| Web site traffic generation is the second major step in the whole internet marketing process. You've come up with a website or had one done for you, and now all you need to do is get traffic to that website. There are literally hundreds of ways to do this, and the right way for you will depend on the product or service you are offering, the amount of time you have, the types of traffic generation that appeal to you, and your budget.
First of all, your site should be as "SEOed" (Search Engine Optimized) as possible. This insures that you will get organic traffic just from people doing normal searches on the internet. You can hire someone to do this for you, or you can take a training course on how this is done. There is also some SEO software that will help you on this aspect of web site traffic generation.
The process can be complicated but in extremely general terms, SEO refers to using the right keywords in the right places on your website in an appropriate manner, and having incoming links into your website from other quality websites. If these two elements are in place, you will rank higher with the search engines, come up more in search results, and get more traffic to your site.
Some free means of bringing in traffic to your site are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or any of the other video websites, UsFreeAds, CraigsList, online forums that are related to your products, free blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress, safelists (depending on the product or service you offer), keyword-targeted press releases, traffic exchanges, article submission to EzineArticles and other article directories, and more.
If you have some money to spend, you can invest in PPC (pay-per-click) advertising on any of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN-Bing). The good thing about this kind of advertising is that you only spend what you want to spend. You bid on certain keywords or keyword phrases and then you get charged only when someone clicks on your ad. If you don't have a lot of money to spend, make sure you choose the lower-searched keywords so that you can bid lower. You can find all the statistics on keywords in the search engine free research tools.
Another paid options is Ezine advertising. Ezines are online magazines. If you can find one that is targeted towards the particular market that you are trying to reach, you can place advertisements on the newsletters that they send out to their subscribers. The most effective types of ezine ads are called "solo ads" which means that your ad goes out alone (with no other ads) and with your own email subject line, not a generic subject like "Newsletter number 20" for example. All of these methods are extremely effective web site traffic generation techniques that you can start applying right away. |