With this in mind I’m going to take a look at a couple of the different methods of getting free traffic to your site(s) and then I’m going to have a look at how to get paid for getting free traffic to your site(s) – yes, you can get money for doing it.

Lets start by having a look at three traditional methods of getting some traffic:

1. Articles
2. Solo ads
3. Traffic exchange

These three methods are the preferred methods of most webmasters as they encompass a wide target audience.

Articles.

All of us at some point or another write tutorials of one form or another (this for example) or perhaps we write a review of something. Even better, when you’re at university you write lots of reports as part of your course.

These documents can all be used to bring you some much loved traffic.

This is achieved by submitting your article to a site such as iSnare.Com or GoArticles.Com.

How does this work?

Quite simply and without any effort from you.

When you enter your article into these services you also have opportunity to enter a biography section. This section tells the reader a little about you and also allows you to list a url (or two).

The article sites then provide the articles in their database to other sites – your biography always go with them.

This means that suddenly you have a LOT more sites linking to your site and it also means that you have a lot more people (who perhaps wouldn’t normally find your site) visiting via your biography. You should however ensure that the subject of the article has some relevancy to your site (if you write about dogs and your site is about tanks most people who read the article are not going to be interested in your site).

Solo Ads.

A solo ad is an advertisement that is sent out via email by a list owner. The price of this service can vary radically and so can the quality.

Anyone offering a solo ad service will never EVER promise a response rate (unless it’s a paid to read service).

If you do decide to go down this route there are a few things you should remember/ask:

a. What is the demographic of the list (who are they? Male, 23 – 34, IT professionals, etc)
b. How big is the list
c. How old is the list
d. How responsive is the list (best and worst cases)
e. Will the owner do a 2 for 1 deal (pay for one mailing, deliver two)
f. Is there a way of the list owner splitting the delivery (thus allowing you to test your sales copy)

If you do go this route you should remember that you are effectively only picking up the customers/subscribers once – so make sure your copy is good.

You should also remember one golden rule – do not make the sale, get a subscriber. What a stupid thing to say – I’m trying to sell something not make friends! Yep, that’s right – but – it is widely acknowledged that it takes a user 7 views of the same advert in order to act upon it (this is why some marketers will send you the same thing rehashed repeatedly for a couple of weeks). So with this in mind if you send a mailing and don’t get subscribers you’re effectively blowing your money.

You should also be aware that the size of list has no direct correlation as to its quality or responsiveness.

Traffic Exchanges.

As the title suggests you’re swapping traffic, this usually means that you surf a selection of other members sites and in return you get your site added to the rotation so that some of them see your site.

The quality of traffic is sometimes quite poor from this source as a number of people are not really interested in seeing your site – they just want you to see theirs.

So where does the making money from traffic exchanges come in?

Well, simply put, there are a new type of traffic exchange services starting who offer both a free and paid membership, the free service allows you to surf and acquire credits which you can use to buy visitors and then there’s the paid member option (normally referred to as ‘pro membership’). With both the free and pro membership levels you still need to surf the site daily but there are a couple of things different:

a. Both membership types display a slide show of other sites for you to surf
b. Both membership types require no intervention (no clicking – just watching)
c. The pro membership pays you money!

Yep, as promised there it is – you can get paid to surf a small selection of sites a day with no action required on your part.

So how does that work and are we talking about pennies here?

Most important question first, no we are not talking about pennies (unless that’s all you’ve paid for). These sites normally pay you a percentage of your membership fee as your daily surfing fee, so my favourite site pays me 12% per day over 12 days (this means I make a profit of 44% every 12 days).

So in real terms, I can choose my investment level, so here’s what it looks like:

Pro membership $120 $6 $500 $1000
Percent per day 12% 12% 12% 12%
Cash per day $14.40 $.72 $60 $120
Membership term 12 days 12 days 12 days 12 days
Total Cash back $172.80 $8.64 $720 $1440

As I said the membership level is completely at your taste. But there’s more. You not only earn your own money and surfing credits but that of affiliates – so for example if you have a couple of affiliates then potentially you’re earning 10% or everything they pay in/surf and also 2.5% of whatever their affiliates do (so a two tier affiliate system).

The affiliate commissions vary but usually they are at least two tiers. The one I recommend is 12Daily, the url is http://www.12dailypro.com/?ref=62998 – complete with my affiliate ID (quid pro quo!).

