After setting up your website and stocking it with enough informative articles, without visitors all your effort would be in vain. To successfully make money with your website, never ignore the importance of attracting targeted web traffic to it.
There are basically two things you need to succeed in making money with your website. You will need quality content and huge amount of targeted web traffic. Quality content places your online shop in good light to your visitors. It makes them to trust you and to consider you as an expert in your field. In this article, we are going to consider 9 ways of attracting targeted web traffic to your site.
1. Search Engines:
Submitting your site to search engines is the very first thing you should do. Do not forget that search engines will contribute a large percentage of your free traffic.
But submitting your site to search engines is not enough, you have to learn how to rank high in SEs for keywords in your niche. Familiarize yourself with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
There are over 100 search engines in existence today and all of them would contribute their own quota of traffic to your website. Google has the highest share. Make sure you submit your site to Google at www.google.com/addurl.
If you want to submit your site to 40 major search engines, www.submitexpress.com will do that for you free of charge. SubmitExpress also have a premium service that review your site and submit it to 75,000 search engines and web directories.
2. Article Marketing:
Article marketing allows you to leverage on the high page rank and traffic of popular article directories to get traffic to your site. It involves writing and submitting articles to article directories. These article directories are websites that collect and publish huge numbers of articles written by people who want to promote their website.
Article marketing is a very popular method of attracting targeted traffic to a website. It gives you free traffic, boost your search engine ranking and ensures faster indexing of a new page or website. To get free traffic, you have to write many keyword-optimized articles and submit them to article directories.
At the end of each article, attach a resource box. The resource box is where the traffic comes from. It contains information about who you are, what you do and a link to your website. If you want your resource box to get you more traffic, use it to offer one freebie or the other instead of just writing about yourself or your site. But mind you, the freebie must be related to the subject of your article.
If you want your articles to be index high in search engine results, use popular keywords in your articles. You can get such keywords by doing keyword research.
Below are very popular article directories you can submit your articles to:
- Ezinearticles.com 6. Articledashboaed.com (PR5)
- sooperarticles.com (PR5) 7. Ezinemark.com (PR4)
- Selfseo.com (PR5) 8. Infobarrel (PR4)
- ideamarketers.com (PR5) 9. Goarticles.com (PR3)
- ArticleTrader (PR5) 10. Amazines.com
3. Optimise Your Content with Keywords:
This is a part of SEO. It helps to increase the position of your website in search engine results. One of the algorithms used by search engines to rank web pages is how the keywords in those pages relate to the search term. If you’re serious about getting more web traffic you must have done your keyword research before even hosting your website. Keyword research tells you the keywords that will boost your search engine rank and the keywords that would make you money. Knowing how to do keyword research is very important because 80% of all sales come from search engines, and keyword research increases your visibility in search engines.
With your keywords already known, use them at strategic positions in your articles: Use them in the introductory part of your content, between heading tags, and title tags. Also use keywords in meta tags, alt tags for images and in anchor texts of backlinks.
Search engine optimization experts recommend a keyword density of about 3 to 4%. If you exceed this, search engines might see your web page as spam and rank it very low. A keyword density of 3 to 4% means that for every 500 words, a keyword will appear 15 to 20 times.
Use your major keywords in your domain name. Not only will this improve your search engine ranking, it will also increase the tendency of someone clicking on your url. Supposing you want to generate FREE website traffic to your site and you are confronted by two URLs, one is www.freewebtraffictips.com and the other is www.highranking.com Which URL will you first click on? Of course, its www.freewebtraffictips.com. So if possible include your major keywords in your URL. But before you can do this correctly, you must have known the correct way of doing keyword research.
4. Social Bookmarking Sites:
Social bookmarking sites offer you an advanced form of bookmarking whereby users can create profile pages and bookmark their favorite sites. These bookmarks can often be shared with the public depending on the privacy setting. Popular bookmarking sites include Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.
The advantages of bookmarking your own website(s) include:
- You’ll get targeted web traffic from the bookmarking sites
- If you bookmark a new webpage or site it will easily get indexed in search engines.
- Your site will rank higher in search engine result pages and
- Your page rank will improve.
But here is the downside: Social bookmarking is very, very time consuming, especially when you have a lot of websites or when you want to do a lot of bookmarking. This is because you have to manually add your page’s url, keywords and descriptions in each of the numerous social bookmarking sites. That’s why automation is the most effective way of tapping into the enormous power of social bookmarking sites.
