So you have yourself a website, and your interested in increasing the amount of traffic – what should you do? First, let’s take a look at where your web traffic is coming from now, which can conveniently be divided into four categories:

1. Bookmark traffic from previous visitors
2. Referral traffic from other sites
3. SEO traffic coming from the search engines
4. Paid traffic from pay-per-click (PPC) or banner ads, etc.

So what you need to do is figure out where your traffic is coming from now – then start implementing some new strategies to increase the traffic for each. Here are some tips for increasing traffic I would suggest pursuing:

1. Increasing your bookmark traffic is easy – just place links on your site that allow people to automatically bookmark your page. People less experienced in the internet may not know how to bookmark a website, so make it easy to do.
2. SEO traffic is the stuff coming from search engines – so you need to let the search engines know what your website is offering so that they index you for it. If you make ‘widgets’ then you need to have the term ‘widgets’ in your meta tags and in your website content so that it is clear to the search engines that is what your site is about. You can get an idea of this by taking a look at your website analytics to see what keywords are currently being used to come into your website. I’ll post more on this later.
   blog routing code

3. You can increase referral traffic, but this can be a bit grueling. Basically you contact other website owners and ask them for links, or you enter your website into lots of web directories. Maybe you have to use reciprocal links, where you both link to each other helping each of you. Having spent lots of time doing this very thing myself, let me tell you that you can expect most such requests to simply be ignored. There are tools on the web that help it be less painful, some free some not, so I like to use them. Tools like the Directory Submitter and WebCEO are free too.
4. Paid traffic is usually where most new websites have to start as the other referral sources take time. If you are selling a product, getting paid traffic usually makes sense if done right. The most important thing to remember with paid traffic is to be aware of what your ROI is – how much it is costing you for the traffic. You have to look at the numbers, because if each sale from the paid traffic costs you $100 dollars to get and you are only making $25 dollars on the sale – that is obviously not good. Google Adwords is probably the best place to start for most because it is so easy and they are the search leader, but you can also get banner ads on other websites that will send you targeted traffic, etc.

My favorite answer to people asking how to better market their company / product / ideas is to get a blog – kinda like this one. How come? Because they are so easy to create and maintain, mostly. Take a look at your alternatives;

• You could produce a flyer to email or mail to your customers / prospects
• You could send out a company newsletter via email of snail mail
• You could also place the marketing material on your regular website, if you have one.

While each of the above has its advantages / disadvantages, none of them can compare to a blog:

• The cost to create the blog is about the same as it is to create and mail a single newsletter.
• Blogs are available to be viewed 24 / 7 – they are immediate and can be updated later as needed
• Search engines love them – over time you can have a whole lot of information that the search engines can point their traffic to
• They are easy to use and maintain

There are disadvantages to having a blog too;

• If you have a blog, ideally you should post on it maybe 3 times a week to keep the search engines coming back.
  blog routing code

• The cost to post is, uh, nothing but you do have to find the time to do it. But maybe that is something you can delegate to some underling! (smile)
• Ideally you should have original content on the blog, not just copy and paste information you got elsewhere, and can sometimes be difficult for people not as talented as myself. (smile again)

And oh yeah, did I mention that website-help-blog.com can create a blog for you, then train you on how to use it? And all at a price you will find most agreeable.  Just let us know if you are intested.