Many who decide to put up a website and make a living online have the idea that traffic to their site will not be a problem. “If I build it, they will come.” It seems to be a popular approach for a lot of webmasters.

The sad truth is that traffic doesn’t just show up at your website without some planned, consistent effort on your part. They aren’t knocking your front door down just because you have a fantastic looking website.

Someone once said: “Running a business without advertising, is like winking in the dark. You know what you are doing, but no one else does.”

If you are needing more traffic to your site, here are three specific approaches that are guaranteed to work: 

BUY SOME TRAFFIC-

One of the fastest ways to get some traffic is to buy it. Google AdWords is one of the better known and largest place for you to throw some money at this traffic issue.

You pay only for actual clicks on your Google ad to your site or affiliate link, but you need to be careful and watch your advertising budget. It can get quite expensive if you end paying for clicks that aren’t producing sales. Be sure to track your ads to determine your return on investment for your keywords and search engine.

As a note there are several other places beside Google to buy PPC traffic. Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, MSN.com and dozens of other places provide the option of PPC traffic. They all operate about the same way. You only pay for targeted visitors to your site who have clicked on one of your ads.

BORROW TRAFFIC FROM OTHERS-

Locate those who have mailing lists related to your area and ask them to post an ad in their list in exchange for a link on your site.

If you have your own mailing list, you could propose an ad swap. “I’ll run your ad in my list; You run my ad in your list.” You might have to offer a commission to the publisher to induce them into running your ad. That way they make a profit on it too.

You can locate these prospective publishers at a good search engine or publications like the Directory of Ezines.com. Be sure to target publishers who readers will be receptive to the type of offer your ad is offering.

If you are selling something to do with internet marketing, your targeted readers should be those interested in marketing on line.

BUILDING YOUR OWN TRAFFIC-

One of my favorite and time-tested ways to promote and market on line is to write and publish original articles. Other newsletter publishers will sometimes

reprint my articles and send them out to their readers.

To save a lot of work and aggravation when sending these articles out to publishers and article directories, you may want to consider a distribution service

like iSnare.com . For a nominal charge you can have your articles widely distributed in a very short time. You get what you pay for and this is one service

that has proven its worth.

Be sure to include a resource box at the end of your article so that interested readers may follow your link to your site or your affiliate link you are promoting. Ideally your article has prepared the reader and motivated them to be receptive for the type of offer you are making in your resource box.

Write many articles. Publish and distribute lots of articles.

If you will consistently apply there three traffic tactics discussed above, You will benefit from it with lots of traffic and permanent links (more or less) to your site which can benefit you for years to come.

Work At Home Resources

There are paid methods and free methods to get visitors to your blog. Unless you have an advertising budget at your disposal, you would have to rely on free methods. Free methods means getting organic traffic from the search engines or other sources. There are some well-known ways of doing so like article marketing and SEO. Besides those, here are two other ways of getting search engine traffic that are just as effective as the other more conventional ways. 

The first method is using Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is a website for people to ask questions about anything and for other people to answer them. You must have at least two Yahoo! accounts to use this method (the more the better). The first step is to log into Yahoo! Answers using one of your Yahoo! accounts. Enter a keyword phrase related to your niche into Yahoo! Answers in the form of a question. For example if you are in the weight loss niche, one of your keyword phrases might be Lose Weight Naturally. So just type in How Can I Lose Weight Naturally? into Yahoo! Answers as a question.

Then exit from Yahoo! Answers and log in again but this time using your second Yahoo! account. Go back to the question you asked earlier and answer your own question. Of course, your answer should be informative and as accurate as possible. You can either get the answer from your own blog content or from another related website. If you take the answer from another website, be sure to re-word your answer so that you would not be plagiarizing. Along with your answer there will be a field called, Know your source? List it here: Now here is where you put in your blog URL.

Besides answering your own question, you could do a search within Yahoo! Answers for other similar questions asked by other people and submit your answer there also. What is happening is you are building quality backlinks to your blog with each answer you submit. It goes without saying that the more questions and answers you submit, the more backlinks you get to your blog. And everyone knows that backlinks push your blog ranking up the search engine.

In addition to getting visitors to your blog from search engines, you will also get visitors from those who read your answer on Yahoo! Answer.

The second method is by using forums. Find a forum related to the niche topic you are blogging about. Choose forums that allow you to put links into your signature file. Edit your signature file to include a catchy caption and your blog URL. When you visit the forum, search for threads that are relevant to your blog niche topic. As far as possible, visit threads with as few replies as possible. This is because people reading through the threads would normally not read more than the first page of replies. So if your reply is listed on the second or third page, the chances of people reading your reply is low.