There are many social bookmarking software that can automate bookmarking for you, but the best I’ve seen so far is the BookMarkingDemon. If you don’t want a tool that will spam these bookmarking sites, or have the problem of creating the same bookmark across hundreds of bookmarking sites, then BookMarkingDemon is the best tool for you. Unlike other such tools, BookMarkingDemon just have a one-time fee and you’ll get free upgrade.
There are also some free social bookmarking tools but they have limited capabilities. Examples include OnlyWire and Ping.fm.
Another way of attracting traffic with social bookmarking sites (and other web 2.0 sites) is by adding social sharing buttons on your site. These buttons allow people to quickly share your content in different social sites. You can get a sharing button code for your site at ShareThis.com.
5. Forum Marketing:
Forums are community sites where you can discuss any topic of interest with many other people. In a forum, you can post questions, answer questions or just post information. Such places are good sources of targeted web traffic, but it requires patience and dedication. Before you get any traffic, you need to provide value and interact first.
Traffic to your site will come through the links you place in your profile page and in the signature file that appears below every posts you make. So make sure you learn what experts in your niche did in these areas and do the same. Don’t just use these areas to advertise one product or the other, also use them to BUILD YOUR LIST!.
You can place yourself as an expert in your niche by answering peoples’ questions, asking good questions and posting quality information in your niche. Also point members to good sites that are not yours. In return for all these, the text and link in your sig file would appear below every post you make. If people see you as friendly and helpful, they will trust your self-serving links and some will click through to your site or view your profile.
I will advise you to join at least 3 active forums that have about 1000 members or more. Participate actively under your niche. Show off your expertise and people will regard you in a good light and they will follow you to your site. Many people in these sites come to seek solution to their problems. If you can convince them that articles in your website will help them, they will follow you to your site. Forum posts are also indexed in search engines, giving you an additional source of traffic.
6. Blogs:
You can get traffic from blogs through blog commenting and guest posting. For this strategy to be effective, you have to do the following:
- Comment on blogs that give dofollow back links. Tools for checking this are SEOQuake or Nodofollow.
- Comment on blogs that have at least page rank 1. The higher the better. Tools for checking this are SEOQuake, Google toolbar or Google-pr.
- Do not spam. Post quality comments or your comments will just be deleted.
Guest posting is similar to submiting articles to article directories. All you have to do is to read their editorial guidelines carefully before writing. You can easily find sites that are looking for guest bloggers by typing the following into Google search bar:
your niche keyword “write for us ” or “guest bloggers”
And of course, go for those with high page rank.
google search bar
7. Answer Sites:
You may be suprise to know that many people rely on answer sites to get answers to their questions instead of using search engines. You can go to these answer sites to search and answer questions relating to your niche. In your answer you can conveniently link back to your site for more details.
Examples of answer sites are Yahoo Answers, Google Answers, Vark.com, Help.com, Quora.com, Answerbag.com, Fluther.com, Wiki Answers and BlurtIt.com. These sites can give you both traffic and some link juice (if your links are dofollow). Just remember to read their guideline before you start answering.
8. Video Sharing Sites:
If you can create videos that are related to your target market group, you can submit them to video sharing sites and get some traffic (sometimes tons of traffic). You can easily create videos using a free software like CamStudio and share it on sites like Yahoo Video, YouTube , Vimeom and so on,
9. File Sharing Sites:
These sites allow you to share and download files. You can write an ebook in your niche and share it on these sites. Put links to your site and affiliate products in the ebook and encourage readers to freely share the ebook so long as the content is not modified or ownership overwritten. You can upload your document to multiple file sharing sites using interupload.com.
You can convert your best articles to power point presentation and share them on SlideShare. As for images you can share them on Flickr, and Wikimedia.
Attracting traffic to your site or blog requires some time and effort, I will advise you to have a concentrated effort. Do not try to apply all these methods at a go, focus on a few at first and see how things work out, then slowly incorporate other methods.
Keep track of your traffic to see where people are coming from. This would help you to know the methods that pay off most and allow you to concentrate on them. Tools like Google Analytic, StatCounter and SuperStat help you to track your traffic free of charge. Some hosting companies also provide this statistic either as part of your hosting fee or for an additional fee. Lastly, do not forget to give more time to those tactics that get you most of the traffic.