I am no expert by no means on marketing websites, however I think a lot of people are not putting enough focus on "what can I do to keep these visitors to stay on my site and come back". I bring this up because what good is it to get 1000's of uniques visitors a day if you don't have anything interesting on your site. Just because you rank for a specific search phrase it doesn't necessarily mean that your visitors find your site appealing, it just means that you have convinced the search engines. The search engines don't buy anything from your site. Here are a couple of small things that I have started doing and some I plan to do to keep them coming back and stay on my site. 1. I moved the search box in my wordpress blog and placed it under the below the header section of my site. 2. I started doing a lot of interlinking in my blog entries to specific landing pages. I vary the anchor text to keep it more natural. I also added a wordpress related post plugin. 3. I started to develop a newsletter and am offering an incentive to get them to sign up. I can then use this this to communicate with my readers and hopefully keep bringing them back to my site. 4. Have monthly drawing and pick out people who have made meaningful comments to a blog posts. 5. Quality Content - nothing beats having fresh and well written content. If you are not a good writer you can hire someone to spruce up your writing or find a good writer to write for your site. I know that steps 1 and 2 have worked for me because I noticed my page views per visit more than double. I have a feeling that the giveaways are going to more than pay for themselves. I am not saying that it's going to replace paying for link advertisements but I feel that with the right giveaways that can draw alot of natural links to my site from others talking about it. Like I said, I am no expert but I have proof that some of this works and I feel that this is a good starting point to generating a successful site for now and the future.
Their was a thread in DP recently about some guy asking about giving away a 24" lcd monitor. If you look at what $$ you put into link building and not forgetting the time put into validating the job, etc... I believe that giving away something substantial can surely bring the traffic to your site and even pick up natural links from other websites talking about your giveway. Anyone want to add some other techniques that they use.