Once you find such a thread, post your reply. Most forums have a check box to indicate you wish to show your signature file. Always make sure this check box is ticked. Another little twist to this method is to start your own thread in the forum. This way, everyone who visits your thread will see your post and signature file.

Using these little-known methods over time, you will start seeing more visitors to your blog from the search engines and from Yahoo! Answers and relevant forums.

Work At Home Resources

When it comes to free traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is the main strategy to tackle. You want to get your site ranked on the first page of the search results for terms that you are targeting. Having a good ranking for a select few highly searched terms can bring you loads of free traffic but technically, the traffic is not free. You have to put a lot of effort into link building, optimizing your site, etc. This takes time and as the saying goes, time is money. 

For this article, we will focus instead on paid sources of traffic. This is the fastest way you can generate a lot of traffic to test your sales page for conversions. The most effective paid traffic is that generated through pay-per-click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. These three platforms get the lion’s share of PPC traffic so you should focus on them. Master them and you will be on your way to creating streams of traffic on demand.

It is important, however, to be constantly testing new sources of paid traffic. Social media advertising is another option to advertise your business. MySpace and Facebook have recently launched their own self-service advertising platform. With the ability to target a certain demographic that corresponds to your business, you may see some high conversion numbers. There are a large number of social media and social networking sites that you can test.

Media buying through banner networks is another option. Most of these companies have easy-to-use platforms where you can easily upload your banner to create an ad campaign. Then you can specify your ad budget and also target the categories of sites you want your ad to appear on. Alternatively, you can also approach individual site owners to advertise on their sites. Think of sites that your prospective customers tend to visit, such as forums or blogs.

As you branch out to other traffic sources, be sure to keep track of the results of your tests. After a period of testing, gather all the data and analyze them to make a decision whether the traffic is profitable. If it is not, drop it and move on to the next traffic source.

Another thing you can do is to set aside a portion of your profits for the purpose of testing. This is akin to reinvesting your profits to grow your business. Having a disciplined approach to continuously increase the traffic to your site will reap massive benefits in the long run.

Work At Home Resources

When it comes to free traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is the main strategy to tackle. You want to get your site ranked on the first page of the search results for terms that you are targeting. Having a good ranking for a select few highly searched terms can bring you loads of free traffic but technically, the traffic is not free. You have to put a lot of effort into link building, optimizing your site, etc. This takes time and as the saying goes, time is money.

For this article, we will focus instead on paid sources of traffic. This is the fastest way you can generate a lot of traffic to test your sales page for conversions. The most effective paid traffic is that generated through pay-per-click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. These three platforms get the lion’s share of PPC traffic so you should focus on them. Master them and you will be on your way to creating streams of traffic on demand.

It is important, however, to be constantly testing new sources of paid traffic. Social media advertising is another option to advertise your business. MySpace and Facebook have recently launched their own self-service advertising platform. With the ability to target a certain demographic that corresponds to your business, you may see some high conversion numbers. There are a large number of social media and social networking sites that you can test.

Media buying through banner networks is another option. Most of these companies have easy-to-use platforms where you can easily upload your banner to create an ad campaign. Then you can specify your ad budget and also target the categories of sites you want your ad to appear on. Alternatively, you can also approach individual site owners to advertise on their sites. Think of sites that your prospective customers tend to visit, such as forums or blogs.

As you branch out to other traffic sources, be sure to keep track of the results of your tests. After a period of testing, gather all the data and analyze them to make a decision whether the traffic is profitable. If it is not, drop it and move on to the next traffic source.

Another thing you can do is to set aside a portion of your profits for the purpose of testing. This is akin to reinvesting your profits to grow your business. Having a disciplined approach to continuously increase the traffic to your site will reap massive benefits in the long run.

Work At Home Resources

This same positive approach works as well on the Internet as in face-to-face situations in real life. Complimenting or flattering a person about anything they have done on line
is a great way to get your foot in the door and put them in a receptive mood for your proposal.

Here are six ways to go about doing this on the Internet: 

(1) Surf the Internet for sites which are complimentary but not competitive with yours.

Let them know what you like about their site and information they have there. Personalize a brief proposal to the webmaster and offer to exchange links in order to build traffic and search engine rankings.

(2) Locate and subscribe to newsletters or ezines which are appropriate for your area or niche.

By subscribing and reading the newsletter or ezine you will become familiar with the author and the significance of his publication. When you find something useful and helpful, let
the publisher know. If you also publish an ezine, you can offer to do an ad swap which can bring you a lot of free traffic.

