Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. No visitors, means no customers, no business. A lot of people talk about free traffic but there actually is no such thing as free traffic, as there is likely some sort of opportunity cost involved like paying someone to do your traffic generating tasks, and if you do it yourself your time is certainly worth something. You would be surprised how many people still believe that they can sit back and relax and wait for traffic to hit their websites after they are built. Does not happen that way. You would need to promote your website, just like you would promote a business.

There are many ways to get more visitors to your website but here is a list of the fastest and easiest ways and a brief description of each.

1. Email Signatures

If you have a business website, you should at least have an email signature that has a link to your website AND your unique selling proposition or any value statement that catches attention and prompts a reader to click the link to your website.

2. Social Networking and Social Media Accounts

If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube then you have the opportunity to tell people on your network about your website, product or services. However there is the right way and a wrong way to do that, and from what I have seen, a lot of people do it the wrong way.

Do not spam nor annoy people with messages that they are not interested in. The key to getting people to your website through social properties is to catch their attention by posting your own or sharing other people’s content such notes, articles, links, and videos that are of interest to people on your network. The key there is to first get their attention, then sustain their interest with whatever piece of content they are viewing,  the longer they consume that content a desire in them brews, then make them take action by giving them an irresistible offer or incentive.

I always underscore the three key elements to a successful social marketing campaign:

• continuously grow your network
• keep posting content that people on your network will enjoy or find useful
• interact with people in your network in order to establish a rapport and build trust

You can send traffic to your website from social sites through the links that you include with the content that you publish.

3. Craigslist and Classified Ads Websites

If you are selling products or services and you cater to a local audience, Craigslist  is a great way to be able to put those products and services in front of customers who are already looking for what you have to offer. In fact, Craigslist is a great way to quickly dispose of products or inventory that you do not want cluttering your shelves, because you want to make room for new stuff.

Craigslist allows you to post classified ads that contain links in the listing, links that readers click and are sent to wherever those links point.

4. Press Release Submission

If you own a business, you probably have sent out Press Releases to media outfits requesting that they get published or the story carried. You would probably see a lot of these on newspapers. The same thing works online, you submit a newsworthy story to Press Release websites that will publish and distribute your story to media outfits. There are free sites and paid sites that you can submit to and of course the paid sites offer some form of added value.

The traffic from Press Releases will come in three ways:

• people reading the Press Release on the PR sites where it is published click a link in that takes them to your website
• people subscribed via RSS feeds to these PR sites will receive notices of your new PR via email
• people reading news websites who carried your PR story click the link that takes them to your website

5. Email Marketing

If you are an existing business and have customers, leverage on existing customers by getting them on your mailing list. Satisfied customers often make repeat buys from a seller that has earned their trust.  Again, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way would be to, not be in touch with your customer then suddenly send them a message that you have a sale. You would need to be in touch with your customer through email, immediately after they make a purchase and find out if they are satisfied with the transaction; keep in touch with them by providing them with useful information that would make them make the most out of the product they had purchased; then offer them special deals on related products. It is also important that you get their permission for you to send them email messages, and this is easily accomplished with many email marketing services such as , which I use and have used for several years now.

6. Article Marketing

This is one of the most effective means of getting traffic today. Simply put, it is the process of writing articles that are relevant to your prospective customers, articles they would find helpful or useful and would contain a call to action for them to click a link that is part of that article. You would need to submit that to article directories such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com.

The traffic you will receive come in the form of visitors reading that article published on those article directories and the traffic from websites that republish that article on their websites. Article directories allow other websites to republish articles as long as the links remain intact.

You can also publish these articles on high traffic social sites; blog sites like WordPress.com and Blogger.com; content sites like Hugpages.com and Squidoo.com. These sites have a huge number of pages and communities tagged or categorize according to topic or subject matter. Publish content on these sites and tag them with relevant keywords; words or phrases that best describe your content, the same words and phrase that people on these sites use on the website’s internal search engine in order to find your content.

7. Forum Posting

Forums or online bulletin boards are online communities where you can find people of similar interests. You would need to join forums where your target customers are found and contribute in threads or discussions, providing useful content that will help resolve any of their issues or problems. Make sure to include a link on your website on your forum signature, with your unique selling proposition or a value statement.

8. Yahoo and Help Sites Posting

A few years ago, a friend of mine laughed at the idea of going to Yahoo Answers and answering questions, she found it silly. Well, the fact of the matter is, Yahoo answers has proven to be a good source of traffic. All you have to do is find answers that you can provide good answers to, and if you can use your website as a reference to those answers or an added resource you can post that link in your answer.

