How to get
more traffic to your website
Everyone struggles with
getting more website traffic, because it is never enough. If you
have 10 visitors you want 20 and if you have 1000 you want 10,000.
It is a never ending cycle of trying to build a business online.
So what is the answer?
How do you build more
traffic over time? What can a webmaster do to grow traffic?
The first thing I want to
point out is not to give up. It takes time to build traffic and a
customer base. It is never going to happen overnight, so giving
up after 6 months is just a waste of the 6 months you spent
trying to get traffic. Plan on the long haul, plan on building
traffic over years, not weeks.
Some options:
Banner Exchanges
Here are countless banner
exchange programs that offer you the ability to post banners on
member sites in exchange for the ability to place banners on your
website. This allows a free method to get traffic to your website
by using the vale you already have in the form of page views.
You let people advertise on
your website and you advertise on theirs.
The programs are usually run
for profit and the cost is normally a percentage of the page
views. So maybe the exchange gets to post 100 banner views on
your website and they give you back 75 vies on other sites while
keeping 25 that they can sell for profit. That is not a bad deal
for everyone as long as the number pay off.
It is hard to know how honest
the exchange is, and with so many crooks out there it is more
common to see scams than legit deals.
You might want to run your own
software and let people sign up on your website and that way you
control the numbers and wont get burned.
Traffic Brokers
Speaking of getting burned
here is the biggest scam of all, Traffic Brokers. They sell you
page views, often by the thousands. The problem is, it is not
targeted traffic, often delivered in annoying pop ups or framed
in spam pages so a single page view could deliver 100 or more
hits to various websites.
They also use bots to create
fake traffic or use surf for hits type programs to get you to
surf other sites in exchange for the traffic they send you.
This is a great scam, you get
traffic free, problem is it is not human traffic. Then they sell
your surfing to other people as real traffic. But you are just
clicking on sites, no intent to buy, no plan to even look.
So how valuable is that
traffic? Unless you are just interested in creating fake traffic
it has no value in building a business.
Search Engine Ads
One legit method is search
engine ads. All the searches offer programs where you can buy ads
and pay per click for real visitors.
There are some problems with
this as well especially if you run ads on the content network
which is made up of independent webmasters. The problem is, there
is a huge amount of webmasters having people click their ads to
make money.
Image if you could place an ad
on your page, have your friends click it all day and get paid
thousands of dollars. Webmasters create click groups just to
click ads and earn money but send no visitors that have any
interest in your website.
Make sure you only run ads on
the search engine itself or you might spend a bunch of money for
nothing.
Affiliate Programs
My favorite traffic builder is
affiliate programs because you pay based on what you earn. Now
this is great if you sell products because you pay a commission
for anyone sending buyers. You have fixed costs and have everyone
else sending you customers.
It is one of the fastest way
to build a store, but of course you have to share some of the
earnings with the affiliates and this can get expensive.
When people realize they have
to fork over 10% or 20% of the gross, it turns most people off.
If you don't sell products
that you can monitze and share then affiliate programs are not an
option for you.
Advertising,
Advertising & More Advertising
The best way to build a
website, a brand or any business is through advertising. You can
never do enough advertising whether it is though Social Media,
Paid ads, Print ads, TV, Radio or Billboards. The more visible
your band is, the more people will go to your website.
Blogging & Article
pages
If you are on a budget, then
consider writing a blog and articles on your pages to build
organic traffic. This is traffic when people search for something
they find your website.
You can do this by just
creating text based content that has some interest to your
visitors.
The mistake most people make
is building a 5 page website. There is no chance you will have
organic traffic because you have no useful content.
There is a reason why you find
so many bulletin boards and discussion forms when you search
because they have lots of content. Lots of information that
people are searching for daily, so they get placed in many search
results. You can do the same thing by creating articles just like
this one that target your market.
Over time, these article will
bring visitors to your website.
Make sure the content is
relevant to your website and it brings in the kinds of viewers
you need. For example, don't write porn articles if you sell
bibles and don't create article about particle physics if you
sell children puzzles.
As land as you create unique
content that has some value to readers, you will get traffic over
time.
Monitor Keywords and
Modify pages
To make sure the content is
working you will need to monitor your web stats or web traffic
and look at what people are searching for and how they find your
pages.
Evaluate the keyword searches
and create new content for keywords that are not generating
traffic and change the pages that bring in the wrong types of
traffic.
If your product is "Naked
Chocolates" and people are finding your pages for "Naked
Girls" because you have things like "Girls love to eat
Naked Chocolates" then you need to adjust the page.
It is unlikely that someone
searching for porn is in the mood to order from your website. On
the other hand, traffic is traffic ad the more people that see
your brand the better.
But understand, most of that
type of traffic wont convert into sales.
So create new pages that will
generate sales. Monitor how people find you and add to your pages
with new exciting content that will get the visitors you are
after.
SEO Of Course
It goes unsaid that the
website needs to be search engine friendly, but if you create
content it will be without an additional effort. In fact, the
more content you have the more search traffic you will get.
Just remember that a 500 or
1000 word article will get more traffic than 2 louse sentences.
So write write and write as much as you can as often as you can.
Traffic and Content
Over Time
All of this takes time. Search
engines change all the time and they take months to get traffic
to new content. So work diligently, make updates almost daily and
add more content every chance you get.
It will not be an overnight
project and it wont be something you can pay a webmaster to do
for you. You would never be able to pay a webmaster for all the
work needed to make money.
If you are serious about
building traffic, you need to invest the sweat equity.
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