Friday, October 31, 2008

How To Get Traffic To Your Website For Free

By Brian Armstrong

There are many ways that you can leverage the internet, including several free resources to get traffic to your website. If you don't have a website yet, you'll need one for some of these processes to work most effectively, but there are still options included in this article for those of you without a website yet.

Articles like this one are great means of getting traffic to a website and also an easy means of getting your business contact information out to the masses. Assuming you produce good content, there is no shortage of opportunities to get your articles published and read. Be sure to have a strong call to action.

If you have a retail business, you can get your business details listed in local directories including both Google and Yahoo which have "local" listings and based on the search will generate a listing usually at the very top of the search engines. For instance, if you search for "Salt Lake City plumber", you'll get a list of plumbers, their contact information. You can submit your own business information so that you have local traffic to your site or store.

Another service similar to the local listings is Google base which is Google's way of creating listings of events, products, photos, and just about anything else that people submit. This is a great way to get your products to show up in Google's search listings. It doesn't cost anything to list in Google Base and also has options for uploading spreadsheets.

You can use Craigslist.org as well to list items for sale, events, such as a sale that your business is having or even products, or things like a coupon code that you can use to get other people to your business or website to buy your product. In my experience, coupon codes work very well on classified ad sites.

Social networking has grown significantly in the last few years online and you may have heard of this as "Web 2.0". You can use a lot of these social networking sites to develop contacts who can benefit from your products and services. Just like the name implies, however, you'll need to network with other people. The benefit to you if you're a bit more on the shy side, or not usually extroverted, the internet provides a bit of a buffer and will allow you to get out there and form some relationships and get some additional business to your website.

Another way to get traffic to your site is to comment on other people's blogs. This works the best when you have blogs that get a lot of comments and posts that get a lot of views. Adding a comment that provides insight and adds value to the original message will get people more interested in what you have to say on your website which will create traffic to your site, and depending on the blog will also create some search engine optimization benefits and help you with your website's ranking.

You can develop any number of different strategies for getting traffic back to your website. The most important part of any of these strategies is to be consistent. - 15254

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