As an online marketer or someone who has recently started an online marketing venture, you know the importance of driving traffic to your website. Without visitors, you cannot survive in the market, and your business will most likely fail.
Site traffic increases your exposure as well as the potential for backlinks from interested visitors. Your website may even appear in the first or second page during searches. You will also benefit from an increase in customers and profit.
Do you know how to get free traffic for your website? Here are a few steps you can take to get traffic to your website without spending a dime.
Social media sites serve marketers well by funneling people through to the original site. The most effective social media contender is Facebook. Anything you post on Facebook is visible to a high number of people, who can make it go viral if it is worthy enough. You begin a Facebook presence by attracting a small number of friends or fans to whom your posts are visible.
Friends can show a preference toward your links or repost them on their walls, all with the click of a button. In this case, it shows up on your friends’ pages where all their friends can see it. This online word of mouth is a very powerful marketing tool. Every time you post you have the potential of reaching out to hundreds or thousands of people.
Similar to Facebook, Twitter is also a very popular social media tool. Twitter is used by many businesses to stay connected with their customer base. You, too, can take advantage of this social media tool by sharing thoughts and pertinent links. Twitter is a great place to introduce your product or service to the world.
Social bookmarking, while less popular, is still an effective means of increasing your traffic. Most sites will allow you to post links and tag them with relevant keywords. Users searching for a topic will enter a keyword and be shown your site, as well as all the other related sites. There are some bookmarking sites that work in a manner similar to the main social media sites in that they enable people to follow others. When you follow a poster, you can be alerted when that person posts links that may interest you.
Article directories are a way of getting your name and link in the public eye. You are able to post your site link in an author box after each article, which is a good way to get noticed. When people find your content useful, they tend to refer your work or your website to others. As an added bonus, many article sites pay for articles or share ad revenue with writers.
Discussion boards and forums within your niche are powerful ways of generating highly interested and relevant traffic to your site. Most forums are very anti-spam, and therefore require membership applications, acceptance, and a probationary period. After you have become an active member in good standing, you are able to leave back links to your site.
Blog commenting also gets your name out there to interested parties. Similar to discussion boards, you can link your name and comment to your website. Blogs are very popular sources of information. If they find your comment useful, they not only read it, but also click through your link and visit your site.
Using social sites and being an active contributor to many online arenas, will increase your personal traffic. Free traffic will require effort and creativity, but anything worth having is worth the hard work. The time to profit in online marketing is now, but you need the traffic to get there. Go after the traffic today.
