How to get more people to visit my website

Getting People to Your Website--WOW -- It sure was easy back in the 80's and '90's to get people your website. Now adays you are competing with billions of other websites, and many of these with large corporate budgets.

But you don't want just any type traffic coming to your website. If someone wants to buy golf clubs and you sell jewelry; obviously they have *come to the wrong store*. You need the kind of traffic that wants what you have for sale -- the kind of traffic that ends up buying something from you.

One way to *upgrade* your website so it looks like the *modern* versions of those corporate models is to offer videos on your site. Google now offers universal search, which means videos, user reviews, news feeds, etc.... also come up right away in search results. When you see a still of a video, you will probably click on that before other static links. Why? People are so used to watching t.v., yes, even the commercials and if a commercial is funny or very well done, it sticks in the watchers mind! Make sure to label these videos with appropriate keywords, types of keywords your *future clients/customers are likely to use when searching the web.

Starting a User Forum is a great way to keep people coming back. People like to participate and inter-act with others. People will tell other people about their posts and (hopfully) the hotl discussions going on at your website. Or the awesome information to be found there. There are a lot of free forums to be used so you don't even Need to pay to have one if you don't have the money.

You do need to keep an eye on your forum to keep it spam and unfortunately (porn-free), keep it on the topic's and to remove any self-promotional posts that others have made. But everyone should be allowed a sig file of 2 or 3 lines.

A blog is a good thing to have as well because if you keep up with constant publication, this tells the search engines that your site probably has some *substance* to it.

But, like user forums that have few users, an abandoned blog is just a waste of bandwidth-- that does you no good at all and in fact may be detrimental.

Make a plan of what you want to blog about on an ongoing basis. A blog should be a serious longterm time commitment, for you and for your readers especially if you expect them to keep coming back and to tell others about it. So...what are you going to write about that will keep your audience coming back and possibly even linking to you if they have their own websites?

TIP: Mention other people a lot so they have another reason to link back to you. Some bloggers thrive on controversy and people's appetite for gossip, it can get people talking.

Make a Widget! Google has made this Very easy to do now! Make a handy little tool that people can put on their own website or their own desktop. Offering a tool, game or some sort of handy widget that people can use elsewhere is a great way to increase your *stamp*. Try very hard to make your widget appealing to a mass market of people. Something many many people would use. It is getting harder to come up with new ideas but you can do it if you put your mind to it.

Embedded in your widget is, of course, a link to your website. The person who places your widget on their site should be made aware of this. After all, this is your payback for offering this useful widget free of charge.

The Importance of Inbound Links-- Says it on its own, it's important! You may know the search engines look at how many sites are linking to you. If those linking sites have a good ranking, then it stands to reason that in some ways this will reflect well on you. Think "Link Neighborhood".

You should always look at your referrer logs to see who currently links to you. Is it is very good to know and somedays you will jump up and yell "YES!" in glee upon discovering a new awesome banklink.

Links pay off because you get traffic in two ways from them. The traffic that comes from the link itself on the remote website; as well as a better link profile result in the search engines, which then *think* more highly of you and will rank you higher in search results.

Point to Yourself -- If you have a lot of domains, make sure they all ink to each other back and forth. Business cards and sig files. This may seem like a kindergarden statement but since a website is not a physical thing; people aren't going to bump into it every day unless you promote, promote, PROMOTE! Just be sure you've got something worth promoting; something you would use yourself.

Social Networking -- I've written a whole hub about that so you can read that one. Depending on your niche market (the people that are all interested in the same type of thing(s) ), you might find some deals on under-exposed websites that will cost you WAY less than PPC programs do to place an ad on (if your content isn't enough and it should be enough!

Offer a Prize -- A prize that is relevant to the content. I once gave away a palm handheld for the affiliate who made the most sales in one month. You can do that with visitors. You choose who wins and why. Have them write an *essay* on why your product/service is so great. Then you also have a great bunch of testimonials!

Make an RSS Feed & Get it Published on other websites. Most people think of RSS feeds as being read by the end user in an RSS reader at Yahoo, or some other provider. But if your content is really very good, there's a good chance your feed will be carried on other websites.

Some feeds feature only the headline with a link back to the main website. Others feature snippets and a link to the rest of the article. Either way it's a very good way to get yourself out there!

Enough from me for today!

Best Regards, Melanie