Not only do you want to get more traffic, you want to get more
unique traffic! In order to achieve this, you need to create
multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for one
source of traffic is simply not enough for most small to
mid-size sites, or home-based business sites. This is the first
of four parts in a mini-series about generating multiple streams
of traffic for your website. The remainder will be published
here on newbie-guides over the next few days.
Considering the competition most people experience with Search
engines, not to mention the ever increasing trend towards 'pay
for inclusion' with the major search engines, it can be a real
challenge to get decent traffic from SE's alone (not impossible,
just challenging). Likewise, most net advertising and
promotion has become much less effective, in particular banner
style advertisements are now not really much more use than
creating brand awareness, and unless you get massive coverage
with your banners, you won't create much awareness.
This does not mean that you should skip these forms of traffic.
That would be foolish. However, what it does mean is that you
need to look for other, alternative, sources of traffic that can
fill in the gaps, and provide additional traffic to your site.
Two very good additional ways of increasing your traffic are 1)
to make use of a variety of 'viral' marketing techniques, and
2) to promote your online presence in offline media (print,
radio, TV, etc.).
1) Search Engines
Search engines are still a fantastic source of traffic - probably
the most important - because they will simply keep on producing
traffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is
getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords (ones that
are relevant to your site and get lots of searches). This is not
always easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even
if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get
some traffic, however, a poor placement will result in very poor
traffic flow.
I won't go into the details of meta tags and search engine
optimization here - there are literally dozens of sites that try
to teach you how to do that. Check a few of them out. A word of
warning however, be very careful with what you choose to believe
when you read those sites. Unless they can prove they have
produced many top 10 search engine placements on many different
keywords, generally what they are telling/selling is rubbish.
Remember what you are looking for is HIGHLY TARGETED traffic
coming to your site because your site gives them what they need
and want.
side note
I know from personal experience that the techniques taught by
Stephan Peirceproduce top results every time. After putting the information to
use, the next time my sites were 'spidered', all of the results
were top 10 for the keywords I had focused on! They were not all
#1, although a few were, but it didn't matter, my traffic from
search engines jumped significantly thanks to the information in
his book. I also know that he himself uses these techniques to
get hundreds of top 10 search engine placements for his own
business and is approaching $1,000,000 in profits annually.
There are two additional things to think about when you consider
search engines. Well actually, there are many more things to
talk about when it comes to search engines, but I'm only going to
talk about two more: mis-spellings, and smaller search engines.
Taking advantage of mis-spellings can be a great way to boost
your search engine traffic. People frequently type too fast, and
submit their search before they realize that they have mis-typed
the word that they were searching for. As a webmaster, this can
be quite good, as far fewer sites actually try to focus on the
incorrect keywords. Of course the total number of searches made
on mis-spelled keywords is much fewer than on correctly spelled
keywords, but they can still generate a large amount of traffic
with FAR less competition. Just as a quick example, as I write
this, "web hosting" produces nearly 3.9 MILLION results, while
"wbe hosting" produces 10,000!
GoodKeywords from http://www.softnik.com/ is a great tool that
allows you to quickly and easily find out how many searches are
done on any keywords you like (including mis-spellings). It's
free, and an invaluable resource!
Lastly on search engines, is the importance of the smaller
search engines. There are many benefits to the smaller search
engines, but the most significant are that you get indexed more
quickly, have fewer competitors, and can generate a solid amount
of traffic for you. The huge engines (google, lycos, inktomi)
and indices (yahoo, DMOZ) can take weeks to add your site, if
ever, and always put your site against 1000's of others.
While there is no guarantee that you will be included in a
smaller search engine, you will be 'spidered' much more quickly.
And while they may not have millions of searches a day, there is
no difference between 1000 visitors coming from 1 source (say
google) and 1000 visitors coming from 5 sources (200 from each of
several smaller engines). An additional benefit of the smaller
search engines is that some (not all) have agreements with the
main engines so that their content is spidered by the main engines
- in essence giving the webmaster a 'backdoor' into the main
engines.
I hope that this gives you a bit of direction and hope as far as
search engines are concerned. As I mentioned earlier, based on
my own experience using the information, I highly recommend
Stephan Peirce's bookon traffic generation. He WILL make a difference in your
website's success.
Look for the remaining 3 parts in this series on Multiple Streams
of Traffic over the next few days.
About the Author
Eric Koshinsky: Site Manager and guide at Newbie-guides.com
We aim to provide useful tips and guidance for those who
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