I launched a new website exactly 17 days ago – Sept. 17, 2003 – and that new site has already had over 700 pages viewed. It’s important to note that I have not paid a single penny to promote this site, and I’m not generating random junk traffic.
So far, my initial traffic has come primarily from discussion boards, and a free Traffic Swarm ad. Several visits have also come from other publisher’s websites too. Using a specific promotional system, I fully expect this website to have more than 100,000 page views each month within the first 12 months of it’s existence.
And that’s the point of this article. Getting massive amounts of website traffic is not a secret, and it’s not expensive. It’s a system, plain and simple… and here’s how it works.
1. Figure out who will visit the site. You’ve heard the term “target market”, right? Well this is it: Who do you want to visit and why? What will keep this particular market interested?
2. Create content specifically for that target market. Once you know what they want, and what interests them, you can create content that speaks directly to their needs and desires.
*Tip* Do not worry about search engines at this stage. Too many people tend to think they’re supposed to “design” or “write” for search engines, and that’s wrong. The real “trick” to search engine optimization is to provide content for your specific market. If the content you create targets them well, and holds their interests, the search engines will automatically follow.
3. Be sure you’re providing quality content, and update it regularly. People like content – and search engines do too. If your daily newspaper had the same stories and information in it for months at a time, would you have any reason to look at it daily? Would you even subscribe, let alone bother to glance at it… even for free? Not likely. And the same applies to websites.
If you provide regularly updated good content that’s highly relevant to what your market is looking for, they’ll come back – again and again. They’ll also tell their friends and colleagues about your site, and often link to it from their own. These are great ways to build traffic without outlaying any cash. So make a commitment to update your website no less than once each week.
4. Distribute articles to other publishers for free. Again, the content of your articles must be good and relevant to your target market. And by allowing other publishers to use your articles, you’ll get additional links to your own site, and additional readers will be referred.
*Tip* Double duty: If you’re creating new content for your website at least once each week, use that same content for the free article. This allows you to take care of two promotional tasks at once.
If just 10 publishers use your free article, that’s 10 new links into your site. Done regularly, the number of links into your site – and the amount of traffic coming in from them – can multiple exponentially.
5. Network yourself online. The easiest way to start networking online is to join in on discussion groups. Find one or more that people use every day, and join the conversation. Don’t blast ads to the discussion – contribute. Give your thoughts and opinions on any thread that interests you, answer questions where you can, and give advice or help if you’re able.
When you join a discussion group, you’re usually able to create a “profile”. This is simply a bit of information about you. In this profile, you can also create a signature. The signature is additional text added to the end of each post you make. So, be sure to have your website linked in your signature. If people like the comments and contributions you make to the discussions, they’ll visit your website.
*Tip* Discussion groups can be habit forming and time consuming. The best way to prevent them from eating up all of your time and attention is to limit yourself to one hour a day, or a few hours each week. Try to keep in mind that this is a promotional strategy, and only one piece of your overall business or website traffic plan.
Now, one other thing I’ve mentioned using for my new site is a free Traffic Swarm ad. Traffic Swarm is a two-fold service. It can be used as a start page system, or it can be used as a text ad exchange. I don’t think very highly of start page systems, but that’s for another article. I do however, use the text ad exchange that Traffic Swarm offers – because it’s free, and it works. You can find out more about how Traffic Swarm works here:
http://www.gurugazette.com/resources/22-1.html
In any case, doing the 5 steps from this article systematically will build your website traffic. Once you’ve put yourself into the habit of doing each part consistently – you will see wonderful results that just keep growing.
(C) 2003, Kathy Burns-Millyard. All Rights Reserved.
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