subject: Three Killer Free Traffic Tips For Small Business Owners [print this page] Three Killer Free Traffic Tips For Small Business Owners
Any entrepreneur who's the least serious and interested in growing his business needs to have a foot on the Internet. Unfortunately putting up a nice looking website is not enough to establish your online presence and bring in more customers. The time and money you invested in your website will be completely wasted unless you are able to drive targeted visitors to it. Without targeted traffic absolutely nothing happens online.
There are hundreds of methods of generating traffic but this article will cover only three proven traffic strategies. The reasons? They are easy to implement. They are free. They are effective. They can be outsourced.
Let's get down to the nuts and bolts:
1. Article marketing
Write articles about your products or services and submit them to articles directories with a link to your website in the author resource box. By doing this you will get : a) quality backlinks to your site from the articles directories, which are normally sites with high PageRank; b) backlinks from other websites that may re-publish your articles; c) traffic from people who click on those links; d) traffic from search engines once your articles are indexed and eventually high-ranked for specific keywords.
It is important to note that your article shouldn't be a sales page or blatant advertisement but provide enough information to entice the readers' curiosity and make them click on the link to your website.
2. Forum marketing
This technique involves making posts on forums with a link to your website on your signature. Besides building backlinks you will also receive visitors when people click on your signature links.
The first thing you need to do is find active forums related to your business/website. This can very easily be accomplished by running a search for "[keyword] forum". When you have found a few forums, first check out if they have had recent activity (the more recent posts the better), then read their rules on advertising and signature links. Skip forums that don't allow links on signatures or that require hundreds of posts before allowing a signature.
Once you have selected a few forums, spend 15-20 minutes every day, or three times a week, answering or asking questions, offering help and advice to other members, contributing with useful information. This way you will build trust and make people click on the links that appear at the end of every post you make.
3. Blog commenting
This technique consists of posting comments on high-traffic, authority blogs with a link to your website. Again, search blogs related to your product/service, select the most active ones and add comments to the discussions taking place. When you leave a comment enter your name and your website URL. Some blogs allow you to enter an anchor text that can be used to insert keywords. This way you will gain a backlink to your website and targeted traffic from the people clicking on your link.
These three simple traffic generating techniques can be completely outsourced if you are scarce on time to do it yourself. At sites like elance.com or guru.com you can hire a freelance writer to do all the article writing you need at a fairly low cost. Also several blog commenting and forum posting services can be found by running a search on your favorite search engine.