(3) Write and distribute articles inviting others to join you in joint ventures and to exchange reciprocal links.

Writing an article a day and distributing it to directories and other publishers is a great, free way to get some exposure and free traffic.

(4) Place links on your site.

Just a simple link on your site can gain you some needed and valuable exposure in a passive way. Offer a free report or other valuable resource like a software download to induce them. You just need to work on creating traffic to your site so visitors can take you up on your offer.

(5) Use email signatures.

Simple email signatures that are well created can have a great impact. Set up your email program always to add them to any messages that you send out. Out Of Office replies can be set up to include your signature response also.

(6) Respond to email offers.

Your positive response to selected email offers by others for more information can be the beginning of an on line relationship that will allow you to locate a joint venture or
other valuable resource.

Promotion of any site or service on line takes consistent and determined effort. It is of primary importance to the success of your site on line. Each day should begin with a re-doubling of your promotional efforts and a search for discovering new effective promotional resources and methods.

The use of positive statements and compliments when approaching a webmaster or newsletter publisher for an ad swap, link exchange or joint venture will have far greater impact and success than almost anything else to improve your response rate and traffic.

Work At Home Resources

The wordpress platform allows for more social traffic in many ways. Three of which are:
1) The use of automatic pinging when new posts are made to the blog.
2) Provides a continuously updated rss feed for visitors to add to their favorite feed readers such as Google, Yahoo and Bloglines, inviting returning visitor traffic.
3) Automatic updating of the rss (really simple syndication) feeds that can be submitted to rss feed directories. 

Meanwhile, sites created with html editors, static page sites or adsense template sites, have become the poor cousin to the blogging sites when it comes to traffic generation.

It is not that these sites cannot achieve the traffic generating results of the wordpress blogging platform. They can, but it will require more knowledge and more work to achieve the same result. For example, how do you acquire rss traffic when a static or adsense template site cannot generate a rss feed automatically? Simple answer, create a rss feed manually.

It may sound like a daunting task, at first, but keep reading. Its as simple as basic html, with the use of open and close tags.

Basic html code:

XXhtmlXY
XXheadXY
XXtitleXYINSERT TITLE HEREXX/titleXY
XX/headXY
XXbodyXYINSERT BODY CONTENT HEREXX/bodyXY
XX/htmlXY

Go to any blog, click on the rss icon and take a look at the rss feed structure. It should look like this:

XXrss version=”0.91″XY
-
XXchannelXY
XXtitleXYINSERT RSS FEED TITLE HEREXX/titleXY
XXlinkXYhttp://www.YOURSITEURLHEREXX/linkXY
XXdescriptionXYINSERT RSS FEED DESCRIPTION HEREXX/descriptionXY
XXlanguageXYen-usXX/languageXY
-
XXitemXY
XXtitleXYINSERT ITEM TITLE HEREXX/titleXY
XXlinkXYhttp://www.YOURSITEURLHEREXX/link>XY
XXdescriptionXYINSERT ITEM DESCRIPTION HEREXX/descriptionXY
XX/itemXY
XX/channelXY
XX/rssXY

If you would prefer a little automation then Internet.com has a great free tool, just search for ‘channel editor” on their site or go to:
http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/rssedit.pl. This tool will generate the out put you need.

Creating a rss feed is simple and easy once you understand the structure. Now you can see the potential for your static and adsense template websites. Copy the above code or what you automatically generated into notepad and save as whatever name you would like for your feed page name. Upload this text file to your site folder and rename the .txt extension to .rss.

That is all. You now have a rss feed for your static site. In part 2 of this article, you will learn what comes next and what you need to do with the rss feed you just created to drive more traffic to your static web pages and adsense template sites using rss feeds.

Now you will need to edit your home page to link directly to your rss page. The optional use of a rss icon of your choice will help your readers easily find your feed. Copy and paste the code below for linking from your home page to your rss page. Add the code to your home page where you want the link to your rss feed to appear.

Xa href=”http://www.FULL-URL-TO-FEED.rss”YXimg src=”http://www.FULL-URL-TO-ICON-USED”border=”0″ width=”SIZE” height=”SIZE”YX/aY

Do not forget to upload your icon to your site folder. If you decide not to use an icon with your rss feed, then use the code below:

Xa href=”http://www.FULL-URL-TO-FEED.rss”YGET RSS FEED HERE X/aY

That is it. The information this far has shown you how to create your own rss feed for all your static and Adsense template web pages. You should now have your rss feed uploaded to your site and it should be accessible to your visitors from your home page. Not difficult at all.

