Hits, or traffic, are the best indication of your site's success. How do you gain that traffic? is the ultimate question of most site owners and marketers. There are several ways to get your link out to customers:
- List well in a search engine;
- Advertise on search engines, other sites, via Link Xchange or another ad-swapping service;
- Get your URL in a news story online or offline;
- Legitimate emails (don't even consider spam as an option);
- Advertising in emailed newsletters;
- Advertising in your bricks-and-mortar store or in fliers to your potential customers.
Most of these methods have inherent problems in the form of difficulty, or high price. Though search engines represent the number one best way to drive traffic to you, they take time to place well in. Advertising online is expensive, and ad-swapping services drive minimal traffic to your site while forcing you to accept an ad on your own site. It's really hard to get enough notice for the news to talk about you - even for a blogger to talk about you takes some work. Of course, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't send out press releases. Just don't depend on your website to make it into any stories on the basis of those releases, though it could happen.
Legitimate emailed advertisements entail purchasing the rights to a mailing list or becoming an affiliate with a larger site, something that will almost certainly cost you some money. Advertising in emailed newsletters or in your own store and town are the most cost effective and reliable of these methods, but they won't reliably drive a large amount of traffic to your site. And you need a lot of traffic; few page views result in an actual purchase, depending on the industry as little as one in a hundred.
So what do you do?
Use Article Directories
One great way of driving all kinds of traffic, including the kind you wouldn't expect, to your site is to write excellent articles and post them to article directories, encouraging people to download and use them for free.
Article directories are huge repositories online with thousands of free articles on every conceivable niche market and large market, accepting articles from almost anyone who wants to donate them. You should register, set up the byline you want to use and your URL, and your article goes up, free to the world to download.
But what's the point of giving them away for free? Because with every download your URL and your name and often a short bio as well, will follow the article in something called a "resource box." This means that if a hundred webmasters download your article, you have just gotten a hundred free links to your website, many of them from sources you'd never have thought to ask prior to this. It also means that your name has just received the status of "recognized expert" to every person who thereafter reads your article on the other website. You give away free content, but you get real recognition and status in return.
It's one of the best forms of free advertising you can find.
What If I Don't Write?
Actually, you don't have to be a talented writer. You can hire a writer to create your articles for you, either to your specifications exactly or with general guidelines. You can even purchase articles from an article broker, getting content and/or keyword rich articles that you can share with other webmasters in exchange for a link to your site.
And another secret: if you include the keyword you're trying to capture for your own search engine optimization purposes in the article title, you've just made that keyword more valuable to you. The search engine spiders seeing these link backs will apply every one of these keyword links to your website's ranking. And when people search for that specific keyword, the engines will be that much more likely to pull you up in the top ten. So, the more you submit, the better your search engine position is!
One final piece of advice: google yourself. If you see a lot of people out there with your name, you might want to use your middle name or even a nickname as your byline to avoid confusion. The last thing you want is someone else taking credit for your gurudom.
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