Lesson 8
People don't just stumble onto a website.
They don't see it on the way to somewhere else.
They must be sent there! Or at least told to look for your site.
1. Search Engines - control a lot of traffic on the Internet. If you have something on your website that others are looking for, chances are they will find you. Now you may be several page down on a very long list of places where searchers can find what they're looking for.
But if you have unique, useful information, chances are good that searchers will find you.
2. Links From Others - If you have valuable content on your website, you should find other similar or related sites and ask those webmasters to place a link to your site on one of their related pages.
3. Search Engine Optimization - More about this in the next lesson. But there are some simple, fairly quick ways to make your webpages more attractive to the search engines.
4. Submit to Directories - There a lot of Website Directories that will give your website a listing. You will get some traffic from them by being included, but you will also improve the general ranking of your website by the links from those directories. The more sites that link to your site, the higher your website will be valued by search engines. Especially if those sites that link to you have high ranking themselves. It will take some time, but you should use this to improve your traffic.
5. Setup a WordPress Blog - if you have CPanel hosting, you can setup a WordPress blog on your own website using your own domain name.
Once you set it up, it is quick and easy to post some short piece of information to your site. A blog will also allow your visitors to add comments to your blog postings. This helps your site get traffic. If you content is valuable, others will most likely link back to your blog posting.
6. Write Articles - Articles can be a great way to make your site more attractive. Everytime you learn to do something new, write up how it is done and make it into an article. Remember that an Article can be almost any length, but they are usually in the 300 to 600 word range which is not really a lot.
Whenever you do research to learn about something, your are getting yourself ready to write a unique Article which will be in your own words about what your have learned from a number of sources.
7. Buy Traffic - If you are in a hurry, or if you have some hot stuff to sell on your website, you should consider buying traffic. That means basically that you pay money for ads in ezines, on other high traffic sites or advertise on Google, Yahoo or MSN with payperclick ads.
You have to watch your expenditures to make sure that your ad costs are delivering you some results to offset or exceed their costs. In which case you start to make a PROFIT. (Yeah!!!)