9. Blog Commenting

Blog commenting today is often referred to as blog spam, since a lot of people simply leave brief non helpful comments at the end of blog posts, just so they can get a link from that blog post. The right way to do it, is contribute to the discussion, add something helpful or useful to the blog post so that the owner will allow your comment to remain and you keep that link.

Traffic from blog comment links will come in the form of readers who found your comments useful.

10. Integration Marketing

Integration marketing is a term I heard being used by Kim Roach, but this is nothing new. A lot of companies have partnerships and co branding activities. This method of increasing traffic is simply the act of finding related businesses that you can partner with, and put your product in their sales process.

In business partnerships, you can for instance be a contract plumber who gets business from an architect, who hires you to take care of plumbing for a house the architect is building. In the virtual world, you can be an elearning software vendor who ties up with a human resource and training consultant who sells training DVDs online, and when DVD buyers check out, the buyer is given a one time offer where they can try your elearning system for free and a link where they can claim that offer. Another example that has more of a direct impact on sales rather than traffic is, you can be a seller of cellular phone skins and accessories who ties up with a cell phone retailer, and in the check out process when a customer buys a phone from that retailer, the customer will be shown your skins and cell phone accessories at discounted prices.

All the strategies above are FREE methods, but again.. they are not exactly free because your time has a price to it, right? I believe time is precious and certainly not free. If you don’t do it yourself, you can hire someone to do all that for you.

I stood for about a couple of minutes staring that the title of this post and not typing anything else.. I knew I had to make the title a little more compelling, but for the life of me just could not think of something anything better to add to “Website Traffic Sources….”

One of the things I had to do, or still need to continue doing is check on all my other sites and get rid of those which are no longer relevant, or not profitable. There is one site whose income vanished as quickly as its rankings did.

Some years ago, I used to do marketing for a very successful Bar/Club. As you may know, a large part of a bar’s income comes from the mark up made on drinks, whether they be sold bottled like beers for instance, or mixed drinks. When you have a problem with a supplier for items that happen to be your most profitable, you see a huge dent in your bottom line. We solved that problem by not depending merely on one supplier and gave other people the opportunity to sell as that inventory. I am being purposely vague so as not to identify the bar nor the supplier or product.

A website survives mainly on revenue that its visitors generate, regardless of the means. You could be selling your own product or service, or someone else’s as an affiliate, or simply putting banners on your site. Regardless how the money is made, your money is made through your website traffic.

When you depend solely on one source of traffic, if that traffic source dries up or disappears, so will your revenue. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket, I am sure you have heard that before.

Incidentally, about that bar I was talking about earlier, we had several different advertising avenues and not just depended on one. For instance we were heavy on radio advertising and social networking; but eventually realizing that networking was more effective and cost efficient we dropped radio advertising. It was also only at the point where we had come to realize that the brand had achieved the desired perception among its audience, the brand and the value it offered had already been established.

Going back, what I was doing wrong with this one website was, I was only getting traffic from one traffic source, Google. It was getting ranked for a keyword on Google. But since I had not been doing anything more to promote the site, no one new was finding the site, and no one new was linking to it or talking about it, Google thought… this site is not getting promoted by the owner, why should we rank it at all and send it visitors… there are other websites that are more deserving. So Google, dropped the site… from top of the charts to no where to be found.

Now, other people who have had this happen to them make a big hoopla out of it, but hey, your rankings disappeared because you did not do what you need to do to keep them up there. Google does not owe you anything. You want Google to keep you and rank you well, you need to have other traffic sources.

Maybe I confused you a bit there… but it’s simple.

If you want Google to rank you well, you have to not depend on them for rankings, but promote your site and get your website traffic from other sources, like other websites through links, through networking and even paid ads like banners or Google AdWords.

So that if Google does change its mind about how it ranks sites (its ranking algorithm) which it often does, and if you lose your rankings because of it, you still have a steady flow of visitors coming from other sources. Funny thing is, when Google notices you do have this steady flow of visitors from other sources and those sources keep growing, it ranks you even better and sends you even more visitors.

New blog post title on WebProNews reads PPC Vs SEO; the new post features a video clip showing an interview with Kristine Churchill of KeyRelevance shot during the recent SES in Chicago.

