How To Generate Traffic
Communities are clearly becoming the organic way to generate traffic. The WSJ had an interesting article today on LiveWorld, which helps companies add a community aspect to their site. Communities are the ultimate low-cost way to generate traffic. Instead of paying for expensive online ads, you can let your users post comments, thereby creating content, which gets listed in the search engines. Even more importantly, however, by giving users an outlet, you give them a way to stay on your site rather than going somewhere else. That means they can keep coming back to you to discuss their questions, issues, and so on, with other like-minded users. The result is that you don’t have to pay to get those users – they come and they come back because they are part of the community.
Of course the challenge is, how do you get traffic to your site to begin with. If you’ve got a hot new Web 2.0 web site, you can try to get it listed on TechCrunch. What if you’re just a regular joe putting up a web site, however, and you’d like to at least have a number show up next to your web site when you go to alexa.com? Start writing articles. An article can be as short as a couple hundred words, and you can get these articles published on sites like goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, and so on. To get an article published, write something up related to your site – for example, if your site is about gardening, you can write an article about gardening. Then, post that article, with links in it to your new site on goarticles.com and the like. From experience I would say goarticles.com has somewhat lower submission requirements than ezinearticles.com, which doesn’t condone heavily promotional article entries. A few days later, you’ll find your article showing up in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results, with links to your site. Other web sites syndicate content out from these article sites, so you’ll also find your article showing up on a variety of different sites around the net. Be patient. Articles don’t show up in the search engine results in minutes, but they do typically show up within a few days.
Your goal should not be to go for length. In fact, you want to find the sort of minimum bar between having something long enough to be considered an article (a few hundred words), but short enough that you can write a bunch of articles quickly. The more articles with links to your site, the more actual links you get. One really long article won’t help you, but 10 or 20 shorter articles will.
Of course you want to syndicate your web site out via RSS. With RSS, other people can include the stuff you post to your site on their site, thereby generating traffic and links to your site. But this is old news. The new trend is one that I have talked about before, which follows the hybrid destination / distribution model. This is a little more involved and might actually require some code, but it will certainly generate traffic. What you want is a module of some sort that other people will want to include in their site. Photobucket, Slide, etc.; these are all sites that provide something that people can include in their online discussions, the result of which is to drive traffic back to their site. Again, these are sort of the “V2” of RSS, providing more content and functionality than plain old RSS.
By using one or more of the above techniques, you can start to drive some traffic to your site. Once you get that traffic, you can then use that as the basis to get more traffic by honing in on specific topics of interest. More on that in a later post.
Of course the challenge is, how do you get traffic to your site to begin with. If you’ve got a hot new Web 2.0 web site, you can try to get it listed on TechCrunch. What if you’re just a regular joe putting up a web site, however, and you’d like to at least have a number show up next to your web site when you go to alexa.com? Start writing articles. An article can be as short as a couple hundred words, and you can get these articles published on sites like goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, and so on. To get an article published, write something up related to your site – for example, if your site is about gardening, you can write an article about gardening. Then, post that article, with links in it to your new site on goarticles.com and the like. From experience I would say goarticles.com has somewhat lower submission requirements than ezinearticles.com, which doesn’t condone heavily promotional article entries. A few days later, you’ll find your article showing up in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results, with links to your site. Other web sites syndicate content out from these article sites, so you’ll also find your article showing up on a variety of different sites around the net. Be patient. Articles don’t show up in the search engine results in minutes, but they do typically show up within a few days.
Your goal should not be to go for length. In fact, you want to find the sort of minimum bar between having something long enough to be considered an article (a few hundred words), but short enough that you can write a bunch of articles quickly. The more articles with links to your site, the more actual links you get. One really long article won’t help you, but 10 or 20 shorter articles will.
Of course you want to syndicate your web site out via RSS. With RSS, other people can include the stuff you post to your site on their site, thereby generating traffic and links to your site. But this is old news. The new trend is one that I have talked about before, which follows the hybrid destination / distribution model. This is a little more involved and might actually require some code, but it will certainly generate traffic. What you want is a module of some sort that other people will want to include in their site. Photobucket, Slide, etc.; these are all sites that provide something that people can include in their online discussions, the result of which is to drive traffic back to their site. Again, these are sort of the “V2” of RSS, providing more content and functionality than plain old RSS.
By using one or more of the above techniques, you can start to drive some traffic to your site. Once you get that traffic, you can then use that as the basis to get more traffic by honing in on specific topics of interest. More on that in a later post.
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