Getting Traffic to A New Site
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I’m often asked, “how do I get people to my site?” Of course that is the million dollar question. Everyone would love to have thousands of visitors to their website each day.
You can have a website that doesn’t convert well, but if you get enough traffic you can have great success. A ton of traffic overcomes bad conversion rates. Once you have traffic, you can always improve your conversion rates, but you first need traffic to determine your conversion rates.
So, this is how I go about getting traffic to a new website.
Blog Good Content
If you have web hosting and a domain, install a Wordpress blog on the domain. Wordpress is easy to install, and search engines love blogs. It’s common for me to see my blogs indexed in just a few days after making a few posts to them.
I often see my blog indexed before my main page, and since my main page is linked to by my blog, my main page gets indexed.
Write good content to your blog at least two times a week, every other day even better, or every day for the best results.
When writing to your blog, try to think of search terms people might use to look for the info you are providing - these are called keywords. Use the keywords in your title and in your blog post.
If you use keywords that are too popular, like “make money from home” searchers will never find you because of the expert competition. You want to find less popular keywords - sometimes called long tail keywords.
When you write a good blog post, Digg it, Stumble it, and submit it to Social Bookmarking services. Here is a good tool you can use - http://www.socialmarker.com/ (I don’t do this for every post I write, only my best).
I also submit my sites to the following sites which are not listed in Social Marker.
Tagzilla - This is a new site and still has a few bugs, but I think it will be a big one. You spend a few minutes giving link love to other sites and stories that you like, and others do the same for you.
Bloggingzoom - As the name implies, this is really for submitting your blog posts.
It takes a while to signup for all the social bookmarking sites, but they can bring you some good traffic and get you in the Google top ten for your chosen keywords.
Submit individual posts to the social bookmarking services, not the main blog page, and not your site main page. You can always link to your main page from your blog posts and from you sidebar links.
Only submit a post to the social bookmarking services once, and don’t do them all in one day. Spread the submissions out so they look natural.
Take your best posts and re-write them slightly so they are unique and submit them to http://ezinearticles.com and http://goarticles.com Have a Bio box that creates curiosity and points to your website. This is also known as Bum Marketing, and this is a great bum marketing resource .
Good content on your blog, and incoming links to your blog will build traffic, page rank and best of all - credibility. This in turn will lead to people visiting your money pages, and you making sales.
Get Incoming Links
Take some of your blog content, re-write it slightly again, or use new content and create a Squidoo lens , or a Hubpage , or even better - both. From the Squidoo lens, or HubPage, or both - link back to your blog, or your main page.
Submit your Squidoo lens to http://lensroll.com
Submit your blog RSS feed, your Squidoo RSS feed, and your Hubpage RSS feed to http://feedage.com and http://rss2.com
Another good way to get incoming links is to comment on blogs that are dofollow, this is becoming very popular, but you need to do it right.
I have a DoFollow Blog Resource dedicated to DoFollow Blog Information.
Commenting on dofollow blogs is something you will want to continue to do on an on-going basis.
Following these steps will definitely get you listed in the search engines, and if your keyword is not too competitive, they could land you on the first page of Google.
Mike
If you like this post, please buy me a Cup of Cofee :-)
Good article Mike. I have many friends just starting out in web marketing for their own products who would find benefit from this.
I am personally a big fan of ezinearticles and the like. Article directories like these pass not only some ‘juice’ to your web site, but can also drive traffic. Ezinearticles actually has a tool within the account that allows you to see how many clicks you have received through the article. If you build a keyword targeted article (not spammed, of course) you may actually show up in the SERPs not just with your main web site, but you in some cases, your ezinearticle shows up as well. In this instance, you actually ‘control’ 20% of the top 10 with your content!
Of course, some SEO pros will argue that article submission is worthless, but the fact of the matter is, that getting a little juice, some relevance, and of course, hits for the life of the article can only be a good thing.
not to mention, if you write just 1 - 2 articles per week and post on ezine and other article websites (there are hundreds of them) you spend nothing! It’s free… Of course it might take you a few hours to do it all, but 3 hours or so a week is nothing compared to the long-term benefits.
Thanks!
Random Alt Med Guy
I agree with the poster above. I find articles with backlinks gives the site authority juice and relevance.
Don’t forget about link exchanges. This form of link building is probably the one that takes the longest but it is the one that will have one of the biggest impacts. So I highly recommend it.
Yes indeed it is a million dollar question (quite literally in some cases). Those points are well made: about content and incoming links, certainly the two key factors for driving traffic to a site.
Do you think Google’s Knol will replace Squidoo?
i think article submission is only worthless if your looking for super long term seo value. but in order to get to that long term value, that top google ranking, or traffic goal, you have to build it with short term wins, and social bookmarking, article submissions, and other simple first steps are great to get the ball rolling.
I have try to do the same excersice to make people to come to my site. But i never try hubpages. I read somewhere in forum that hubpages is nofollow. Is this true?
Interesting!
KeywordLuv helps you reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their site. This gives them improved anchor text, which can help their site rank higher in the search engine results.
You can now leave a comment with your name as well as a keyword of your choice here and get a PR5 link back to your site! How cool is that? People pay big bucks for that and all you have to do is comment here.
I absolutely love Ezinearticles too, not so much for the traffic reasons but for the link juice power. Although I can tell you that I have made some money off of affiliate marketing and writing articles.
I have used the techniques you described above to gain rankings for some very competitive keywords. So I must say that you are right on target. The only difference between targeting long tail keywords and highly competitive phrases is time.
What I do is include the competitive keyword phrase in a long tail keyword phrase that I am targeting. As I gain links for that long tail keyword, I am also gaining links for the shorter version. Once I have the long tail, I switch my efforts to the short phrases. It seems to work pretty good.
@Random Alt Med Guy
Article marketing is my weakness, and something I need to improve on. I have a hard time sitting down an writing. But, like they say “content is king”, and as I saw someone write recently, “content is king, but backlinks are God”.
@Gourmet Food Gift Baskets
No, I don’t think Knol will replace Squidoo. I’m sure Knol will be a big player since they are Google. I have created one Knol page and haven’t seen it rank any better than a Squidoo lens.
@nimzoindy
I’m not sure if hubpage is nofollow or dofollow - I’ll have to check on that. Even if they are nofollow, their pages do rank well, so you can still get some good traffic to your sites.
@Jason from Atlanta SEO
Good strategy for building backlinks to shorter versions of long tail keywords. I’ll keep that in mind as I work my back link strategy.
Hi Mike!
How come I get the same feeling wherever I go to read posts about better blogging? Perhaps it really does come down to the equation of EFFORT = REWARD
Your recipe certainly looks likely to result in reward! Thanks -
You can now leave a comment with your name as well as a keyword of your choice here and get a PR5 link back to your site! How cool is that? People pay big bucks for that and all you have to do is comment here.
I think people completely underestimate the power of doing good keyword research, and using your keywords to build your blog.
I think the best way to drive traffic is to build a master keyword list for your blog. Start with less competitive keywords, and go for the organic search traffic. It will last, it’s free, and it’s targeted. You will find not only do you get more traffic, but you have higher conversions.
Social traffic has its place, but if you really look at how much money you make from social traffic how much is it? Even building your RSS subscribers. I find subscribers don’t really click ads, or make me a lot of money. They keep coming back for information though!
Interesting post, glad I found your site today.
Jackie
am personally a big fan of ezinearticles and the like. Article directories like these pass not only some ‘juice’ to your web site, but can also drive traffic. Ezinearticles actually has a tool within the account that allows you to see how many clicks you have received through the article.
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