10 Ways to Generate Website Traffic for Beginners
You need traffic. Earning a good income requires a good product, excellent conversion strategies, and traffic to your site.
If any of those 3 elements is missing, you’re going to miss your income goals.
The one most people drool over is traffic. It’s what they lie in bed thinking about at night. How can I get more traffic?
I think the motto of most beginning online entrepreneurs is…
“Show Me How to Get Traffic!”
Today I’m going to cover the simple ways you start driving traffic to your site.
Method #1: Pay for Traffic
You can pay for your traffic. The advantage here is many of these methods are fast…and you can roll out in huge numbers. Plus you’re in full control of the results.
If it’s working…expand into more advertising.
If it’s not working, fix it until it is.
1. Run a Google Adwords Campaign
What, you don’t have a Google Adwords account?
Shame on you. Get one immediately. Even if it’s not your primary advertising method, you should still be using it to test and track your sales campaigns when you first launch.
Run some traffic to your new site and use split testing or multivariate testing to refine the sales process.
Set Up Your Google Adwords Campaign Today:
http://www.google.com/adwords
2. Expand into Other PPCs
Google is the most competitive marketplace, because it’s the one with the most traffic. You might even find the keywords you want are more expensive than you’re willing to pay.
Move into the other PPC search engines.
MSN Adcenter has an excellent system with lower bids and it can often be profitable even if your Google campaign is not.
Signup for your account here:
https://adcenter.microsoft.com
Yahoo is the other competitor in the Big 3. You can find out more from them here:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com
Want to expand even further? There are a lot of lesser known companies where you can buy traffic for as little as one penny each. This site tracks and reviews all these smaller engines:
http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com
3. Expand to Banner Advertising
Already maximized your PPC advertising? I doubt it, but we’ll assume you did.
Run banner type advertising (this includes banners, buttons, skyscrapers, and even rich media advertising). You might have heard it was dead, but its death was greatly exagerrated.
Start off your banner campaigns right inside your Google Adwords account.
Create a new “site-targeted” campaign. Everyone talks about Google’s keyword targeting and that’s where I suggest you start your advertising. Site targeting is another option they offer and allows you target ads to sites. Handpick the exact sites you want your ad to appear on.
Once you have those working, you can expand out to large advertising networks such as:
http://www.tribalfusion.com
4. Send Out Press Releases
I have this under paid advertising because it’s going to cost you some money to do this correctly.
I recommend using:
http://www.prwebdirect.com
I’ve seen a single press release generate thousands of visitors…and radio and TV appearances for several of my clients. Why aren’t you using publicity?
5. Mail Postcards to Rented Lists
Target very specific groups using the SRDS manual. You can often pick up a copy of this directory at most large libraries.
It lists mailing lists you can rent and mail to. Instead of just sending a mailing to freebie seekers like you do online, you can target and mail postcards to BUYERS in your niche.
Find a list. Rent it. Mail your postcards
using http://www.usps.com/netpost/
Method #2: Generate Free Traffic
Let’s say you don’t want to spend any money, or you don’t have any money. You can still start generating visitors for free. In fact, I like these methods more over the long term (as they often take a while to get going).
1. Submit Articles
This has been one of my favorite traffic techniques for years. Find long tail keywords (terms with 3 or 4 words in them)…and write articles about the subject.
Submit to article directories…and watch both visitors and your page rank increase.
Find software to make submission easier:
http://www.myarticletraffic.com
Have articles submitted for you:
http://www.isnare.com
2. Start a Blog
Start a blog…If you haven’t yet, then you’re not planning on generating much free traffic. Sure there are other ways, but why in the world would you want to make your life harder?
Start one for free here:
http://www.blogger.com
Or set up one on your one domain. I suggest WordPress from http://www.wordpress.org
Now start posting good content rich articles.
3. Generate Links
You can trade links with other sites. A good program for this is Arelis at http://www.axandra.com
It’s even easier if you have a blog.
- Visit high traffic blogs and comment on them.
- Include links to other blogs in your posts.
- Submit to carnivals such as the ones you find at: http://www.blogcarnival.com
4. Post Viral Videos at Youtube.com
Everyone is always talking about Web 2.0. The Internet is growing up…and video is taking a priority in online marketing (if you’re not testing videos on your sales pages you’re making a huge mistake).
Create videos and post them to
http://www.youtube.com
It’s not a large traffic generator for me, but it is another free generator…plus it saves my own bandwidth (I embed my own Youtube videos on my pages).
5. Set-up An Affiliate Program
If you sell ANY type of product, you should have an affiliate program. It equals 60% to 75% of my sales on all my products. So if you don’t have one…you’re missing out on 2/3rds of your sales!
