Are you looking for ideas for driving traffic to a website?
Search the internet and you will find that most of the advice is around Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Whilst this is certainly a great way to increase your website traffic it can take some time to get your website to the top of the search engine lists and it's only then that the traffic will start to really flow to your website.
So what you need is a list of ideas to get the traffic in quickly whilst your SEO efforts start to kick in. Even after your SEO efforts have been rewarded, these tips will still continue to bring in visitors to your site and you can never have too much traffic can you?
So here are some ideas to really get that traffic driving to your website. (As an added bonus, most of these ideas will also get you extra links back to your website and so they will help your SEO profile as well!)
1) Put your web address on everything!
Sounds Obvious doesn't it but you would be amazed at how many emails I get from businesses that do not have their website address.
Setting up a signature with your web address for your emails is simple and once you have done it you can relax knowing that all your emails are going out with your web address included.
Apart from your emails, you should add your web address to every single piece of paper that leaves your office. Business cards, letters, brochures, even invoices. It costs nothing to add your email address to all these items and they are all capable of bringing in visitors.
I'd even go as far as to stamp my web address on the outside of envelopes as well
2) Write articles
A well written article with your web address attached to it is a great way to bring in the web traffic. If you make the article very relevant to your business then the traffic is likely to be very targeted to your business.
For example, if you sell Wedding items that an article called "10 steps to the perfect Wedding day" is likely to bring in potential customers.
Once you have some articles, the best way to get them distributed is through the article distribution websites. I tend to use ezinearticles and articlemarketer but there are many others as well.
3) Use Press Releases
The press are always looking for interesting and engaging stories. A relevant press release about your business can generate a lot of interest, especially if it is topical
There are a number of web services that will distribute your press releases for you and give it some great exposure. PRWeb is a good example.
4) Use the Newsgroups
Be active on various newsgroups and forums that are relevant to your business. Make sure you include your website address in your profile signature. Most forums will let you do this. Some might require you to make a number of posts first just to make sure that you are going to be a relevant contributor
Once you have your signature set up, start to read other peoples posts and reply to them where you can. If your post helpful and informative posts you will quite often find that people will follow the link in your signature back to your website.
Also most forums have their pages indexed by the search engines so you might find that your posts are picked up by people searching and they may then also follow the link back to your website.
5) Use Pay Per Click
Pay per Click is a great way to instantly bring in targetted traffic to your website. Google and Yahoo both have very good Pay per Click services. I tend to prefer Google Adwords as it has a far better coverage and the traffic seems to be better targetted.
One word of advice. If you don't know what you are doing you can quickly spend a lot of money for very little benefit. I have a free beginners guide to Adwords that I would suggest anyone new to Adwords reading. Even experienced users might find a tip or two that saves them some money.
Social Bookmarking
Sites like Dig, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us are great at generating traffic.
They all work in a similar way. Their users can tag (or bookmark) pages that they like whilst they are surfing the web
They can then share these tags with their friends. Some of the networks of friends can be huge and suddenly your tagged page is getting a lot of tags and traffic.
You can help yourself by making it easy for people to tag your site by including a tag button. You'll see mine at the top right of every page on my website.
Need any more ideas?
I'll keep updating this page with news ideas. There are many more ways to increase your web traffic. So why not bookmark me now for future reference!
