You measure your website's success in hits – how many
people go and look at the site. There are several ways to get
your link out to customers:
List well in a search engine
Advertise on search engines, other sites, or via Link
Xchange or another ad-swapping service
Get your URL in a news story online or offline
Spam (very bad idea!)
Legitimate emails
Advertising in emailed newsletters
Advertising in your bricks-and-mortar store or in fliers
to your potential customers.
Most of these methods have a problem that make them
either difficult, a bad idea, or expensive. Search engines
take time to place well in, though this is the number one
best way to drive traffic to you. Advertising online is
expensive, and ad-swapping services drive minimal traffic to
your site while forcing you to accept an ad on your own site.
It's really hard to get enough notice for the news to talk
about you – even for a blogger to talk about you takes some
work.
That, by the way, doesn't mean that you shouldn't send out
press releases; it just means you shouldn't depend on your
website making it into any stories on the basis of them,
though it could happen.
Spam is how you lose your business; just don't do it.
Legitimate emailed advertisements entail purchasing the
rights to a mailing list or becoming an affiliate with a larger
site, something that will almost certainly cost you some
money. Advertising in emailed newsletters or in your own
store and town are the most cost effective and reliable of
these methods, but they won't reliably drive a large amount
of traffic to your site. And you need a lot of traffic; few page
views result in an actual purchase, depending on the
industry as little as one in a hundred.
So what do you do?
Leveraging Article Directories
One great way of driving all kinds of traffic, including traffic
you wouldn't expect, to your site is to write excellent articles
and post them to article directories, encouraging people to
download and use them for free.
Yes, for free. Article directories are huge repositories online
with thousands of articles on every conceivable niche market
and large market, and they'll accept articles from almost
anyone who wants to donate one. Register, set up the byline
you want to use and your URL, and your article goes up, free
to the world to download.
But why would you want to give them away for free?
Because with every download your URL and your name and
often a short bio as well, are required to be set up along
with the article in something called a "resource box." This
means that if a hundred webmasters download your article,
you have just gotten a hundred free links to your website,
many of them from sources you'd never have thought to ask
prior to this. It also means that your name has just received
the status of "recognized expert" to every person who
thereafter reads your article on the other website. You give
away free content, but you get real recognition and status in
return.
It's one of the best forms of free advertising you can find.
What If I Don't Write?
Here's the other secret: you don't have to be a talented
writer. You can hire a writer to create your articles for you,
either to your specifications exactly or with general
guidelines. You can even purchase articles from an article
broker like YourOwnArticles.com, getting content and/or
keyword rich articles that you can share with other
webmasters in exchange for a link to your site.
And another secret: if you include in the article title the
keyword you're trying to capture for your own search engine
optimization purposes, you've just made that keyword more
valuable to you. The search engine spiders seeing these link
backs will apply every one of these keyword links to your
website's ranking. And when people search for that specific
keyword, they'll be that much more likely to pull you up in
the top ten.
One more piece of advice: google yourself. If you see a lot
of people out there with your name, you might want to use
your middle name or even a nickname as your byline to
avoid confusion. You don't need someone else taking credit
for your gurudom.
