Hi guys, I am considering re-opening a website I used to run. I closed it down about 6 months back due to no time for it. This has now changed. What I'm wanting to know is some general advice on how to increase my traffic. Website genre: Photography/Tutorials. Domain Extension: .com Appropriate key words in the domain address SEO: I think I pushed the SEO aspect of the website quite far as it was hitting all the right buttons on google for similar searches. I had a good 20-30 tutorials which where generating a total of about 300 hits a month, and being included in over 30,000 google searches a month. (Analytics and webmaster tools). I did run a blog, but I somehow got a bit lost in recoding of a wordpress theme, and didn't use it much. Do blogs bring in many visitors? I suppose my questions follow the lines of, if I'd done all I can with what I had, what areas would be good to diversify into? Obviously more tutorials bring in more visitors, but what's the best way to market the website (for free), I did find that link building from external websites helped a little, and posting tutorials on them worked, is that the best? How good are forums? They generate returning visitors, but getting one started is difficult (no one wishes to join an empty forum). Any tips and advice would be great. I want to re-open the website but to result in what I had seems no sense, I want to push it further. Regards, Sycrid.
All the different ways you've mentioned would need to be utilized. But eventually, you should consider running your own affiliate program. I don't know what the incentive would be in your case, but nothing really beats the traffic generated by your own affiliates.
As you asked for forum traffic too so I would say it is a good method of driving traffic, targeted traffic to your website if you contribute to thigh traffic and relevant forums.
Since you do a lot of video tutorials, I would suggest putting a video on youtube linking back to your site. It's a great source of free traffic. Also another great video site is Udemy.com I hope this helps!