You’ve published a website right? You realize that it’s a meaningless endeavor unless you get some good traffic. You have absolutely no money for expensive advertising campaigns. In fact, your advertising budget is virtually non-existent. Read on to discover some simple methods to get good free traffic.
Good Seo
This cannot be emphasized enough. Good Seo is your starting point to any free advertising campaign. Before you even consider any other methods for free traffic, get your website user and search engine friendly. Put on quality content in line with the objective of your website. Make your content interesting, fresh and unique for the user and the search bots will come crawling. If word gets around that your content is great, webmasters may voluntarily link to your website. This one-way linking will increase your link popularity, search engine rankings and get you good free traffic. Ensure your site is well designed, your html is clean and compliant, your pages load quick and there are no dead links. Your users should be able to get what they want within three to four clicks. Avoid excessive use of graphics and animation unless absolutely necessary. I don’t recommend you use pop-ups as most users get irritated by them.
Articles
Writing articles is another great way to get free traffic. Webmasters are constantly looking for fresh, quality articles to put on their website. When you write an article, you are allowed to describe a little about yourself and your website in the resource or author bio box. It is in this box that you are allowed to put a link back to your site. Submit these articles to article directory sites. If your article is relevant and exciting, webmasters will put it on their websites. In this way, you can improve link popularity by getting a one-way link back to your site and free traffic from readers who read your article. Write articles that relate to your website. For example, if you have a website on growing roses, write an article that has something to go with growing roses. Submit your article to as many article directories and relevant websites as possible.
Forums
Every niche on the internet has a plethora of forums. Do a Google search and find relevant ones in your niche. Join these forums as member and contribute to the community by making useful and thoughtful posts. You are allowed to put your link in your signature line. This also counts towards your link popularity as search engines also index forum posts. Fellow forum members may also click on your link to visit your site. A word of caution – every forum has a different set of rules, especially when it comes to links. Make sure you read and obey them at all times. If you just go in and put up links, you will be banned almost instantly.
Link Exchange
The great granddaddy of free traffic, link exchanges are still very relevant and effective today. Make contact with sites that are in a similar niche as your own. Offer to exchange links with these sites. A word of caution – choose the sites that you link to very carefully. Avoid linking to spammy, black-hat sites with questionable content and motives. Make sure that these sites are not banned by the major search engines.
Newsletters
You not only need to get a continuous stream of new visitors to your website, you need to make sure you keep the old ones coming back all the time. The best way to do this is by providing fresh valuable content and by way of a newsletter system. Put in a newsletter subscription form on your site and invite visitors to subscribe to a newsletter that you can email to them either weekly or monthly. You can put some content, some special offers, ads and a link back to your site in your newsletter every time you email out. Also provide them with an incentive or reason to click on your link and visit your site. In this way, you remind your visitors about your website.
Submit to directories
There are many directories available on the web that allow ads or links free of charge. Some are general and some specialize in a particular niche. Choose relevant ones and submit your link or ad to them. Make sure you choose quality directories that are indexed by search engines. In this way you get a one-way link back to your site. You benefit by getting free traffic and improved link popularity.
Email this page
Another great, yet simple idea is to add an “Email this page” feature to your website. It’s a simple form where a visitor fills in the name and email address of another person that he/she wishes to recommend your site to. You set the form to automatically email a link to your website to that person. That person will then receive an email with a short message that says that so and so person had recommended that he/she visit your site, etc.
If you follow these simple ideas, you should start to see an increase in traffic to your site. Please note that building traffic takes time and won’t happen overnight. All the best!
1) Start today... treat your AdSense business like it is a REAL business and track what you do.
Begin tracking what you are doing that works... as well as what you are doing that does not work. This will keep you from making the same mistakes over and over, and you can repeat the steps that have worked in the past. As simple as this step seems... most people do not know the reason(s) to their success or failure.
2) Utilize the latest tools and software available.
