On a basic level, all visitors to your website will come from one of the 5 following sources:
- Paid Advertising Campaigns
- Emails and Newsletters
- Domain name direct access.
- Search Engine Traffic
- Links from other websites
This article will briefly touch on all five of those areas, but the focus will be on the natural traffic generated from external inbound links (links from other websites) because it has the best long term affect, it is usually free, potentially the most productive traffic source, there are many clever tricks which you can do with it, and it is the easiest form of generating inbound traffic for a new website.
Paid Advertising Campaigns
Getting traffic from advertising campaigns is the fastest and easiest way to get traffic, but it cuts into your profits, so you really don't want to have to rely upon it. This also includes pay per click campaigns like Google Adwords (only pay for each visitor you get), and probably the best version of paid advertising is Affiliate programs where you only pay for each lead or sale generated. (See Commission Junction for one of the most popular versions of affiliate programs)
Email
People might email their friends to tell them about your site if it is worth sharing. You can also pay for an advert in large subscriber newsletters. This is basically the same as paid advertising though. You should definitely have a link to your website in the signature of your emails.
Domain Name Direct Access
By 'Domain Name Direct Access' I mean when people type “www.google.com” and access Google’s website directly through their memorable domain name. This is a source of traffic, but you can only rely upon this once you have a well established brand name or memorable domain name, so this form of traffic is no good to a new site whatsoever.
Search Engine traffic
This is the traffic you want, and the traffic that will provide ongoing success. Interestingly your success in this field of traffic is dependent almost entirely on the final form of traffic: External inbound Links.
The only action you can make here is to submit your site to each search engine (although they won’t list you until you have lots of links pointing at you anyway), and in the case of Google (where most of your search traffic will probably come from) you should without a doubt register with the Wemaster Tools in order to track your progress with them.
Search engines will list your site when their ‘bots’ find your website while crawling the web. They will find your site only when they find a link on one of their known sites which links to you. Once they have listed you, your site will be associated with keywords (based on your content and on the content of the sites which link to you) and your rank for those keywords will be determined by the number of sites linking to you. So in order to improve your ranking for specific and general searches around your topic, you need to increase the number of external inbound links. And more importantly, you want high quality external inbound links. That is, ideally, you want the website which is in first position for each of the keywords you want to be in first position of, to link to you.
Important: Not only is the content of the website that links to you relevant, but so are the actual words which link to you. So when you control the link text you get, ensure you choose the linking text carefully. Focus on the keywords that you want score highly for in Search Engines.
Other Websites Linking to You
In the beginning, you have to do everything yourself. Once you are known, other websites will link to you because of how great your content is. Before that happens though, they have to be able to find you. So to start those inbound links off, you have a range of options, and you should probably use all of them. Before you start to get your inbound links though, you should brainstorm all of the keywords you want to score highly for, and prioritize their importance.
- Internet directories: These are the equivalent to online phone books for websites. Find them, find your category, and submit your site to them. In time they will review your site and then add you to their directory. That is one free content relevant inbound link per directory. Try finding multiple directory submissions websites. You enter the details of your site, and they will submit it to as many as a hundred directories at once.
- Link Exchange: You ask another webmaster to link to you, and you link to them. It’s a win – win! Some websites actually have automated link exchange. Some have no mention of link exchange at all. Email everyone with a website that is on the same topic as yours.
- Google search for link exchange reveals a number of directory like websites which require an exchange : http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=link+exchange&meta=
- Do a search for “Your keyword(s)” and email every result on the list and propose a link exchange with them. Each link you get will be good quality, but you will likely not get many
- You therefore also want to do a search for "Your keyword(s) Link Exchange” which should reveal all of the websites which offer automated link exchanges or are interested in link exchange. This will be slightly lower quality than the previous search, but you will get many more positive replies.
- Social websites/Social bookmarking: Incredibly popular, and if you have a good website, your website will also become incredibly popular. The basic idea is if people like your site, they will recommend it or vote for it. Voting for it brings it to the attention of others, and if they like it they will vote for it, and so on until everyone knows your website! The beauty is that some of these websites virtually have one page for each person, and so you can end up with thousands of inbound links as each person adds your site to their favourites
- Make a myspace account for your website. Write about your website (making the page content relevant) and link to your site. Simple. There are heaps of websites like myspace. Simply go to this social website list and start linking!
- If you offer an authority knowledge on some topic, edit wikipedia to link to your site. This is only possible if your website is relevant enough to a topic and ‘good’ enough for people to accept as a worthy link. There are many websites like wikipedia these days though, where you can edit the content yourself. Add your site to AboutUs.org and explore the possibilities with other wiki style sites.
- Social bookmarking is a definite must. Start with del.icio.us and stumbleupon, and I am sure there are many others. Use every one you can find.
- Social rating sites: Digg your own site (that’s jargon for voting for your site on digg.com). Then do it again on all of these sites: http://shii.org/tech/digg
- Forums: Forums are a great way of getting inbound links, just be smart about it. First, READ THE FORUM RULES. Once you understand their rules then what you want to do is put a link to your website in your signature, and then participate in a helpful way in topic relevant threads. Content relevant inbound links. Simple.
- Find forums relevant to your topic, use your knowledge to impress people. People will follow your link just because they appreciate your knowledge.
- Even off-topic forums can be useful by simply starting threads in the ‘Off Topic’ section, or ‘Open Discussion’ section. Every forum has a section like that.
- Use the ‘search’ function to find threads already started on your topic, and add to them.
- Blogs: Start a blog. Write articles about your website topic, and write entries providing news for your website. Link to your site in every entry.
- Press Releases: There are press release websites who you can pay to do a press release for you. You can write the press release yourself or pay a copywriter to do it for you. Write about your website, and of course, link to your website in that article.
- Article Directories: Write an article about the topic of your website, share your knowledge. Then give away that knowledge for free, and get an external inbound link. Repeat for many more. Similar to press releases, but press releases tend to cost money and may reach the actual media, while article directories are usually free and only relevant to search engines.
- A google search of article directories. Write one or more articles and submit them to many directories.
If you do all of those things, I reckon you just might get first place in google for anything you want..
And in order to prove this point, I will be systematically doing each of these steps with this page. Achieving high results in search engines for 'internet marketing' must be the most difficult keyword of all time, because surely everyone with a website about that must know how to do it, and so I will be competing with seasoned professionals. Keep that in mind as I apply this simply strategies and try to build my traffic to a respectable amount.
Shane
24 February 2007 at 0 hits.