The system I use is:
http://www.netofficetoolbox.com
Go there now to set-up a free 30 day trial and try it out for yourself. Not only can you run your affiliate program, it can also handle all your sales, recurring billing, split test campaigns, and do email follow-up. It’s my complete automation solution.
Related Entries:- Beginners Guide to Tracking Your Stats
- Where’s the Traffic?
- Why Do People Fail At Adwords?
- Unlimited Traffic Technique
- You Have NO Excuse Left to Ignore Testing
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It was an excellent article Terry.
Just a question about your point number 5: “Mail Postcards to Rented Lists”
Target very specific groups using the SRDS manual. I contacted the SRDS two months ago, and they gave me many different lists to subscribe too, I don’t really know which one to register for.
Plus, I never sent direct mail or postcards. I’d like to learn more about this since I am in the process on writing my ebook, and I will go offline for promotion (back to the old days!). If you can post an article on this topic, it would be great.
Hi Franck,
Thanks for the suggestion..I’ll write more about postcards in the future (which I find more useful than letters for general marketing).
Terry,
This was a very useful article. But someone asked me a vexing question. What would you recommend for PPC and “Adsense” type campaigns for marketers who, for reasons of conscience and integrity, will not do business with Google?
If you can’t do business with Google for whatever reason, use MSN as the 2nd choice…Yahoo as the third. For Adsense type campaigns, you could use Yahoo or sign up as an affiliate with pay-per-lead services (again a topic for another article).
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Thanks for your submission- great article!
The carnival is up here-
http://homebizblogger.com/2007/05/30/carnival-of-blogging-success-2/
Some excellent ideas… Now I have a few more tools in the toolchest to try out.
-Jim
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Quite informative, the more I search for ideas on the subject the more it seems I need to start a blog…
Terry,
You are a coach in the true sense of the word.Am quite new to it all and am prepared
to learn.I just discovererd that your old posts have alot in store for people like me.Thanks for inviting me on board.
Terry,
Am new in this business and am working hard to get all the material that I can to make progress. Am operating from that part of the world where getting a functional ISP is a major problem and if one does not generate ones` energy source, one can not be on the net ! The challenges are daunting.
Terry , I will keep coming for more.
I have been posting my articles on http://www.ewagz.com. I get the publicity, a link back to my site and make some money from them running my adsense in their pages. It’s a awesome deal.
Youtube does bring some descent traffic to my blog.
Generating traffic is not as hard as what other people think. Just do it or outsource it.. Good post Terry.
Great intro article. Does anyone out there know any top bloggers who have a long and respected reputation?
Top article Terry. Many thanks.
Excellent advice,
Free blogs and tips are a great way to show your expertise in your specialised area. Just remember, good blog writing is an art, it requires attention to detail, perfect grammar, punctuation, correct spelling and of course interesting and relevant content
The information was really helpful, keep it up
If you do not have your own website or cannot afford a website, here is the Hubpages.com for you. You can write/publish your articles and get paid for the visitors who view your articles. These articles are called Hubs. If you want to publish another article with different subject, you can start a new hub. You can edit, delete or add contents to your hubs whenever you want to do that. Please note, the articles published on other websites are not encouraged to publish in hub pages even if it is written by you. So be cautious about it. You don’t have to know about HTML or php etc.
Very good article. There is some good information in here.
Thanks for sharing
Cheers
Good info. Don’t forget relevant forums. They can bring you lots of traffic aswell. And yes, for articles unique content is crucial.
Thanks for sharing…
Great list. Ultimately SEO proves to be King for free traffic, and content its Queen. With the amount and intensity of competition on the Internet, however, strategic and well-planned advertising campaigns are a virtual must these days. I don’t know that it’s wise to steer beginners in the direction of AdWords, however… there is a massive learning curve to that platform, and it’s easy to blow several hundred if not thousands of dollars figuring it out.
Forum posting and articles writing can bring a lot of traffic for beginners especially those who have good material
Terry, I was searching for various ways to “generate web traffic” and your site popped right up. Thx for the suggestions and good job at doing it yourself
Richard
You mentioned the first option is to pay for traffic. This is not write for beginners.
You are absolutely you are correct i used free traffic for my site and it rank second on google. type this keyword ‘ florida unemployment compensation “on google search no 2. Believe it or not free traffic works fine if you know how to do it.
These are some great suggestions and we use very similar ideas for our clients.
There are literally hundreds of ways that you can generate website traffic. They all work, but what you need to keep in mind is that they may not work immediately, so start with one, master it, and then move on to the next. As you do this, you will find the ones that you like better, or the ones that work better for your business and website, or both.