How to get more good traffic to your website

  There are many ways to get more people to visit your website. One of the best-known ways is to get a good ranking in the search engines. (See the Search Engine Optimization section about improving your page ranking.) But there are many other things you can do to get more traffic.

  It's not enough just to "get more clicks". The quality of visitor you get is far more important than the quantity.

  That's where the term 'targeted traffic' comes from. Personally, I would rather have 10 visitors who are interested in what I'm doing doing than 10,000 who aren't.

  So, where - exactly - does this 'targeted traffic' come from? From accurate search results, from referrals and from your links on other websites. It does not come from traffic exchanges, FFA pages, pay-per-click scams or links on un-related websites.

    The following tips will help you get more targeted traffic.

  Get people to tell their friends about your site.
  Word-of-mouth advertising is the most cost-effective advertising there is. If your website is informative, or entertaining, or helpful in any way - and not just a bunch of ads - then people are usually happy to tell their friends about it.
  SO - Have a 'Tell-a-friend' button on every page. You can use any of the tell-a-friend services, but they place advertisements on the referrals. So I've got this add-free  tell-a-friend script you can use. Feel free to adapt it to your use.

  Use contests to boost your traffic. Contests also help with getting recommendations and repeat visits. A weekly, monthly, or even quarterly contest run for your newsletter subscribers will greatly improve word of mouth advertising for you. People love to win things - and they love to talk about it!
  it does not have to be anything expensive. Every month, my friend Abby (http://abbys-good-stuff.com) gives away three 'Birthday Gift Packs' to subscribers who are celebrating a birthday that month... and it only costs her something like $25 a month.

  Use the data from your site-search and your log files. In particular, find out what people are searching for and then give it to them. This tip could be considered as a 'generic' tip, because having more good information on your website will help improve conversions, page rank, referrals and traffic.

  Ask your subscribers to forward your newsletter to their friends. Your subscribers have friends and family - in every issue ask them to refer them to your website and/or to forward the issue.
  Once someone sees a sample issue, they are more likely to visit and sign up for themselves. (that's assuming that your newsletter has more substance than fluff and 20% or less of advertisements.)

  Reciprocal Links with related websites. It takes time, but this strategy can bring more targeted traffic to your website than even a top google page rank. For instance, at Abbys-Good-Stuff.com, (the only site I have long-term data for.) the most traffic comes from Google. But - coming in at a close number two is the traffic that comes from the link exchange program.
  In hard numbers, for December 2004, there were 690,708 hits from Google and 533,481 hits from what the web-stats data listed as '[not listed: 4,853 sites]'.
  that's almost 5 thousand other websites that are sending traffic! It took us over two years to get that many exchanges - but as you can tell, it was worth it.
  For more information about link trades, see the Successful Link Exchanges section.
  Get the free eBook for linking programs >> Link Mastery 101

  Get a better 'ranking' in the search engines. This is a serious, time-consuming process... but it's not all that difficult, really. The bottom line is, simply, to make your website more attractive to a search engine for your unique qualities and your main topic.
  You do Not need to buy expensive "SEO Services" to get a better ranking! Much more about that in the Search Engine Optimization section.

  Use Top Sites Lists   Top sites lists are those "vote for this site" lists... every time a visitor votes for you, your ranking goes up a little. On my other website, we use Top20 for the voting - and we get an average of 50 new visitors from it daily.
  Tip - try to find one that fits your website theme, and already has quite a bit of traffic. (You can tell by the visitor count)

  Trade Newsletter Ads with other webmasters. A 1-for-1 ad swap with another webmaster can be a little difficult to set up and monitor, but it can really pay off in the long run.

  First, you have to find a website that is similar to yours, and has a newsletter with related content. Then contact the webmaster and ask if they are willing to do an ad swap. If they are, arrange the details via email or instant message.

  Make sure you hold up your end of the bargain - and subscribe to the other newsletter to monitor their end.

  It is a good idea to monitor the traffic from each ad swap. There are various ways to do that, the easiest may be to use one of the url-redirect services like tz4.com or Active.ws - or any of the others you can find by googling for 'url redirection'.
  If you use one of them - pick one that won't place ads on your page, and that will give you some traffic stats.

  Another method is to set up a separate start page for each ad swap, and redirect to your home or sales page from there. Just monitor the traffic for each start page and see who sends you the most traffic.
  The following code can redirect traffic from a unique url to another page automatically... just make a page with the code and name it something like "mysite.com/promo01.htm" and use that url for ad swaps with only one newsletter.
<html> <head> <title>Loading page...</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=http://www.yoursite.com"> <script> url='http://www.yoursite.com'; if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); } else { top.location.href=url; } </script> </head> <body>Loading <a href=http://www.yoursite.com>page</a>... </body>
Edit the URL, of course. With this code all visitors from ad swap #1 are redirected to "www.yoursite.com" after 1 second. Simply monitor the traffic for the page called promo01.htm with your server access logs. (You can also place a counter on the page, but that may slow down the redirect.)