10 Ways To Drive Traffic to Your Web Site

So you finally created your first web site, and you're all gung-ho! elated. So now you're wondering if you just wait for the traffic to come or what?

For your online business to succeed, you must have traffic coming regularly to your website. Without traffic you will not make any sales and you won't get anywhere.

If you wait for the search engines to index you, and for people to trickle to your site, you'll be sadly disappointed. It will surely take months to get indexed. And, the Internet is not like a shopping mall where you can get walk-in traffic from passersby.

If you want traffic, you must take aggressive action. Here are some proven steps that can bring you the traffic you need.

1- Provide fresh, unique and useful content on your website. People go online to look for information and also buy what they need. It is therefore important for you to have high quality content to keep your visitors happy. They will bookmark your site, and come back for more information, and eventually buy from you.

2- Optimise your website for search engines as well as your readers. In order for your site to be found by the search engines, make sure that your niche keywords and phrases are in your headlines and sprinkled throughout your individual articles. This means that your website will be found by Google and Yahoo, and will rank high for those keywords on your website, and this will drive more traffic to your website.

3- Writing and submitting articles is a very powerful tool for getting traffic. In all your articles, make sure you have a resources box or author's biography with your website's URL at the end of each article. After reading your article, people will want to visit your website, so the more articles you write the more traffic you will drive to your website.

4- Participate in forums targeted to your niche. This is one of the most effective ways of driving traffic. Make useful posts in the forums that are related to your niche, and have your website link in your signature.

5- Use viral marketing to deliver the traffic you want. Write free e-books or short reports with a link to your website. Have a link to your website on your blog and on any press release that you write. These can be very useful.

6- Use video marketing to drive traffic to your website. You can create a video about your product or service that you offer and post that on YouTube. Add your website link on that video, and this will make sure that people who view your video will also visit your website.

7- Drive traffic to your website using PPC (Pay per Click) advertising. If you have the money to pay for the advertising, you can run an advert with Google Adwords or Yahoo to drive traffic to your site or blog. But avoid this if you have no PPC experience, as you could lose your shirt, like so many do. Wait until you get some traffic, and gain more experience before venturing into PPC.

8- Create RSS feeds for your site and submit the feed URLs to the major RSS feed directories online. This will generate traffic to your website. You should read up on RSS, as it is neglected by a lot of people, as it sounds complicated, but really isn't.

9- Consider email marketing. If the subject of your site allows it, set up a newsletter that you will publish on a regular basis. Weekly, is preferred, but even monthly could be useful. The risk with monthly is that with the overflowing number of email newsletters available today, your subscribers could easily for you, and accuse you of spam.

10- A tip to help you get indexed faster by Google, Yahoo, and MSN is to get a link back from several blogs. If you know someone with a blog, ask them to mention your site, and that will create a link to you.

Even better than that, post your comments on some suitable blogs with your name and url of your site, at the end of the comment. You might just get indexed in a few days instead of months.

These are some of the preferred and most effective ways to generate the traffic that makes a web site successful. They can be time-consuming so you should budget the time you want to allow, especially for forums.

Get Your Kicks Driving Traffic - and watch your traffic stats increase day by day.

Fred Farah