Driving traffic to your blog or web site is the most important thing when you are developing a website. Without traffic you can’t do much with your website. You don’t know what people would say about your website; you don’t make any sales if it is an e-commerce website; and also you don’t make any revenue with it. How to drive traffic to my website? That’s a question that many people ask. Here are the ways you can generate traffic to your blog or website. Each of way has its own benefits. Some ways are very quick to generate traffic but others may slow. There are many ways to get traffic but you have to decide what is the best way that you can work on.
Create a Great Website
1. Create Good Looking and User friendly Website
If you want more visitors and to make sure that they will come back again, then you need an appealing website that has created users in your mind. Make it easier to find what they are looking for by properly organizing your website. Also use a nice and hassle free theme for the website.
2. Create Great Content
If you have very valuable and unique content that’s the most important thing you need to have to drive traffic to your website and keep them coming.
3. Apply Search Engine Optimization to Your Website and Content
Get a basic idea about search engine optimization and try to obey them. In the long run, search engine traffic is the most stable traffic (in most cases) stream that you can have to your website.
4. Encourage Your Visitors to Link back to Your Website
Invite your readers to link back to your website. This is very good to improve your search engine rankings and increase traffic.
5. Add Images with the Alt Tags
Create Alt Tags (Image descriptions) when you add images to your website. Then you have the advantage of having an additional traffic from image searches through search engines.
Article Marketing
6. Submit Articles to Free Article Directories
Submit your well written articles to free article directories like eZineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, ArticleDashBoard.com, WebProNews.com, SearchWarp.com, and GoArticles.com. They allow using a resource box for each of your article where you can put a link to your website or blog. This helps to drive traffic and improve your rankings by having backlinks from high page rank websites.
7. Write Guest Posts
Write guest posts for reputed and related (in your niche) websites or blogs. This is very effective and can generate a lot of traffic very quickly. Select websites with very high traffic and page rank.
8. Write for Web 2.0 Websites
Write and submit articles to popular web 2.0 websites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. In this way you can generate lots of traffic and exposure to your website.
Directories Blog/Website
9. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories
Use best blog directories like Dmoz.org, Technorati.com, BlogCatalog.com, and BlogFlux.com to submit your blog.
10. Increase Your Community within the Blog Directory
Keep in touch with the community of your Blog directory. Keep in mind that blog directories and far better than social networking, if you do it right. It is a known fact that people in blog directories are more responsive than social networks.
11. Add Blog Directory Fan Page to Your Blog
This is a nice way to enhance your community and exposure within the blog directory. .
Social Bookmarking
12. Bookmark Your Posts and Articles
If you frequently bookmark your blog posts or articles, it will generate lots of traffic in the long run. If you are able to appear in the first page of bookmarking websites you will be able get thousands of visitors a day to your website. Submit your best articles to bookmarking websites like Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, Propeller.com, Mixx.com, and Delicious.com.
13. Add a Bookmarking Widget to Your Blog posts
If you encourage your visitors to bookmark your articles, then it will be lot easier for you to appear in the first pages of these bookmarking websites and get enormous amount of traffic.
14. Have More Friends in Bookmarking Websites
If you have more friends in the social bookmarking website, then it is easy to get their help to promote your best blog posts. This is the best way to drive more and more traffic. Keep company with them by encouraging the communication with them. This is also applicable to any form of social website to significantly increase traffic to your website.
Social Networking
15. Submit Your Website to Major Social Networks
You must submit your articles to Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and MySpace.com as they are the most popular social networks on the internet.
16. Create a Facebook/MySpace Group
You can create a Facebook group and write useful information that might be helpful for your readers. Invite your friends to your group. This will be so beneficial to have a stable stream of traffic.
17. Add a Fan Page/Followers Widget to Your Website
You can add your fan page/followers widget to your website and encourage your visitors to join your group. Google follower’s widget, Facebook fans widget, Facebook like widget, etc. are some of the best tools for this.
Groups
18. Create a Yahoo Group
You can create a group in Yahoo.com and update information frequently about your website. This is also useful to increase traffic.
Search Engine Submission
19. Submit Your Website to Less Known Search Engines.
This is not effective but you can get some traffic in this way. You can use a submission tool so this not difficult. Some of them are Zuula, Mamma.com, Clusty, Excite, and MozDex.