The Super AdSense earners are not any smarter than your average person. I know many people think they are... but for the most part, they are regular non techie people.
They are smarter in one respect though... they use the latest tools available to them to automate most of the tasks involved with researching and creating sites. They use the latest keyword, site creation and search engine optimization tools available. The tools they use are their secret weapons.
3) Quit chasing the Mega Dollar keywords.
You cannot compete with the search engine experts who create sites for the $80 payout keywords. You may get lucky every now and then... but in the long run, you are better off building sites for the low to mid range payout keywords. The competition is less, and your chance of success is much higher over the long term.
4) Choose broad niches and break it down.
Choose a broad subject as your main theme (lets use computers for an example). From there... break it down into as many sub niches as possible.
Using Computers as the example... you could build sub niches/sites like laptop computers, computer hard drives, computer keyboards, etc, etc. You could literally build hundreds of sites around one major theme and stay totally focused. Once you have exhausted every possible sub niche of that major theme... choose another main theme and repeat the process.
5) KISS
Keep your sites easy to navigate and forget the fancy graphics that distract your visitors attention. Unless you are just building AdSense sites for the fun of it and to impress your friends... the purpose of having the site is to have people click on one of the ads, right? Then keep the site layout simple... dump the scrolling banners, dancing chickens and colored scroll bars... they are distractions.
6) What is the purpose of your web site?
Your web site cannot be everything to everybody. If you have a full fledged ecommerce site, with products for sale... links to other products, it is not a good site for AdSense. If the primary focus of the site is to sell products... let it do that.
Do not distract or confuse your visitor with to many options or choices. The best AdSense sites are AdSense only content sites that sell nothing. They are sites that "Tell"... not "Sell."
7) Be consistent.
This is not one of those deals where you build one site and you are done. Refer back to Step #4. You must continuously build in order to be successful.
To sum it up... utilize the tools available to automate as much of the process of building sites - doing research and building keyword lists as you can. This alone will help keep you organized and on track.
Here's a short checklist of things you can do to increase readership, traffic, and overall visibilty on the internet. These things are all must haves if you expect to make money!
Write well and write often
Write what you know and what you like writing about
Stay with your general topic, and be informative
Answer comments kindly and promptly
Never make lame excuses for not updating
Keep your site neat and orderly
Your site should be easy on the eyes and easy to read
Toss out the trash regularly by deleting and blocking spam comments
Use social bookmarking icon links for Reddit, deli.cio.us and Furl and many others
Use Technorati tags on keywords in your posts
Make sure your readers can reach you by email or web form
Don't have more than 2 or 3 posts showing on the front (index) page
Make sure your site loads quickly with no major errors
Frequently check your site in all major browsers for appearance and readability
Leave relevant comments with your return link at other sites
Good content is most important
Don't distract from content with excessive buttons and blinkie ads in sidebar
Use relevant images in posts, don't over do it
Those are the most important ones I can think of at the moment but I'll probably add more in the future.
Here's a short checklist of things you can do to increase readership, traffic, and overall visibilty on the internet. These things are all must haves if you expect to make money!
Write well and write often
Write what you know and what you like writing about
Stay with your general topic, and be informative
Answer comments kindly and promptly
Never make lame excuses for not updating
Keep your site neat and orderly
Your site should be easy on the eyes and easy to read
Toss out the trash regularly by deleting and blocking spam comments
Use social bookmarking icon links for Reddit, deli.cio.us and Furl and many others
Use Technorati tags on keywords in your posts
Make sure your readers can reach you by email or web form
Don't have more than 2 or 3 posts showing on the front (index) page
Make sure your site loads quickly with no major errors
Frequently check your site in all major browsers for appearance and readability
Leave relevant comments with your return link at other sites
Good content is most important
Don't distract from content with excessive buttons and blinkie ads in sidebar
Use relevant images in posts, don't over do it
Those are the most important ones I can think of at the moment but I'll probably add more in the future.
