There are a lot of ways to get traffic
to your website. Some are free and some cost money. The ways
to get website traffic that actually work require time and effort on
your part. You can't just throw money at it and expect to buy your
way to good traffic no matter how easy people trying to sell you the
'traffic tools'
make it seem.
Obviously you want to get as much free website traffic
as you can. It IS possible to get a nice steady stream of visitors
to your website but it does take work. Here are the best ways to
get traffic to your website for free:
1. Get Traffic from the Search Engines.
Hands down, this is the best way to get traffic. If someone types in a
search term related to your website you want your website to come up as
close to the top as possible.
The hard part is getting to the TOP of the search
engines.
To get to the top of the search
engines requires you to optimize your website pages (also called SEO
which stands for search engine optimization.)
SEO is a very detailed and involved process. You
have to figure out which words people type in to find your product, how
much competition each search term has and then you have to actually set
up your pages so that the search term appears where it should and how
often it needs to on your webpage.
If you don't want to learn the nitty-gritty of SEO and
muddle through it on your own there is a good little tool called Search Engine Visibility that can help you do SEO on your
site a lot faster and easier. It helps prepare your website so the
search engine finds it. It's easy for beginners and can really
help you boost your search engine rankings.
2.Promote Your Website Yourself
Using this method you can get website traffic but it
takes a LOT of work both initially and on an on-going basis. In
this method you generate traffic through one or more of the
following methods:
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Twitter
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Facebook
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Put your
Website URL in your Email Signature
*
Word of
Mouth/Networking - i.e., talk up your website
*
Create a
Free Product to Drive Traffic to your website
*
Blog
*
Promote
your website on forums, blogs, and other websites (WARNING:
DO NOT spam your website name everywhere, you need to
make sure you control where it goes and how it gets there.
Do NOT use an automated service for this.)
I don't really like many of the
methods listed in #2 because they are a lot of work for not much
reward. I think the best and most profitable way of getting
traffic to your website is through Search Engine Optimization.
SEO doesn't work overnight and it does take time and effort but if
you get to the top of the rankings for your products you can really
do well.
There are a lot of companies that
will sell you traffic. Most are worthless. The ONLY
pay source of website traffic I recommend is Google Adwords.
It is cheap - you can pay as little as $5/month - and you only
pay for website visitors that actually click on your ad and visit
your website. Google is, of course, very reputable.
You can see a short video from Google below
that explains how their Adwords program works.
Here's what I recommend:
Use
Google Adwords to get immediate traffic coming into your website.
At the same time, use the
Search Engine Visibility tool to optimize your website and do SEO on
your website.
Over time your SEO efforts should
bring in enough free traffic that you can then taper off and end your
pay Adwords traffic. That way you will get website visitors now
but eventually all of your website visitors will be free.
