Get more traffic to your site.

more visitors
Get more traffic to your site.
If you are one of the Webmasters that has great content but has no idea how to get more readers then this article is for you.
There are many ways to get traffic to your site, it can be through paid advertising, free advertising, social bookmarking sites and viral systems in this article I will explain most of them.

Paid Advertising
This is one of the most used methods because it is one of the most effective ways to get traffic. The majority of websites offer Paid Advertising but there are some who don’t like for example my website. At the current time we don’t charge for ads but we will start to charge soon.

The price for ads varies from website to website. There is no set price for an ad on a certain website and it’s really up to the owner of the site to decide how much he wants to charge, but you have to be smart and learn not to overpay for an ad.

When buying an Ad always ask the owner how many visitors he gets and how many hits he gets. With the information he/she gives you, it will be easier to find out how much you should pay for an ad.

Most blogs that I know, only charge about $15 per 468 x 60 ad and those pages get about 2k new visitors a month, so you have to find the average price for an ad by going to different websites and comparing their traffic… I would suggest you use Alexa when comparing traffic.

When you have decided how much to pay you’ll have to decide what kind of ads you want to buy. There are 2 kind of ads that you can buy, Text ads which are ads that are plain anchor text, and image ads which are images that display the content of your choice.

Usually Image ads are sold for a higher price than text ads not only because they are more attractive but the make a page load slowly and sometimes make the page look more cluttered.

Viral Services
There are many Viral systems such as TraficG that allow you to submit your site to get free traffic.

Most Viral websites usually work through a referral system. You refer someone that person has to view your site in order to get a code, then that person refers someone and that someone has to view your site to get a code but he also has to look at his referer’s site to get the code… and so on.

Usually this method works great if you have good marketing skills that you can use to refer people to join the system. You can also start adding your link to different sites and you can tell people to join to get free traffic.

Only use this method if you have great content that you know will attract people. Otherwise you would just be wasting your time and your bandwidth.

If this system is used properly then it can bring hundreds of viewers, if not then it won’t work at all.

Social Bookmarking
You may think that submitting your site to bookmarking sites is useless but it’s not. One time I got over 500 unique visitors from Stumbleupon alone in a day. Social bookmarking sites are a gamble… the system may work and move up to the front page of that specific bookmarking site and get hundreds of viewers, or it can just be another spammy post in the Bookmarking site’s database.

Some of the best social bookmarking sites are digg, stumbleupon, delicious, and reddit. There are many more but the list is so long, I just can’t keep going.

There are many programs that allow you to submit your link to many different social bookmarking sites by the click of a button, some of them are Socialmatic and Onlywire. Here is a tutorial on how to use Onlywire.

Link Exchanges
A great way to gain traffic is to run a link exchange campaign. Even though it’s frowned upon in some search engines if you do it correctly you can benefit from it, if not you can get penalized by Google or some other search engine.

A link exchange is just a way to exchange your website’s URL you can do this with your friends or with random people that you don’t know… but don’t get caught by Google or else your site may drop in Gooogle rankings and it may loose potential readers.

John Chow, way back in December of 2006 was penalized by Google for running a “Link Love” campaign where he asked for people to link to his site so they will get a reciprocal backlink from John’s blog. The campaign did great for John as it gained him hundreds of backlinks, but it didn’t help his search results in Google as he no longer appears in the first 4 pages of Google for the term “John Chow”! And that’s his name.

Google is really hard on your SERPS so if you are gonna do a link campaign do it carefully and read Google’s TOS, here is an excerpt from there.

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

So if you want to gain traffic make sure you follow the rules, or your rankings will drop.

Word of Mouth
By Word of Mouth I don’t mean to tell you to go around your town and tell people to go to your site, that’s what bums are for, so pay a bum to do it for you. No, I’m just kidding.

Word of Mouth means that you do all the work, and you have to go around online in forums and blogs and tell people about your site. You can tell people about your site politely and sneak the link in a post, or you can go all out and ask people to go to your site rudely.
If you want to advertise your site, I suggest you do the first option as the other one will most likely get you banned and will give a bad reputation to your site.

If you want to advertise your site to a forum that meets your niche, then go to google and type “INSERTNICHEHERE forum” that keyword should take you to a forum that is just like your site, those types of forums will also help you gain better positions in the Search Engines because they are in the same niche as you are.

Advertising in sites in your niche is great because not only do you get traffic but you get great juicy backlinks as well, and well… who can refuse a backlink…?