I truly believe that to get website traffic you need to leverage a pay per click advertising network. And I think people need to move beyond Google Adwords since the pay per click is costing more and more as more advertisers join the network. The secret to a successful campaign is having a quality content website. If you have a website which offers easy to find information it won't work and you will lose money using a pay per click advertising network. If on the other hand you have a website which forces the reader to return, then pay per click advertising will work wonders. Free Traffic via the following methods just doesn't work if you ask me 1. Article Marketing 2. Traffic Exchange Systems 3. Leaving Blog comments 4. Leaving Signatures in Forums 5. Chatting 6. Joining Communities such as Myspace 7. Joining a Guest Blogging network There is one technique that would bring in a lot of traffic. Put up your website for sale. Then you will have interested buyers view your website and leave good or bad comments on their blogs which could cause a chain reaction. Well any more ideas or comments?
I don't get a lot of traffic, but I do my best to make sure the little traffic I do get has a purpose. Forum Sigs: I got 500 clicks to my website from this forum this month alone, and 2 sales. About $100 net profit. I've made several hundred dollars this year from forum sigs in general. I don't post to forums just to get my sig seen. So I don't really track it. Anything I get is just gravy. Not to mention a few dollars from the rev sharing. Traffic from ppc rocks when you get it right. Adwords still has the most volume in every niche I've tried. And in theory, as more and more people join, cost per click goes up. However, with google's quality scoring and numerous other factors affecting the final cost, I don't think it matters how many people get in and start competing. There is a plateau, a balance between cost and return on investment. There is only so much one can bid before they hit a break even point. I think having a landing page with a call to action works best for ppc. I'm also having some success with passive landing pages that provide easy to access information. So I wouldn't generalize by saying "easy to find information won't work". Most ppc traffic only stays on my site for less than 1 minute anyway. Please elaborate on this, I'm curious. I suppose you could mean providing information on a schedule, where it won't be available until some future date. Could you give a specific example?
Yes that could work but only if your content offers quality. And when I speak of quality I mean practicality and in case you are writing an academic article then I mean thoroughness. What people fail to realize is that you have fierce competition in any given subject. To grab readers and convert them into returning visitors you want to solve their problem. Solve their problem quickly. Here is an example Howstuffworks.com is a website which offers very thorough academic information and as a result people turn to it every time they want to know how something works. Not only that, but the thoroughness and lucid writing style of the website wants you to read on and on. That is one of the reasons it has been accepted into Advertising.com a network which only accepts publishers whose websites receive a minimum of one million visitors per month. Another example is Site Point. Site Point actually pays writers between $50-$100 for articles. Why? Because it has a community of 3 million readers. The reason for the large number of readers is practicality. They offer practically programming solutions. So you see if you have content which forces a reader to return, then when you pay for an adword campaign, you will be able to make a profit from adsense since one reader will be a loyal reader and will click on many more ads (or atleast there is the likelyhood he/she will since the person will return more often and see more ads). This is something I haven't seen people doing. Most adword campaigners just want to sell something.