Generating Traffic

There must be a ten thousand and one different SEO marketing firms that will promise to put your website in front of thousands and hundreds of thousands of unique web browsers, all promising to bring you tons of traffic.

Sites like SocialPoster, which helps to generate back links to your site, is great at improving your sites relevance and authority within your niche, provided that you and your social bookmarking budies can help build quite a list of backlinks in a relatively short period. The backlinks need to be constructed over time, and do not expect your traffic to bust over the 10,000 visitor mark per day in the beginning, without paying for the traffic.

Now, there are three ways of generating traffic for your site. The first, is a natural or viral method. This means, that as someone finds your site, they might email or IM a buddy or relative about it, and now word is spreading from user to user. Although slow to start, it is going to be a consistant theme in your traffic building plan.

The second way, is to buy targeted or untargeted advertisements from a provider. My favorite is Google's Adwords program, which is a pay per click, not pay per impression scheme. This is great for placements in front of a highly customizable targetted audience, which is far better than randomly presenting your information to just anyone. That would be a waste of resources and provide a lower click through rate than a targeted audience. Other advertisement methods can be bought from any of thousands of sites.

If you have an RSS feed, as most sites do automatically, or you can set up a syndication service with Feedburner.com, then post the feed to news readers using www.pingomatic.com or with RSS Submit

Lastly, are link exchanges. I have two that I think are fantastic. If you are posting a blog, or have another RSS feed established on your site, I would recommend BlogRush.com. BlogRush allows you to show syndicated content from related sites on your site, while your content is being presented on other sites of relative content. The great news with BlogRush is how much visibility you get, and the downline of referal credits (impressions) you will get. Check it out. Another resource for building traffic is www.suexchange.com. This type of site promotes the use of StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking exchange (building backlinks) as well as site visits. This is a slower pace of building traffic, but every time someone bookmarks your site in their public bookmarks, is yet another backlink (and site visit).

I think the best policy is to set your page up with proper keywords for your niche, use them without overusing them in your content, and build your readership slowly and steadily. However, if you can afford to spend on advertising your site, consider multiple avenues of attack. 1) Google Adsense 2) Buying x page impressions 3) Syndicate your work and 4) Link exchange(s)

Regardless of the approach you take, you cannot demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing without the use of tracking tools. If you have access to you Google Analytics, I would suggest using it. This will require access to either your blog templates, or other source code, but it provides outstanding reporting on your daily traffic. Other stats packages are available, but some free stats packages may require a small yet visible link on your site as part of the deal.

If you have a good understanding of your site metrics, you can fine tune your continueous marketing and advertising plan to further push your sites recognition and popularity. Your efforts to generating traffic should not be a one time effort, but a continuously evolving marketing plan.