Top 10 Easy Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Website – HostNamaste
There are many effective ways of driving traffic to your website. The easiest way is to utilize paid advertising, but that requires a significant budget. Most of us do not have that luxury, especially when starting out online. The good news is there are many ways to drive traffic to your website that do not require a budget, but they do require some of your time. Some methods require more of a time commitment than others. More than half of the methods mentioned below require creating excellent content.
1) Article Marketing
Article marketing is my favorite way to drive traffic. It involves posting quality content on web sites other than your own and including a link back to your target web site. There are several types of sites available to article marketing.
Article directory sites collect articles from many different authors and provide the content for others to syndicate on their own web sites. With Google targeting duplicate content and scraper sites, this has certainly become an issue recently. When submitting to article directories, make sure the article content is unique to that particular directory. The best way to build links through article marketing is through high quality and unique content.
Revenue sharing sites are similar to article directories, except other web site owners are not allowed to syndicate your content and you share in the revenue of advertising placed on those pages. There are a great many of these sites available on the Internet. Make sure any sites you submit articles to allow only high quality content. Those sites with a history of good content will be a much better place to link to your site from than the sites with short and low quality content.
There are a number of web sites where you can create free blogs or web sites. These sites provide an excellent place to write some related articles to your web site and provide a link back to your site.
2) Social Media
Social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, provide an excellent place to promote your content. Make sure when submitting your pages to these sites that you provide links, bookmarks, and content from other locations on the web. Social Media Branding is designed to be interactive with the community. That can provide some very targeted traffic, but can take some work to manage.
3) Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is similar to social media, but these sites are structured entirely around sharing bookmarked links with others. By spending time on the social bookmarking sites and gaining a following, you can share your content to them, and in turn, they may share your content with others. The more people who share your content, the better the chances it has of showing up on lists of popular content on or near the home page.
4) Guest Posting
Another great way to share content and gain a link back to your web site is by posting an article on a blog related to your site’s content. These postings at established blogs can benefit your site in many ways, including increasing the number of visitors to your blog, the number of links, and the number of subscribers through RSS syndication. When submitting content for posting on a blog, make sure to spend some good time on the article. You will want those articles to be some of your best work.
5) Directories
There are a large number of web hosting directories out there where you can submit your site for inclusion. Most are free, but some high quality directories require payment. The paid directories may or may not be worth it, depending on the popularity of the directory and the type of web site you run. Yahoo and Best of the Web are two excellent paid directories. The most popular free directory is dmoz, but it can take a long time for your site to be included in that directory, since they have a very large number of applications and a fixed number of people reviewing those sites. There are many smaller niche directories that may be worth looking into.
6) Blog Commenting
Commenting on blogs related to the topic of your web site can be very beneficial. The traffic you receive from commenting is targeted to your content and may very well become regular visitors. When leaving comments on blogs, make sure to read the entire article and leave comments that contribute to the article and conversation.
7) Press Releases
Press releases can be effective in adding links to your site, especially if the story is well written and gets picked up by a few major news outlets. When creating a press release, do some research and look at as many examples as you can. That way, you will be able to create the type of content the major news outlets are currently looking for.
8) Forums
Forums are an excellent place to engage a like-minded audience in conversation. Most web hosting forums will allow you to add a signature section where you can provide a link back to your web site. Make sure you don’t abuse that ability and make sure to be a good contributing member of the community.
9) Answers Sites
The popular trend of answers sites that has popped up in recent years can be a good place to gain some additional links. As with any other commenting technique, make sure to provide quality and relevant answers to the questions. If you look carefully, there will be some questions where you can provide a link back to an article on your web site that provides additional value to your answer.
10) Develop a Module/Plugin
Developing a module or plugin, especially if it becomes popular, can help to create a large amount of links and traffic to your site. While it takes quite a bit of technical knowledge and work to keep up to date, modules and plugins can be rewarding to your site, especially if you are just starting out.
