John Reece has earned well over a million bucks teaching people how to get traffic to their websites, so you gotta understand there are plenty of different ways… Here are my top seven:
1) There is an old time tested one called search engine optimization which still works but it’s not as easy as it once was. Basically you have to hunt down keywords related to your website that people search for regularly (on the search engines), but for which not many people have built webpages. You then build and optimize a webpage for each keyword (the more original the content the easier your SEO efforts will be).
This technique has been taught for years so the competition on keywords is getting fierce, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find any - it just means you have to look harder…
The better your optimization, the more chance you have of appearing at or near the top of the rankings for your chosen keywords. Once you start getting lots of websites to link to yours, your website will start climbing the search engine rankings (for even the most competitive keywords).
2) A less effective method is one I call “lazy linking” which is simply the submission if your link details to as many directories as you can. Directories are not equal (some are more equal than others) - if you can get your site into directories like DMOZ you’ll end up with hundreds if not thousands of sites linking back to you purely because many automated link scripts include DMOZ link details. BUT - it takes ages to get your application approved (anything up to 18 months or more) so don’t hold your breath…
In my view links from directories don’t count for much with the search engines, and you’ll probably get more traffic from people seeing your links in a directory and clicking on them than from any improved search engine ranking as a result of all the extra back links.
3) Another pretty effective method is “smart linking” - yes it involves reciprocal linking, but your target is traffic, not SEO… This means you have to hunt down websites (or a specific page on a website) on a similar theme to yours on which to place a link back to a selected page on your website. For example you might find a website about dog collars which would be ideal for placing a link back to your website about dog leads.
Regardless of what people say, reciprocal links are not dead and they still have an effect on how the search engines rank your website, they might not count for much but they still count. My hunch is the search engines count links between similarly themed webpages as fairly relevant - this is NOT an absolute… it’s only an observation based on some of my websites where I’ve experimented with different types of reciprocal linking.
There does seem to be a hierarchy in terms of link placement:
- A single link to your website on a page of related text is the most important
- A link on a page with other links, all pointing to similarly themed websites is less important (the theme of the link page must be similarly themed).
- A link on a page with other links pointing to websites of different themes is the least important. If you link back to that page you could actually be penalized!
4) Writing and submitting articles can be a pretty effective way of driving visitors to your site, but badly re-written PLR article won’t help you at all! In fact I view the submission of re-written PLR articles to any directory about as effective as shooting yourself in the foot before trying to run away from a mean ol’ Cape buffalo… It is said that more hunters have been killed by the African Cape buffalo than by any other animal. Wounded buffalo are known to back track, then stalk and attack the hunter - just like your re-written PLR articles will do to you…
Two things are killing the effectiveness of writing and submitting articles:
- The sheer number of new directories (every man and his dog now has an article directory)
- The sheer number of near similar, crappy re-written PLR articles being submitted to all these directories.
If you want to get the most out of submitting articles, make sure you write (or get written) top quality articles that webmasters of the top websites in your niche would be proud to publish. Getting your article published on a keyword generated “spam” site is not going to do you any favors!
There are two places you want your articles published:
- In a popular newsletter - this will give you a one time rush of traffic.
- On the top websites in your niche - these will be high traffic sites and will funnel some of their traffic to your website through your article.
5) Using Google Adwords to drive traffic to a website can be pretty effective, the trick is to find loads of keywords and set up your campaigns so that you only pay a few cents per click. Getting your advertisement onto page one of the search results is not the way to do this. Getting your ad so it appears at the top of the page two search results is more effective.
The cost of your clicks depends on many factors, but chief among them is the relevancy of your keywords, advertisement and landing page - keep them all relevant and your cost per click goes down.
One of the best places to learn about using Adwords is Wealthy Affiliate - Kyle and Carson offer one of the best tutorial and one on one training systems I’ve seen so far.
6) Next is a method that most people will take one look at and then run away screaming… It’s the big ogre called “List buildingâ€Â, but first I want to ask you a question - “What’s the point of spending all the time and effort to get people to your website and then letting them disappear into the horizon after only one visit?”
You can actually get them back to your website and often more than once…
To do so you need to get them to opt in to a list you have set up. Unfortunately most optin systems are either too subtle or too “in your face”. I favor a system which allows your visitor to view one or two articles, but clicking on any other link then triggers an optin form known as a “reverse squeeze pageâ€Â. To continue reading your visitor must opt in, and you can offer a freebie report as an incentive to do so.
Click here for a program you can use to create your own “reverse squeeze pages”
7) Lastly I want to cover a fairly recent (it’s been kept quiet for some time) and effective traffic generation method known as Tag and Ping, which is effective right now but will probably become less so as people find ways of automating it (spamming the heck out of it, just like they have everything else).
Essentially this involves starting a blog to drive traffic to your website. You write short teaser posts which link to article pages on your website. In each post you insert tags before pinging directories such as Technorati which serve to get your blog more visibility and therefore more visitors.
You might want to consider making your blog a niche website, after all blogging platforms are basically content management systems and they have the added advantage of allowing your visitors in interact and add their own content - just what the search engines love.
Lisa Ann Ginger has just written an excellent guide called Tagging Secrets - which not only explains the tag and ping system in an easy to understand manner, but also goes on to explain another effective promotion method called social bookmarking which could soon become a very big thorn in the search engine’s sides.
Use these seven methods and you’ll be well on your way to generating considerable traffic to your websites, but I have one last tip – take one website at a time, set it up and then promote it. Don’t take a bunch of websites and try promoting them all at the same time. Just like you, many webmasters have more than one niche website and if they see a number of emails from you asking for a link to a number of their websites they’ll probably just delete your emails thinking you’re spamming them…
Once a website is earning a satisfactory amount of money, start on the next one…
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