1. Start a blog.
If you're not familiar with blogs, you soon will
be. They're taking the online world by storm! Basically a blog is a
series of regular posts to a webpage that readers can look over
and even subscribe to anonymously if they're interested. Their
appeal is that they become a compilation of interesting and
informative posts that people can read through at their leisure.
For webmasters they're easier than publishing a newsletter
because posts can be done when you feel like it and can be as
long or as short as you'd like. There are also no formatting issues
or spam filters to worry about! Get started with
your own blog using the free blogger.com hosted solution or for a
more robust solution check out WordPress.com
2. Write articles that showcase your expertise.
Articles are an
excellent way to generate free, targeted traffic for your website. If
you don't enjoy writing don't worry, there are alternatives that
require less work but are still very effective. Instead you can do
an email interview with someone your target market is
interested in, create a ‘top 10' list, write a quick series of tips,
review a product, book or website, pose and answer the
questions you are most often asked about your industry or conduct a survey and write a synopsis of your findings.
Whatever option you choose make sure your article is free of errors,
informative and of interest to your ideal customer. A good trick
for encouraging list owners to publish your article is to offer a
generous affiliate program and allow them to change the URL in
your resource box to their affiliate URL. That way they get great
content and the potential to earn some money at the same time!
3. Create search engine friendly pages that don't interfere with
your main sales page.
The problem with optimizing pages for the
search engines is that often marketers undo the elements that
have made their site convert visitors into buyers. You can get
loads of traffic but if the people aren't buying you won't be
making any more money. Avoid this problem by creating multiple
pages that are specifically designed to rank well in the search
engines and that funnel traffic back to the page that is set up to
sell. This can be done by simply including enough information on
the page to get their attention and then putting a link at the
bottom to your main site where they can get more information.
The search engines will rank your pages well because they use
specific keywords and include useful content and you can still
have a site that converts well.
4. Run a contest.
People love the prospect of winning
something ‘ that's why a contest for the right target audience can
be a great traffic generator. Form a JV with several other
webmasters and together offer the prizes. The key is to choose
the prize(s) to attract people from your target audience. If you
make the grand prize a new laptop you'll get entries from
everyone who would like to win a new laptop (which is basically
every computer user in the world!). Get more targeted traffic by
choosing something that your target audience is interested in but
wouldn't mean much to other people. To start promoting your
contest do a search in Google for ‘Contest Directories' and you'll
find lots of places to list your contest for free.
5. Exchange links with other websites.
Exchanging links with
other websites can bring a substantial amount of traffic if you
choose your link partners wisely. Remember, you're better to
have 10 links from sites that are prominently displaying your URL
and driving traffic to it ‘ than 100 who just put your link on a
page with hundreds of other links. In fact having links on your
site to pages that include hundreds of links can hurt your search
engine rankings, so be sure you're only linking to sites that are
relevant to yours and that you honestly endorse. If you don't have
time to spend looking for link partners consider hiring someone.
For around $1.50 a link you can outsource this task.
