How Do You Get Traffic

I thought it might be helpful to include some of the most effective 'active techniques' for your consideration as you prepare your promotional strategies:

Article Marketing For Traffic

1. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your site - we've talked about this several times on this site, but it's still worth including as our #1 strategy for active promotion that sends traffic to your site - pushing them forward.

Submitting articles to the most widely read article marketing sites is an excellent idea.

A very important point for you to note.

Unfortunately I made this mistake.

I wrote an article about wordpress. This is the article here:

7 of the Best Wordpress Plugins For Making Money

I published this article as a Squidoo Lens about 5 days before my article was checked by Ezine Articles. They did a check on the content of the article and it came up as duplicate content.

I was suspended pending the outcome of an inquiry.

Someone had seen my lense, not even acknowledged it, and then decided to steal the complete content and paste it on their website/blog.

Not a very nice thing to do. It could have cost me my Ezine account.

So the moral is. Make sure you know where your content is coming from and post to the article directories before building your squidoo lenses or hubpages.

Do not steal other peoples content.

If you do make a article from quality content, use copyscape or a similar product to make sure it is unique.

Make sure you have details of where you have published your article incase you need to refer to it...

The Top Article Marketing Directories are:
 
These are the top article directories. info from early 2008...

EzineArticles.com  PR6 at 499

GoArticles.com PR 4 at 3,592

ArticleDashboard.com  PR6 at 5,255

SearchWarp.com PR5 at 6,032

ArticlesBase.com PR4 at  8,735

iSnare.com *PR6 at 8,791

SelfGrowth.com PR 6 at 9,653

Buzzle.com PR 6 at 9,698

ArticleCity.com PR 6 at 11,526

IdeaMarketers.com PR 4 at 13,121

ArticleAlley.com PR5 at 14,259

Web-Source.net PR5 at 15,375

SelfSEO.com PR 5 at 15,945

Amazines.com PR5 at 17,509

ArticleTrader.com PR5 at 17,633

SearchGuild.com PR 6 at 20,008

WebWorldIndex.com PR5 at 22,233

ArticleSphere.com PR4 at 24,462

BusinessKnowHow.com PR 6 at 28,036

PromotionWorld.com PR 6 at 29,707

ArticlesFactory.com PR 7 at 30,664

ExcellentGuide.com PR 6 at 33,740

ContentDesk.com PR4 at 33,894

ArticleCube.com PR5 at 36,322

ArticleBiz.com PR 6 at 49,044

Be aware that it is NOT recommended to submit the same article over and over again to the article directories. This will give a massive amount of duplicate content and could make your rankings worse rather than better.

If you want to submit to many article directories at least try and rewrite the comtent by at least 30%.

Personally I would submit to no more than the top 4 article directories.

Pay Per Click
  

2. Paid advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) is another way to drive traffic. It requires some skills, but it's still the best way to generate targeted traffic instantly and collect some metrics from your website.

Be aware that pay per click can be very costly. Google makes you provide a credit card for payment and this can run into hundreds of pounds if you do not know what you are doing. We are talking hundreds A DAY, not a month.

Syndication

3. Syndicate your website content so that it really becomes viral and will be distributed to many different communities and networks.

Forum Activity

4. Stay active in your own community by actively participating in relevant forums, blog carnivals, e-zines, and other types of online content that will help expose your name as an authority, and your website as a valuable resource.

Be aware that forums are full of experts. If you start to spam the forum you will get blacklisted and banned. It is only helpful to post quality content.

Networking

5. Network, network, network - talk with other people in your niche market, communicate with your customers, encourage interaction with your visitors and customers by engaging them in interactive strategies.

Ebook Givaways

6. Give away an eBook that points back to your products and services - this is a great way to drive repeat visits to your site.

There is a lot to be said for giving away free ebooks. You can make a good name for yourself if you write and provide good content on a subject that has very little information on the web.

Ezine Ads

7. E-zine ads are another active idea - although they may cost a little more money.

But you could test this strategy with a relevant e-zine or two and see if the traffic follows.

Then you'll know if it's a worthwhile investment for the future.

Teleseminars or Video Production

8. Engage, offer, and/or participate in teleseminars in your niche market. Or you can even consider offering an e-course or teleseminar to your niche market.

Producing videos is now the in thing. Google loves to show your videos, and will gladly move you up the rankings should they prove successful. This is a surefire way of bringing in good quality traffic on a particular subject.

Don't just look at the short-term marketing value of a strategy - always consider the long-term benefits as well.

Repeat visitors and loyal customers are vital to your websites success...