
Guest Blogging
Blogging in your area of expertise on other people’s website is the most complimentary, and authoritative way of increasing your website’s traffic. After all, the other person is willing to share their following with you in exchange for good content on their website. This is a win/win situation for all, and will increase your site’s visibility in search engines by spreading your face and the website you represent across the internet.
Traffic Trading
Now this is relatively new, but is guaranteed to bring traffic (although not very targeted) to your website. Traffic trading is where you visit other people’s links, and in turn you get enough points to use to attract other people to clicking on the links you are sharing. Let’s take a look at a site that offers traffic trading:
TrafficUP
http://www.trafficup.net
On this site you can sign up and get free points to use as a bid to drive people to your website. They have to stay a certain amount of time, but who says they don’t grab a coffee while your page is open? You can of course buy points, but essentially you will have to spend hours looking at other people’s websites, in order to get them to look at yours. The bright side is that with this program, you will increase your traffic. The down side is that you will have no idea if the traffic was quality traffic or not. If your website has a sure fire way of convincing people to do what you want them to do on your website, than this may be a good option for you.
Now if you have followed the steps so far, you have added 11 new traffic lanes to your website. If you continue to follow these channels, and keep up with them, there is only traffic success in your future. These options may not be quick or easy solutions, but they will build a solid foundation of traffic for your website. I hope these tools work for you as well as they have worked for this website, and many other websites that we have helped. Enjoy!
P.S. Of course if you need help or don’t have the time to manage all of these marketing campaign channels, we can help! This is what KMH Kreations does, as well as website development.