Some people will say PPC is better because of this and that; the others on the other side of the fence say SEO is better because of so and so. With all that is being said, you now believe that you actually need to pick a side; you feel the urgency to decide whether you are pro PPC and anti SEO or vice versa.

What many people do not realize is that both PPC and SEO, being the traffic generation methods that they both are, are actually equally important for any online marketing strategy since they both achieve specific goals that are unique for each, objectives that the other may fail to accomplish.

You cannot absolutely choose one over the other because doing so would be like deciding what you want to have all day long — daytime or night, which is just not possible. If you are not familiar with the distinct features and difference between SEO and PPC, click this link http://www.magrointernational.com/PayPerClick/SEOvsPPC.aspx

Again I stress, PPC and SEO are both important. PPC delivers quick traffic especially to websites that have just rolled out and without any incoming links or organic rankings. If you were one such website owner, PPC allows you to get stats rolling in that you may examine, evaluate and use as basis for optimizing your content to improve engagement or conversions, and optimizing your traffic generation or online advertising activities that would likely include ranking for search queries organically which are the result of SEO activity.

Here is that interview with Kristine Churchill.

Image Source: www.magrointernational.com

A new post on Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog www.shoemoney.com reads “”.

The post basically tries to determine which traffic generation strategy is better, SEO or Social Media, and in a way concludes that neither is better; SEO is the term that cold unfeeling tech geeks inevitably prefer to use while the more warm and gregarious folks fall under the Social Media.

While I agree to that neither is better than the other, I have different reasons. I believe them to be equally important.

Many people view SEO as a cause, a means to achieve a result… however I have a different perspective on SEO. SEO is actually a result that begets more results.

Let us assume you have an effective website, optimally set up that engages visitors well regardless of traffic source; search engine traffic or referred from social media, and you need to send visitors to that site, what do you do?

You build links! Make sure you observe good link building practices, ensure that your links are found on highly relevant websites or web pages that would ensure high click rates on your links from those pages. Social Media has been an effective way of getting traffic because of the high level of traffic Social Media sites typically have.

Proper link building results in good SEO results (better rankings for relevant keywords), which in turn leads to more traffic. A key part of good SEO is good link building tactics which includes activities on Social Media.

Image Source:http://www.searchenginegenie.com

ikoni

So you might have not heard of YouTube marketing before, or thought that YouTube was just another site where you can put up videos for fun. YouTube is the most authoritative video site with the most number of videos and highest traffic, and one of the most expensive websites to ever get sold (bought for gazillions by Google some years back).

There are a lot of really talented musicians, songwriters and artists who try to find ways to get their music across to their audience. In the old days, getting your music heard meant trying to play as many gigs and venues to as many people possible… then maybe give away a few cassettes here and there.

Radio and other broadcast media is also helpful, but it is not easy getting your music played over the radio, even more difficult is getting an interview or getting asked to do a few songs live on air. Having been on radio for about a decade, and a marketing and program director for some, I know how radio stations decide on which music to play, which acts to feature.

This is why today, with the internet fast and reliable (at least faster than when it was first commercially available little over 10 years ago at turtle speed), musicians have found that inexpensive yet equally effective medium of spreading music… YouTube!

So if you are a musician reading this, and want more people to view your videos on YouTube, this is how to do it.

Let’s say you just came from a gig, a good gig, a good crowd. You brought the house down and they loved your songs. Where do you think they are going to start heading?

Chances are they are going to go online, head over to Google and start typing your band name or your own name and find out where you are playing next and if they could hear your songs, or watch your other performances. Others go straight to YouTube and type your name.

So here’s a question… when you type your own name on Google or on YouTube, are you anywhere among the top results? At the bottom of the page? Or are you listed at all?

If not, well here are a few tips to help ensure that your YouTube video gets found on searches done on YouTube and even on Google.

Tip 1 – It’s All About Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases that people use when searching for information online, they do that on Google and on YouTube. If you know what keyword people are likely to search for, and in your case, your band name or your name, you need to make sure that your name is found:

- in the title of the YouTube video
- in the description of the YouTube video
- used as tags

Tip 2 – Tell The Viewer What To Do Next
Viewers who watch your video will not stay until the very end of the video if they did not like what they saw. So if they do, then that is a really good sign, they are open to what you will tell them. At the end of the video, encourage them to do any or all of these things:
- rate your video
- leave a comment
- spread the video to their friends
- publish it on their own blogs so their own blog visitors can watch it
- bookmark it on social bookmarking sites
- or click a link to your main site

Tip 3 – Leave a Link So They Know Where To Go