Friday, September 12, 2008

10 Free Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Driving traffic to your affiliate site is not difficult, you simply need to focus on methods that have been tried and tested to work. Let's take a look at 10 of the very best and proven methods for driving traffic to your website.

1. Blog Comments
Commenting on blogs related to your niche can drive remarkable amounts of traffic. The key to getting a link to stay on these blogs is to make your reply helpful and relevant. It is no use just writing a short sentence then linking to your site, you need to write a long, useful reply and then point people to your site advising them that further information can be found there. Of course, there is no need to tell anyone that it's your site!

2. Forum Signatures
Posting on related forums with a link to your site in your signature can work well, if the forum admin allows it. It is always wise to build up a credible forum account before trying this tactic.

3. Social Sites

4. Article Submissions
Article marketing can literally be the only method of traffic generation you do and if done well, can bring you traffic for years. The best place to submit articles to is ezinearticles.com. Make sure your resource box has an enticing call to action for people to visit your site.

5. Videos
Submitting a video to YouTube can have an astounding effect. If your video is viral in nature, that is if people will want to share it with friends, then the potential for web traffic is enormous. Your videos should have relevance to your website and of course display your site URL in the video itself plus in the description box.

6. Viral ebooks
Giving away free ebooks is a great way to gain traffic. People love anything that is free, so handing them an ebook in exchange for their email address not only gains you visitors but also builds your mailing list for future use.

7. Email marketing
After you start building a list you can begin emailing them. It is important not to flood the list with offers or people will unsubscribe. Ideally you should provide useful information regularly and every so often include an offer or product recommendation using your affiliate link. List members will then respect your opinion as you have provided them with so much value.

8. Squidoo
Squidoo.com allows you to create your own page called a lens. A lens can contain any information, many affiliate marketers post articles related to their niche and a link to their website. Because Google loves Squidoo, it is possible for your lens to rank very high in the search engine and as such, lead people to your website. You can also promote products directly on your Squidoo lens.

9. Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers provides an excellent platform for gaining visitors but you must tread carefully. Answering questions in a helpful manner plus slipping in your website link in a subtle way is a great tactic.

10. Free Blogs
Similar to the Squidoo strategy, creating a free blog at blogger.com or Wordpress.com may increase your chance of ranking well in the search engines. These sites become like mini satellite sites to your main site and add yet another method of traffic generation to your arsenal.
The above ten free traffic generation methods all work. How well they work will depend how much effort you put into each one and of course, how useful your website is to visitors.

1 comment:

Sam said...

Awesome tips you dished out there.