Traffic Basics
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Any experienced internet marketers reading this will probably not learn anything they didn’t already know, or may remember something to do that they forgot while promoting their sites.
A website without traffic will not make any money. You need visitors, prospects, new sign-ups, and potential customers all the time and as many as you get. Many markters specialize in traffic generation since it’s so important to online success. John Reese, author of Traffic Secrets, put it very well saying you get traffic by using any and all means available to you to send a visitor to your site.
This means there is no hard and fast rule to getting traffic or that one method is a magic fix that will keep your traffic coming indefinitely. You need to make use of all forms of traffic generation.
One form of traffic generation commonly used in building opt-in lists is Traffic Exchanges. Sites like Traffic Swarm and Traffic G send your site traffic by putting into a rotation program where visitors have to view your site on a timer to get credits. When your site is viewed you lose credits and you gain credits by viewing other people’s websites. Opt-in lists are perhaps the best thing to use on these traffic exxchanges because your site will have a time limit set upon it and perhaps a visitor who has a short attention span. Most traffic is not very targetted either.
If you go to any message boards to chat with people your forum signature is a great method to bring traffic as well. People interested will click on your link in your forum signature and go to your site. This works best if you’re chatting on a forum within the niche your forum signature is about. You’ll get very few clicks for your body building website while you’re chatting at a forum devoted to movies for example. Since forums post your signature at the bottom of every post you slowly accumulate backlinks as well.
Another well known form of traffic generation is writing articles. There’s hundreds, maybe thousands, or free reprint article websites online. The more popular and powerful of them are EzineArticles, Searchwarp. When writing an article you are allowed to have a Resource Box. In this box you can pretty much put whatever you want. What you need to have in there is a link back to your website. Anyone wanting to use the article on their website has to keep the article unaltered, including your linked Resource Box. If it gets picked up by a big Ezine or website your article can send you lots of traffic by being on their high traffic area. Articles that spread online are natural creaters of backlinks as well since the Resource Box must be left unaltered.
The age of Web 2.0 has brought up Social Bookmarking sites as more forms of traffic. A powerful traffic driver is OnlyWire is a website that lets you bookmark around 20 websites at one time on social bookmarking networks as well. These tools imediately get the word out on your website or new content.
One of the oldest forms of getting traffic, submitting to directories and search engines, is still good today, though not as powerful as it used to be. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the main engines you want your site listed in. The search engines has spiders tha go out and look for sites to index on their own as well, but if you can’t wait that long a manual submission can speed up the process. Google is a bit moody about this type of thing and your site may not get listed even if you manually submit it. A lot of the smaller search engines get their listing from the big players so focusing on them will help your listings with the smaller engines.
Trading links with another website will also get you some traffic. By linking to them and having them link to you will allow each other to ’share’ traffic. This gives both of you a link on each other’s website and you’ll find visitors can find links just about anywhere on a page to get to you. Link exchanging is believed to be becoming weighed less by some search engines, particularly Google, of late. It can still be effective, especially fi you can get your site linked to one of the bigger websites in your niche. Websites exist to make this process easier as well including Link Metro and Link Market.
There’s many other ways I haven’t touched on, but feel a few notes are needed. Links from sites relevant to yours will hold more weight. It’s often not the number of backlinks you have but how relevant they are and where they come from. A link back to your site from the top ranking search engine listing to your site will hold a lot more weight than from a site not related at all to yours. You want to get people as targetted as possible to come to your site so they’ll be interested in what your selling, your ads, or whatever action you want them to take when they get there.
I hope this has been helpful. Comments welcome. 
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