Get the Help of Famous Blogs
20. Ask from Popular Bloggers in Your Niche for Link Exchanging.
This will greatly improve your search engine rankings and traffic. Also this will stabilize your traffic. You can frequently link to their articles expecting that they will do the same. This is beneficial for both your readers and you.
21. Advertise on Famous Blogs
If you can spend some money to advertise your blog in a famous blog like Problogger.net and JohnChow.com, you can definitely increase your sales and the reader base. Those who come from such blogs are very responsive people. So you have the benefit of having more targeted traffic to your blog.
22. Comment Frequently
If you comment of those famous blogs in the same niche with a link back to your blog, then the webmasters might visit your site. If they feel that your blog site has a good content, they will link back to your articles. This is a huge advantage to have. Make sure your comments are informative and never spam them.
Video Submission Sites
23. Submit Video to YouTube
If you don’t get the advantage of YouTube it is a huge waste. There millions of people visit YouTube every month and you can get the advantage of this. Submit some great videos with catching titles to YouTube and don’t forget to include your website’s name in the video and the profile.
24. Use Other Free Video Submission Sites
There are number of other free video submission sites out there too. Submit several videos to them and enjoy some nice traffic spikes. Metacafe.com, and Blinkx.com are good video sharing websites to consider.
Podcasting Sites
25. Create Some Audios and Submit to Free Podcasting Websites
Podcasting is one of a new concept on the internet. You can create an audio about a topic in your blog and submit it to podcasting sites.
Forums
26. Join to Signature Supported Forums
There are so many forums with huge amount of traffic. Find some of the best forums in your niche and join them. Find whether they allow signatures under your posts. This is also a great way to have targeted traffic to your blog.
Answers
27. Yahoo Answers and Similar Sites
Use Yahoo Answers to answer their questions and try to link to your articles whenever possible. They are very strict on self promotion and try to add a value to their site without spamming. There are several other sites that are capable of driving traffic to your website too.
Blog Carnivals
28. Submit to Blogcarnical.com
Submit your best posts to Blogcarnival.com. You can enjoy huge amount of high quality traffic and comments in a very short period of time. Use blog carnivals to increase your reader base.
RSS Directories
29. Submit to Free RSS Directories
This is another good way to enhance your reader base. Bloglines.com, and MoreOver.com are two places to start.
30. Use Feed URLs in Your Website
Allow your readers to subscribe to your feed. Use FeedBurner.com to create a free feed account. This is a very good way to increase your exposure.
Free Classified Sites
31. Submit to Free Classified Websites
Submit some ads about your website to free classified ads websites like Craigslist.org and Gumtree.com. If you sell services like freelance writing or web design, etc., then this is one of the most effective ways to increase your sales.
Press Releases
32. Write a Press Release and Submit to Free Press Release Sites
There are websites that you can submit your product launches and websites launches. This is a useful way to promote your products and websites and to generate a buss among the community.
Use Ping
33. Ping Your Articles
Use websites like Pingomatic.com to ping your articles. This is kind of a notice to search engines that the site has updated. Don’t overdo this as search engines won’t like it.
Create a Toolbar
34. Create a Conduit toolbar
You can create a free toolbar easily with Conduit.com and allow it to be downloaded. Give away it to your friends and it will be an easy way to increase traffic to your blog or website.
Emails
35. Use Your Email Signature for Linking to Your Blog
You can use email signature to drive some traffic to your blog by embedding the blog’s URL in it. Whenever you send emails to your friends they might visit your blog too.
Free Reports and EBooks
36. Write Free Reports and EBooks
Write informative reports and eBooks and give away them for free. Convert them to PDF files before allowing them to be downloaded using a PDF converter software. Make sure to use links to your blog in it. People love free content and this is a great way to generate free traffic in the long run.
37. Submit Your Free EBooks to PDF Search Engines
You can submit your free eBook to PDF search engines like PDF-Searcher.com for an additional exposure to your website.
These are some of the best ways to generate free traffic to your website or blog. Use several ways at first and understand how it works. When you are going to have enough traffic with that method, try to develop another method while keep improving the older method.
August 30th, 2010 
jase
