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What’s the one thing everyone doing business on the Internet wants?

Traffic

And lots of it as well, even better if it is highly targeted traffic!

I have been working at building regular traffic to this blog for a few weeks now and I still haven’t tried all the techniques I want to! I am now starting to get regular visitors that are interested in what I have to say. I still can’t quite believe that there are people out there interested in what I have to say!  So enough of the introduction and my ramblings, lets get some good content for you all.

Traffic generation is a long process if you are going to do it properly and do it all yourself. However you can outsource a lot of it if you have the money to fund it!  I decided I would do all my own work to start with, it may be slower and a lot more hard work but at least I will know my business inside out when I come to get other people to take over different parts of it!

Blog Traffic

So the main traffic generation technique I have been using to start getting good targeted traffic is Blog Hopping. This has been hugely successful for me in both getting new visitors, creating a community on my blog and also creating relationships with other people in the industry for future Joint Ventures together. It’s also a great way to learn how other people are marketing, although you shouldn’t spend too much time on the sites you are hopping to you should take the time to read the post you are commenting on.  You may learn something and you will have a lot more to offer when you do leave a comment.  Just don’t spam your comment with links back to your site, I just leave my link in the box provided so people can click on my name. Some people leave ONE link at the bottom of the comment as well but any more than that and it just looks spammy!

With Blog hopping you need to be doing it daily really, so commenting on between 5 and 10 blogs a day is a fair number to be starting with. Some blogs will be updated more regularly than others so you can go back to those again and comment on the newest post to keep the links more visible.  I also advise subscribing to the RSS feed either by email or if you use an RSS reader regularly then add them in there.  This way you are always notified of new posts to the blogs and you can head straight over there and try to get the first comment.  It also pays to keep an eye on the alexa traffic rank and the google page rank of the blogs you are commenting on, the best way to do this is with the free firefox toolbar called SEOBook, this shows you live stats for any website you are visiting. You want a higher number for the pagerank and a lower number for the alexa traffic rank.

Forum Traffic

The next technique I have been using is forums, although I haven’t been doing as much here, what I have done has been very effective so I should really do more work in this area. The only problem is this is probably the most time consuming of all the free traffic techniques I am sharing with you today but it is probably the most effective one!

One MASSIVE tip I cannot stress enough is to read the rules of every forum you sign up to. I got complacent ONCE and got immediately kicked out of a forum for not posting my introduction to the correct area of the forum. You have been warned!

So warnings out of the way, ‘how do you use forums to generate traffic’ I hear you cry! Well forums are a great resource of information and people.  You need to go and be active in the forums of your niche.  Find the most active forums in your niche by searching for your niche title and forum like this;

cat grooming for weight loss forums

That would only work if your niche is cat grooming for weight loss but you get the idea.  This will bring up a list of forums for your niche, now you need to have a look through them and find the most active ones. To do this have a look at the number of members and then how recent the posts are. Some forums don’t let you read anything until you are signed up so you may have to sign up to these just to see if they are worthwhile.

Once you are signed up to a few well trafficed forums you want to create your signature, this is what is shown at the bottom of every post you make in that forum.  In this signature you want to make sure you include a link to your website but beware some forums don’t allow links straight to a squeeze page so try to send them to your blog or main website where they can then be redirected to your squeeze page.

Then you just need to get active in the forum, ask questions, answer questions where you can and start interesting discussions. Remember the more you post the more times your link will appear on the forum and the more helpful you are the more chance people will click the ink in your signature. Just don’t spam the forum with links back to your site. If it is relevant then maybe add a link in the post but make sure you check the rules before doing this!

Traffic from Article and Squidoo Lens’

Articles and Squidoo Lens’ are a great way to drive traffic to your site. Some people like to separate these two sources but they are essentially the same. Whenever I write an article I also put it into Squidoo, Everything links together and back to this blog.  When writting an article be careful not to cover too many topics. I tend to keep mine to one topic and around 500 words so this blog post would be too big really and it isn’t focused enough. I could expand one of these methods into an article and I may well do that in the future.

