Publishing your first website or blog can be pretty exciting. You can tell your friends and family, and you can open yourself up to a whole new world of expression. But a few days or weeks later, when the thrill wears off, it can be pretty depressing to check your logs to find you're only getting about five unique hits per day.
Getting your site published is only the first step. Now you've got to promote your site, so more people will know about it and come take a look. Or if you are selling some kind of product, you can get the word out so interested people can come take a look. You can do this different ways, and most of them are free. In this article you'll learn a few of the basic ones.
A popular way that has been around for a while is article marketing. You write an article on the same topic of your site, and submit it to an article site. They usually let you put a couple links back to your site in the resource box. People interested in the topic will read your article, and if they are still interested, they'll click on the link at the bottom, and visit your site. The more articles you write, the more visitors you'll get to your site. If you write three or four articles a week, in a short while you can have a substantial amount of traffic.
Another way to promote your site is through the various social networking sites. Facebook, Myspace and other sites like them have literally exploded in recent years. Just sign up, create an account, and start networking. Pretty soon you can have a pretty big network to promote your site to.
Another great source of to get visitors is Twitter. You can generate quite a number of followers over time, even if you are just starting out. Simply look for and follow people that are interested in the same things you are, and they will tend to follow you back. Before you know it, you'll have plenty of followers that you can promote your site to.
If you don't want to wait, then you can simply pay for visitors. The most popular and quickest way to do this is through Google Adwords. You'll set up an account, write some ads, and then sit back and wait for the traffic. You'll have to pay for every visitor, anywhere between a few cents, and a few dollars, depending on how competitive your particular website topic is. Unless you are pretty sure your traffic will convert into dollars, be very careful with Google Adwords. It can add up in a hurry.
Of course, this is just the beginning of how you can get plenty of traffic to your site. The more you start doing this, the more creative you'll get and think of plenty of other ways to get traffic. The important thing is to get started doing something, and be consistent, and persistent.