11. 12.
An online business is only successful if you have enough website traffic coming into it. In fact, traffic generation could be the most important part of your online business promotion. Without traffic your business is dead and is no longer useful. Here are some free and easy ways to get traffic to your website
The first one is Blogging
Chances are, you probably have a blog or have at least have heard of blogging. But do you know how important it is to develop an informative blog that people are going to follow?
To have a successful blog it should be updated daily and it should have only quality information on it. A great way to keep people coming back to your blog is to frequently give away free stuff that is related to your business. It could be a free e-book that you have written or a free template that will be beneficial to the people that are reading your blog.
The reason that blogs are mentioned first in this article is because search engines love them and they will crawl all over them when new content is added. If you have a blog that is updated on a daily basis the chances of your blog getting ranked high in the search engines is very good. Two of the more popular blogging sites are Blogger.com, which is very user friendly and WordPress.com, which is a little more advanced. both of these are free to use.
Next are online forums.
This is another free way to get website traffic. All you have to do is start posting on forums. Do a quick search in your favorite search engine and find a few active forums that are related to your business topic. Sign up for the forum and then read through a few of the posts to get a feel for the way that things are done. Find out what people are talking about. Find out what questions they’re asking. Once you get familiar with how the forum operates then simply start posting.
One important point to remember when posting to online forums is not to spam the forum. It is considered spam when you jump right in and start posting all about your business and products with a bunch of links to your website. In most cases doing this can get you promptly removed from the forum. This is easily avoided by just posting relevant information that will help solve some of the problems that the people on the forum are talking about. Just make sure that each time you post it has value to it and you’ll never be accused of spam.
Something to remember with both of these traffic generation methods is that they are all about building up your reputation. If you spend some time and develop a reputation on your blog or an online forum as someone who is an expert and as someone who is willing to help other people with their problems, then people will actively seek out your posts and comments to see what you have to say next.
Then in your signature line or on your about me page, you can insert a link to your website or favorite affiliate program. If you have a good reputation and people value your opinion, they will click on your links almost every time to see what else you may have to offer. Both of these methods of traffic generation are free, easy and have the extra added benefit of getting targeted traffic.
So there you have it, two free ways that you can drive website traffic into your online business. There are many more ways, but these two are simple and you can start using them right away. These tips are easy but could make a great change on your website.
10. 12.
You set up your website, added your RSS feed and started a monthly submission routine. Now what is the next thing to do?
Well, let’s compare this to an off-line business. What you have done is set up your business “store” and put the open sign in the window. Now its time to start bringing in some potential customers. If you opened your store in a busy mall then you could naturally expect to receive traffic from mall foot traffic. But wait, what if you opened your store on a quiet back street? You may have a great product and great parking but no one will find you. This is the situation you are in with your website, no one knows where your website is and therefore there is no website traffic and no conversions.
An important concept to keep in mind about website traffic generation is to go where the traffic is and where you can redirect the traffic to you. Let’s look at some ways an offline business would generate traffic that we could apply to our online business.
Offline, business owners will network, join the local chamber of commerce, and other networking organizations to get the word out about them and their business. You will find them with small kiosks in malls and display booths at trade shows and community events.
Now how would we apply this concept online? Online this would be comparable to:
(1) Joining social networking sites. Creating profiles and adding your website url on social networking sites gets you in front of the traffic these sites generate.
(2) Building your own satellite sites. These are high PR (page ranked)sites such as Hub Pages or Squidoo that allows you to add your own content to their site. Creating these satellite sites are much like the kiosks at the mall, all directing traffic back to your website through the content and the links you have placed on your profile and satellite sites.
As an online business owner, you will need to create profiles at high pr social networking sites and create satellite pages directing traffic to your website. Sounds, good so far, but creating, maintaining and updating these off page traffic generation sources, while beneficial to your business can be labor intensive without the right tools.
Use the free tools listed below to redirect website traffic from high page ranked sites to your site.
Google Gmail:
Create a Google Gmail account. It is fast and easy to set up. Keep it separate from your regular email. You will need it to confirm emails from the social networking sites and to “dump” the occasional or regular emails they send you.
Firefox Browser:
Next download the Firefox browser. It’s free. It does not interfere with internet explorer. And best of all, it has many add-ons that you will find useful. You will need its multiple tab feature to jump back and forth between opened tabs to make your online business more efficient.
Go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Roboform:
Roboform is a password manager. The trial version is free. You will need this to save you logins and passwords to all the social networking sites you create.
Go to: http://www.roboform.com
HelloTXT:
HelloTXT is a micro-blogging and social networking status updating site. Join the site. There is 28 different sites to sign up with inside. Join each one and make sure to confirm the link inside each email you will receive from each site. Add each site to your HelloTXT profile. Now you will be able to update all your social networking profiles from one interface. Fast and easy. Over time you will build up your website presence and receive traffic, both, from the links inside your profiles and also from the search engines because of the page rank juice of the links leading to your website.
Go to http://www.hellotxt.com
Follow the process above. Do not put this off, schedule it. This kind of traffic is time consuming to set up but very easy to maintain with the tools above and following this traffic generation process will prepare you for the next step. It takes patience and persistence.
In the next article we will be discussing how to multiply the power of the website traffic you will generate by using bookmarking and pinging. Apply what you’ve learned here and expect to receive more traffic and buying customers soon. This will improve the effectiveness of your online business.