Back to it then… You want to grab the readers attention in the first couple of lines. Make them feel like you have the answer to their problem. something like ‘Are you struggling to get traffic to your website? Here is a great way to drive massive amounts of traffic using article submission services.’ You get the idea.  Once you have the readers attention you want to solve their immediate problem but also raise an extra question that they might not have thought about. This way you can direct the reader to your blog or website to get the extra information and hopefully they will then turn into a regular reader and potential customer from there.

Once your article is written you then need to submit it to some article directories, there are quite a lot of free directories as well as some paid ones.  At the start it is fine to just use the free directories, eZineArticles.com is a great free directory and it is the 103rd most trafficed website on the Internet! You want to get your article out to as many of these directories as you can so it can be seen by as many people as possible. This can be quite time consuming at first as you have to sign up to all these services to be able to submit an article, you can outsource this stage though if you have the capital for this.

Once you have submitted your article to the directories you want to head over to Squidoo.com and submit it there. This is slightly different to the article directories. You have a profile page that all your ‘Lens’ are shown on, a lens is just another word for an article however you can add a lot more to a lens than an article. If you have a related video or picture you can embed it into your article on Squidoo for more visibility. You also want to work on your profile page so it has some information about you. Once you have e few lens’ you will want to link them all to each other as well as your blog or website.

The other part of Squidoo is to look at other peoples lens’ and leave a comment and a rating. There is quite a community there and it definitely pays to become active there as well. This is another thing you can outsource in the future when you know your ROI (Return of Investment) of your lens’.

Traffic from Social Media

This is such a massive area of traffic these days that really this should be a separate post and it may well become one in the new year! Social Media is probably the biggest revolution since the birth of the Internet. We can now talk to friends and family around the world in an instant (as long as they are awake in their timezone!) this has changed the face of the internet over the past 5 years from friendster and myspace through to twitter and facebook we are all communicating with more people more of the time than ever before. Facebook is either the number one or number two most trafficed website behind google depending on the time of day and who you go to to get the statistics! If Facebook was a country it would be the third largest in terms of population!

The question I hear you screaming is “How do I get this traffic to visit my website?” Well there are quite a few different ways you’ll be pleased to hear and pretty much all of them are free. I personally don’t do any paid traffic methods online unless I am purely looking at numbers in which case I have a few places I can get an immediate number of visitors or a sustained number every day for a period of time. I’ll talk about those in another post though.  Back to Social media though…
Twitter isn’t as good as it once was for driving traffic as there are a lot of people just sending out links every 5 minutes to buy their latest product. You can however build up a good following on twitter and if you don’t spam them with links all the time but entertain them and give them some free information then your followers are likely to look at your profile and then click the link to your website. I very rarely post to twitter these days but my I am incresing my followers daily using socialoomph which is a free twitter manager.  This site refollows people that follow you and then if you set it up corrcctly you can get it to add more followers for you amongst a lot of other very cool things! I still haven’t used twitter that much but I have had a few hits to my site from my twitter page so I can see the potential for it.

Facebook on the other hand is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website. There are so many ways you can use Facebook for traffic generation. I would suggest creating a new account for yourself and try to focus your profile to your niche as well. Then you want to go and find people interested in your niche by joining groups and fanpages in your niche and adding all the people in that group. You can now just make status updates with a link to your site everytime you make an update. I find this fairly effective as my friends as well as potential customers see this. I can then get the really harsh criticism from my firends to drive myself forward with the next one.  Once you have some friends you want to create your own group and fan pages, this is where you will start to see the most amount of traffic.

Your group page needs to have what is called FBML which is like HTML code for facebook. This is where you can add in an opt in box for your mailing list which will then drive people back to your website. You also want to be starting good discussions in this group rather than trying to sell to them all the time. The same goes for your fan page although you will want to be giving more updates on what you are doing with your business in the fan page.

If you want a complete course in how to use facebook to drive traffic and market to your audience then have a look at facebook fortunes here.

Summary

I hope you got some value out of this post, I have been meaning to write it for quite some time now so it feels good to get it all written down!  Please leave me some comments of your thoughts, anything I missed or anything you want to hear about in the future or even just to say hi!

Thanks for stopping by!

Simon

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