May 2, 2008

How to Increase Your Targeted Website Traffic For Free

You want to increase the amount of targeted traffic to your website… and you want it for free from the search engines or other advertising sources! You can have all the traffic you want, as long as you're prepared to learn the basic SEO(Search Engine Optimization) ropes and create unique content.

Remember, you don't just simply want traffic. You want targeted traffic. And you can get it if you produce good, unique content. When visitors hit your site, they'll immediately be interested in your content if they're targeted visitors.

These Steps will Help You Generate Free Targeted Website Traffic:

1. Setup a Blog, preferably a Wordpress Blog

The reason a blog is going to help you to get free traffic faster is:

• It's fast and easy to add new content
• People tend to trust blogs more than websites

• Blogs get updated frequently by the search engines

• You get additional content when you allow visitors to post comments on your blog

• Your articles are linked and listed chronologically automatically in a blog – There's no need to do any linking of your pages like you'd have to do with a website

Maintaining a website is hard work. A blog eliminates a lot of the work you need to do for a website. For eg. you don't need to create a sitemap, or link your webpages together etc. which you have to do on a website.

If you intend to setup a blog long term and you want to build a business around it, get a Wordpress blog. And if you have some money to invest in the Semiologic add-on package, it's worth every penny. And it'll make your life a lot easier… and more efficient to setup and run your blog.

2. Get One-Way Links to Your Website or Blog

Google has stated that it does not like websites exchanging links directly. Therefore you need to get one-way links to your site to be on the safe side.

The easiest free ways to get a stampede of visitors to your site with free links is by:

• Submitting to carnivals at http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit.php
• Go to high traffic blogs and make contributing comments on those blogs
• You can find "Do Follow" blogs below which will allow the search engines to follow a link to your web site
  Not all blogs do this, so make sure you visit blogs from these Do Follow lists.
  Check out the Do Follow Blogs Directories and lists here:
  1. http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
  2. http://www.dofollowdirectory.com/submit.php
  3. http://nicusor.com/do-follow-list/

3. Use Stumbleupon to Get Free Traffic to Your Site

Stumbleupon is a social bookmaking site. You need to have a good solid content site first before you use this technique.

But once you've got good content, you'll find stumbleupon will get you targeted traffic quicker than almost all the Web 2.0 sites. Simply open and account and get one or two people to help you to bookmark your site. Make sure they also bookmark other good websites too and Stumbleupon will send you decent traffic…

4. Submit Videos with VideoUploadPro or Tubemogul.com

Use TubeMogul to upload your viral video to the web. It's a universal upload tool which uploads your video to all the supported video sharing sites, saving your loads of time. The supported sites for distribution include Yahoo Video, Blip.tv, Dailymotion, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Youtube.

This site tracks stats about the video so you can see how much traffic it's getting across multiple networks.

If you want to make sure you get even more exposure for your viral video on the web, I highly recommend getting a copy of http://www.videouploadpro.com/. This software uploads your video to 18 different sites such as Flurl.com, Clipshack.com, Sharkle.com and all of the above site which Tubemogul submits to.

Obviously, there are many more methods to get free traffic for your site. I'll cover more methods in future articles.
What are your 'secrets' to get lots of free targeted visitors to your site?

Filed under Blog Promoting, How to Get Traffic, Marketing Strategies