A couple of points to mention:
1) Try to use only 10-12 items in your rss feeds. The point is to generate interest and traffic back to your site, not to bombard the readers with everything you have on your site, at least not all at once.
2) Keep your rss feed up to date by editing the code with your latest content. Use the code below to insert the new item below the close language tag and above the last updated item in your feed.

-
XitemY
XtitleY INSERT ITEM TITLE HERE X/titleY
XlinkY http://www.YOURSITENAMEHERE X/linkY
XdescriptionY INSERT ITEM DESCRIPTION HERE X/descriptionY
X/itemY

Remove the last item from the bottom of your feed if it puts the 10-12 item limit. Remember to replace all the capitalized text in the code with your own information.

Now that you have your feed set up on your site, start submitting your feed to feed directories. Here are a few to get you started:

http://www.feedage.com
http://www.myfeedz.com
http://www.freefeedsdirectory.com

You can add images and other features such as ads into your feeds as well. For these and other more advanced techniques, just do a Google search for rss feed and this should bring up an abundance of information. If you want more rss feed directories, a simple Google search will help as well.

Creating a rss feed for your static web pages and Adsense template sites is simple once you know the process. Submitting your feed to feed directories about once a month will help to increase traffic to your site. Now it will be easier than ever to get traffic to your static html and Adsense template sites. Go ahead, create your rss feed now and let the traffic flow.

Work At Home Resources

Google Analytics allows you to identify you ideal objective, goals and specifics. If all you want to know is who visited your website and how they got there – that is simple enough, you can do that. However, the power of Google Analytics lies in the ability to define goals and put on filters that will allow you to do in-depth analysis of your website. 

What does this mean? Let’s break it down for you so you understand how Google Analytics works to your advantage. First of all, Google works with objectives, goals, and specifics these allow you to really hone in on what you are trying to accomplish when managing your website.

Objectives: An objective is the big picture – what do you want your website to do? What is the purpose for your website – what do you want visitors to do once they are there?

If you are an e-commerce site maybe you want to sell an item and make lots of money. On the other hand, you may want to know what products are selling and what products you should take off your catalogue.

This would be an objective.

Goals: If objectives are the result you ultimately want to achieve with your website,a goal is a short term aim. What has to happen for you to hit your objective. Do you have to track visitors that enter on a certain web page? Or perhaps your goal is to sell 30% more widgets within 6 months.

You can do this using Google Analytics as the tool and setting goals within the application.

Specifics: Now that you have outlined your objectives and goals you are ready to use Analytics to your advantage. Specifics are the “how” the action steps you will take to reach what you really want.

Example: You would set up the sales page and a funnel (using google analytics) to measure how traffic is coming into your website. Google can tell you where they are entering as well as where your visitors are exiting your website. Knowing how your visitors are responding to your website allows you to go to these pages and tweak them – this help you achieve the results you want.

Google has made it easy to place code in your web pages, they do the initial metrics for you and best of all it is free.

If you are not particularly savvy about how your website is put together or developed – leave it up to your website professional to add the code to your individual web pages. Once the code is embedded analytics will start collecting data and within a few days you will see countless stats related to your site.

Once you become familiar with the dashboard that Google Analytic’s provides, you will be able to set up the goals and specifics of your website. You will access all the data through the Internet, you can login and set the parameter right then and there.

Another great function of Google Analytics is that you can set up different profiles for one website. You can break down your website into different sections called “profiles” and monitor them independently, this allows you to see which sections of your website are effective and which need work.

AdWords and Analytics

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising program. Essentially you would buy keywords and then pay a small amount for every time a potential client (website visitor) clicks on an ad you put up through Google.

If you are thinking about using AdWords as part of your marketing campaign or are using them already, Google works seamlessly in providing you with the answers to all important questions like, is this add working or am I making more money on these ads then I am spending? You will be able to monitor visitors who click on the ads and buy and those who just leave your site before every going to the sales page.

When you sign up for Google AdWords use the same account number as you did with analytics (Google uses your gmail accounts login and password). You will then be able to link both accounts together. AdWords will be imported into your Google Analytics account. This helps provide you with a safety net so you can watch the behavior of your visitors and change what isn’t working.

The development team at Google has a way of making their tools very usable and Google Analytics is just one of many tools that lives up to Googles high standards.

Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this Search Engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo’s advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites.

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing.

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

We will cover this in detail in a specific chapter later.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content.

Search Engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in Search Engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site.

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities.

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters or E-zines.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.