It’s a common story. Someone builds a great site, populates it with lots of fantastic content and beautiful graphics. They spend weeks or month making sure everything is perfect before the big launch day arrives. Then in the hours, days and weeks after the upload, a few people trickle in but nothing really explosive. What happened? How can such a great site not naturally take the internet community by storm? Simple – the marketing of the site was not planned (and often not even thought about!).
If this is happening to you then don’t panic! There are a few ways to kick-start your traffic and get some meaningful visitors. Done in combination with a long term marketing strategy, they can help grow your list of visitors and more importantly keep them. Here are a few of the immediate steps that can be taken:
Buy Traffic – This is probably the easiest and a very cheap way to go. The way it works is that companies purchase expired domain names and redirect the traffic straight to your site. Other companies operate pop-up or pop-under technology that displays the website you want visited. Often you can start seeing results from this in 48 hours and many thousands of visitors can be had for only a few dollars outlay. Beware! This can really send your stats through the roof and is very easy, but there are pitfalls. Untargeted traffic is quite low quality unless you have something truly great to show a general audience. In most case you are far better off purchasing targeted hits to your site’s area of interest. It is only logical that a travel site would want people looking for travel information! It is worth spending a few extra dollars.
Post on POPULAR, ESTABLISHED Forums – Do some research and find out what are the most popular forums in your area. I am talking about forums with at least 1000 members and preferably many more. Beware of forums that reward people for posting as they may indeed have many members, but few of them post more than once or twice and even fewer read other people’s posts. (You want forums with many more posts than members – this indicates that members actively return, read and post at the forum). Most forum moderators have no problems with users having a “signature” at the end of their posts. This is where you can list your website URL. DO NOT SPAM people’s boards with commercial messages. Post helpful or interesting topics and respond to other people’s queries. Posting solely to advertise your site will get you banned from most forums. This technique can be worth many thousands of visitors to your site quite quickly if done properly.
Yahoo! Listing – It’s the most popular site on the internet and it’s where many companies go to get listed. It’s also responsible for about 50% of all internet searches. You can get your site reviewed quickly for about $200 (though they do not guarantee to list everything so make sure your page looks professional and has good content. Even then it is still a gamble). It is expensive but your site WILL get seen by a lot of people if you get a listing with Yahoo! One good tip is to try to title your site with a letter towards the beginning of the alphabet as the listings go in alphabetical order. That way you will be in front of your competitors.
These techniques can have a very fast effect on your website traffic. The first two should send your stats up within a few days and combined with the Yahoo listing, see them stay high. It’s a lot of work, and maybe a little cash, but these three techniques combined can have your site getting thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors per month.
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