ways to generate traffic

Generating traffic

So, now we figured that in order to make money online one needs to generate traffic. How to generate traffic? There is about 1001 way to generate internet traffic. Some of them cost money and some are free. I will concentrate on the free ways to generate traffic as we are trying to earn money, not spend money.

Submit to search engines

It doesn't guarantee you a listing, farther still a top listing, but at least you need to "inform" the search engines of your site's existence and they can start crawling your website, which means your website content will become visible to the outside world and will participate in search engine listings. It is enough to submit only your main website address and not address to your sub-pages. Just make sure that all pages on your website are inter-linked. If some page isn't linked to from another page on your website or another link it is invisible and no one besides you, your host and perhaps some spam engines will know about it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) section of this website talks in greater detail about building effective website structure and other ways to increase your position in Search engine results pages (SERPs), which helps generate more traffic.

Obtaining External links - reciprocal link exchange and free links

Link exchange basics

Obtaining links from other websites pointing to your website is a great way to start generating traffic instantly. Link exchange serves two good purposes. First, it brings actual visitors to your web pages, i.e. creates traffic. Second, if done properly it positively affects your website search engine rankings SERPs (more on this in search engine optimization section, for our immediate purposes it's enough to say it's a good thing). Below more information about how to obtain external links and how to do it properly.

How to exchange links

The main idea of link exchange is to identify websites that are related to content on your website and get that website to publish a link to your website. A reciprocal link exchange is probably the most common way to exchange links, whereby you will be required to place a link to that website from your website. There are also many sites that will place a link to your website free and without you having to place a reciprocal link. A lot of websites will have a link page and a form to submit a link exchange request. For those sites that don't have a form for submitting link requests check whether the site has a dedicated links page or lists any links to other websites at all. If it does not I would say it's rather unlikely they would agree to publish your link (at least not without a fee). If you do find that a site participates in link exchange contact site webmaster and ask them to place a link to your web page. Offering a reciprocal link to their website will increase your chances of getting a positive reply.

Now, few important things to keep in mind when exchanging links:

Exchange links with websites that are related to content on your website. Getting links from websites that have nothing to do with content on your pages will bring little or no result. Having other websites link to yours can't really hurt your website search engine rankings (more on this in the SEO section). However, it is believed by some that having links to sites with 'bad reputation' can have negative effect on your site's ranking.

Building links is an on-going process. Of course, building up an initial set of links to your site to get your site started and then leaving but best results can be achieved when you build up links on a continuous basis. For example, you can decide for yourself, that each day/week/month you are going to obtain a certain amount of links to your site and try to stick with the plan.

These days there is a lot of software (some is free and some is paid for) that automates the process of building links. I personally never used one and frankly never replied to requests originated from automated link exchange software, as I prefer the human contact, but it is definitely one of the ways to go about link exchange that has a right to existence. Since I haven't used any of these programs, I hesitate to recommend any particular ones. For those of you who are interested in experimenting with them, I suggest to do a search for "automatic link exchange software".

Submit to Directories

Getting your website listed in Internet directories is also a must-do of free promotion of your website.

Having your website listed in directories serves the same two purposes as obtaining external links to your website - it brings traffic and improves your website ranking. There is a large number of directories on the Web today - big, small, global, local, general and specific. You need to identify directories that can be advantageous for promoting your website.

There are two factors that determine how advantageous a particulardirectory can be for your website. One is whether or not this directory content and traffic are related to your website content. Second is popularity of the directory - i.e. how much traffic it generates directly and whether or resources of any particular directory are used by other directories, websites and search engines. You can identify a dozen of directories that are specific to your website content, but there are two that concern all sites alike and you should consider submitting to them - DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory.

DMOZ

One of the musts is DMOZ (Open Directory Project dmoz.org). Having your website listed in DMOZ is important for several reasons. First, you will automatically receive a lot "derivative" links to your website as many other directories on the web are using DMOZ database and will publish links to sites that are listed in DMOZ. DMOZ database is also used by some of the major search engines. According to information from DMOZ their listings are used by AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos and Netscape Search. Website listings from DMOZ are considered "reputable" amongsnt search engines and other sites, which means links that are published at DMOZ are treated with higher importance than a similar link at some other website. In my case, having my sites listed in DMOZ has not resulted in much traffic directly, but it has drastically improved my website rankings on search engines.

One thing to keep in mind when submitting your site in DMOZ is that DMOZ is a human-edited directory. There are actual human editors who review submissions and decide whether or not the site is worth listing. For this reason the directory is able to maintain a high quality of listings. But as with any human it can take some time and there is a chance of human mistakes, prejudice, lack of attention and such. That said, submit your site (carefully following instructions provided at DMOZ), follow up with your submission but don't lose your sleep over it if your site doesn't get listed or approval process is taking a long time. One of my sites (for whatever reason) was not accepted into the directory but with promotional techniques described on this website it maintains a very good search engine rankings (top 5) in a very competitive field (business cards) and actually generates majority of my online revenue.

Yahoo! Directory

Yahoo! Directory is another directory to consider, however if it is a commercial site you should expect to lay out some $$ to get a listing. What is deemed a commercial website - read the guidelines, as "commercial" can be a stretchy term. Selling a product a service directly is commercial for sure but having a hobby website that lists some banners and third-party ads - I couldn't tell for sure.. Read up their guidelines.

Other ways to increase traffic

Here we discuss remaining techniques for increasing your website traffic. I personally wouldn't count on any of them alone to significantly increase your website visitor traffic, but they take so little effort from you as the webmaster that I still consider them a must-do of website promotion.

Promoting website in forums

Actively participate in related forums, contribute information and remember to mention your website. Now, I don't mean simply flooding all somewhat related forums with links to your website a it is frowned upon and you will most likely very quickly get banned. On the other hand, if you provided valuable comment on a topic, gave an answer to someone's question or started an interesting discussion, remember to sign the post and include a link to your website. In this way you will get additional visitors to your website, plus you aquire a back link to your website.

Publish a newsletter

Publishing a news letter does not bring new visitors to your pages per se but it reminds your previous visitors of your existence and gets them to come back. Remember that part of your website traffic (to a various degree) consists of repeat visits.

Include website address in print materials

While this really should be obvious it is still often overlooked. Remember to include your website address on all of promotional print materials like business cards and such.

Make a signature

Create an email signature (most email software and free mail services offer this option) and include a link to your website in the signature. This will help to make sure that people you are emailing are aware of your website.

As to bookmark

Ask your visitors to book mark your site. This also helps to increase your website traffic by increasing the number of returning visitors. Yes, you would think that if people are interested they would bookmark your site themselves, but it's a good idea to just remind them of that possibility. You can even offer your visitors a link to automatically add your website to their favorites like this - Add to Favorites

Word of mouth

Word of mouth is something that many beginning webmasters excessively rely upon. If you came up with an original idea, put an effort to build up a site around it, it is so common to assume that the first person that happens to visit your site will be so stunned with the product/service/information you offer that he or she will go out of his way to tell everyone he knows about the site. It does happen, but I wouldn't recommend relying on it too much.

Maintaining a good quality of website content is important to have a successful internet business, but this alone isn't likely to give you a jump start. Word of mouth is more related to websites that already have established a good presence on the Internet, but shouldn't be counted on to get your website off the ground.