In the following post Heidi Richards Mooney, Founder of Women in Ecommerce™ discusses the top five ways to generate website traffic for FREE. You can read the article below or click on the Audio Link and listen while you are doing other things:
5 Website Traffic Tips
There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, you wont generate any income. PERIOD. Unless of course you also have a brick and mortar business or have other ways to sell your products or services. But that’s another story. Lets just say that if you had to depend soley on your website to generate income, you need traffic. Without it, your site will not make money.
Are you doing things to STOP traffic from coming to your site instead of encouraging it? If so, stop it! right now! Although It takes money to make money with website marketing there are also many FREE ways to do so. Sure you have to spend some money, but not tons of money. In fact, to maintain an income generating site; you have to spend time and resources too. In fact, you don’t need tons of cash to generate website traffic for your site. You also need to cultivate strong relationships online.
Have you ever wonder how those popular sites drive traffic to their sites?
I would venture to guess that most of them are spending tons of money to do so, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing strategies and opportunities. That is well and good for sites that have lots of income, they can afford to spend the BIG Bucks on advertising in magazines, banner advertising, email marketing campaigns and other cost inducing programs. But what if you are just starting out? You probably have very little excess cash and even less experience in getting eyeballs and traffic to your website.
Not to worry. You don’t have to spend tons of money you don’t really have. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. It’s important to try new things with internet marketing but many web entrepreneurs will tell you they don’t, spend money when they start out.
Women in Ecommerce™ recommends these five ways to generate website traffic without spending a fortune to get valuable traffic and link backs to your site and greater visibility on the net. And when done correctly, these 5 strategies are effective ways to add to your bottom line.
Exchange Links with other sites
This is a tried and true method. Just take a look at other sites you visit. Rarely will you see a site where there are no links to another site. Many web entre
preneurs and webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they can help one another create more awareness about each others site
s. If the site has equal or more traffic to yours, you will also see an increase in the traffic coming from those sites.
A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having a similar or complementary niche or content. They should share a common subject so that when visitors click on those links, there is continuity in the types of service and information of interest to your target traffic. You also want to exchange links with sites that have more traffic and better rankings than yours. You can go to Alexa.com to find out the rankings of every virtually every website. Unless they don’t have a rank. Generally speaking, the lower the rank, the better the site traffic. For instance when you go to Alexa, you can check out Google’s ranks. They are #1. That means they are the most visited site on the planet. And we ARE talking traffic here, aren’t we? So it stands to reason that you want to be listed on Google! Facebook is now number 2 and YouTube is number 3. That means of the millions of websites out there, these are the top 3 in the world. But back to exchanging links.
Exchanging links boosts your chances of getting higher ranking in search engine results. When search engines visit a site and see links, they look for relevance. If a link seems out of place or does not fit your purpose, they may ignore the link, resulting in no extra rankings or worse case, even demoting a site. Search engines rank sites higher when they have inbound and outbound theme-related links. Link Exchanges can give yours site good rankings in the search engines, so your site generates more traffic at little or no cost.
Traffic Exchange
As with everything on the net, you either love traffic exchanges or you are totally against them. According to Wikipedia: “a traffic exchange website receives website submissions from webmasters that join traffic exchange networks. The person who submitted the website then has to browse other member sites on the exchange program to earn credits, which enable their sites to be viewed by other members through the surf system. This increases the number of visitors to all the sites involved.” Most traffic exchange sites are free or may cost a few dollars to participate. If you are invited to participate in a traffic exchange, I recommend you do a few things first. See who else is participating and find out if their audience is one you’d like to also get in front of. If they are, test one out. Create a system to build your list from this exchange in the form of a “freebie” you give away when others from the exchange visit your website.
Write and Submit Articles
There are many e-zines, article banks and online encyclopedias in the internet that provides free places to submit articles. You can “google” the term “article banks” and find dozens of listings. Articles not only can drive traffic to your website, they can help you build your list AND your credibility across the net. If you don’t like to write, you can hire a freelance writer to do it for you or you can even purchase private label rights articles that you have full control over editing to suit your needs and your “voice.”
If you are going to write the articles yourself, write about what you know, those things you have expertise in. Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you write interesting, information-laden articles, people will go to your site for more of the same. The more of an expert persona you can demonstrate online the better your chances of getting not only traffic to your site, but people actually buying things from you.
Write a Blog
Self-hosted blogs (similar to this one) are the best way to drive traffic to your site. Don’t let your webmaster convince you to have a blog on another site such as blogger because blogger gets all the traffic and their ranks go up every time you make a post. When you have a blog ON YOUR SITE, every time you write a post or make an entry, Goolge and the other search engines get almost instantaneous notice that new content has been added to your site. This means you don’t have to wait for their service to “crawl” your site for new information because they already have it. Test it out and you will see what I mean. How do you test it? You create an alert through Google Alerts with the search terms in your site description or the name of your company. Post new information to your own website and a post to your blog. See which one Google tells you about first. I rest my case.
If your blog is interesting to others (and we hope it will be) you will gain traffic, subscribers and new prospects and customers.
Check out the Blogging for Business Audio (on sale thru January 30th).
Leverage Social Media
Join Online Communities and Forums – they are free; the main investment is your time. The important thing here is to join those that are relevant to you, your audience, your topic and your expertise. Why? Because if you only have so much time in the day (and everyone has the same 24 hours, its just that we all spend the time differently) then you want to maximize your time on these social networks to build relationships, share knowledge and expertise, gain knowledge and share valuable information. It is one of the best FREE ways to promote what you do -when done correctly, that is.
You can learn more about Leveraging Social Media in my program “Social Networking Digital Formula for Success (also on sale thru January 30th).”
In a future article I will talk about how to use add press releases, contests, mobile aps and more to generate low cost traffic to your site.…
Note: This is just one of several audio resources Women in Ecommerce™ offers women. When youJOIN you get access to several of our “packaged” summit programs as well as our latest interviews with experts in topics of interest to women entrepreneurs, webpreneurs, online retailers and more.