Paul Foley is a well known webmaster whos expertise lies in Adsense sites – www.Cash-Sense.com/cashsense.html Pauls other interest is getting real rich, by sometime soon so he uses www.12dailypro.com/?ref=62998 – and they are slowly making him happy (very happy) www.MortgageHelp4u.com – for mortgage info and help. www.HelpmeBuilda.Com

—>Do Not Buy Traffic
This is one of the oldest scams around the internet. I’m not talking about PPC programs; that’s a whole other article. The ones I’m talking about are the ones that ‘guarantee you’ 10,000 visitors for $10.00 (just an example). Do you really think that’s possible? Not only do they try to sell you visits; they also try to say you’ll get such and such amount of sales. In plain words…BULL! Besides, there is NO company that can guarantee you any amount of sales. Sales depend on the demand of your product/service, price and of course your ad copy. Plain and simple…Buying traffic is a scam. Don’t do it.

—>Don’t Bother with Top Sites
These quickly become a big waste of your valuable time. (Remember, your time is valuable and time IS money.) Everyone else listed there with your site is doing the exact same thing you’re doing. Let me guess, every day you are clicking on your link and voting for yourself and/or you are sending out tons of emails (possibly spam) begging all your friends to vote for you. Am I right? Don’t waste your precious time doing this. Instead spend your time working on your ad copy. It’ll take you much further.

—>Submitting Your Site Myths
You don’t need to submit your site to search engines. Submitting your site to search engines does not increase your search engine rankings. The important search engines will index a properly built website.

—>Web Rings
Web Rings can be fun but, you very well could be sending your traffic AWAY from your site. You are giving your visitors the opportunity to click away to another site. You need to be concentrating keeping your visitors and selling your product or service. Besides that, a lot of people break the web rings. These rings are set up to be all about the same topics. You are giving your visitors direct links to your competitors.

—>Don’t Spam Your Website
Some webmasters out there have decided to spam their own websites. How do they do this you ask? One way they do this is to place a lot of unrelated keywords into their meta tags and keywords. Another way is to make ‘invisible text’ on their website by making the text so small that it actually looks like a dot or period. Don’t do this. This can easily get you banned from the search engines.

—>Do Not Participate in Link Farms
What exactly is a Link Farm? A link farm is list of links created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. For example: One page of links is generated and to be listed on this page it is a requirement to place this page on your website. Search engines see this as an illegal move and can have you punished and banned from them. Please don’t hesitate to investigate if you have a question about a particular program that you are involved with. It could save you tons later.

One thing that I frequently hear when referring to the above ‘programs’ is the following: “But, it’s free, it’s not going to hurt me.” First of all, these aren’t free. These are a waste of valuable time. As I mentioned Time IS Money and your time is precious. For every moment you are spending on these basically worthless ideas, you COULD be improving your traffic instead. Secondly, a few of the above mentioned are against search engine rules and could get you banned. That is a lot of hurting.

Starting to get depressed? Want to know what TO DO to increase your online traffic? No worries. (I wouldn’t let you hanging like that.) There are lots of great ways to increase your website traffic. Take a look at http://www.mommyshelperonline.com/increase-online-traffic.html to find out what you should be doing.

About the Author
Anita DeFrank a WAHM of two and co-owner of DirectSalesHelpers.com which was created specifically for those in Direct Sales. Do you find yourself asking how to make more sales? The above is only a small taste of the wealth of information available at http://www.directsaleshelpers.com. Stop on in if you’re serious about your direct sales company and want to know how you can make more sales.

Help People Every Chance You Get

Whenever someone posts a question to the forum, answer it. Challenge yourself to see how many people you can help in an hour or try and see if you can be the first person to answer.

Be honest and offer real advice. Don’t just post a quick line asking them to call you for help. People who use forums want answers – TODAY. They’re banking on having anywhere from 5 to 500 people on the forum ready to answer their question.

The better your answer, the more likely they’ll click over to your web site!

Answering questions will help you to build a reputation for yourself as the expert in your field. The more information you give away, the more you prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Don’t be afraid to give a lot of information away. You might feel that you risk losing work this way but, really, you risk losing work by failing to prove that you know your business.

Be Friendly Towards Everyone, Even if You Disagree With Them

Heated arguments are commonplace in forums – learn how to express your opinions without being rude or insulting.

When someone disagrees with you, present your views and then, as Dr Stephen Covey says, agree to disagree, agreeably. Agree that you feel differently about the subject and then agree not to argue about it any more.

Eventually, people will come to know you as “the nice person that knows a lot about …”. That sort of reputation can earn you lots of traffic as well as lots of sales!

Contribute to the Forum as Much as Possible

Whenever you come across something you think will be useful to other members of the forum, post it. Let everyone know how you found it, where it came from and write a short summary of what they’ll find if they follow the link or download the article.

This might sound like a lot of work but, in most cases, it’s really easy.

You establish yourself as the professional in your industry. This really helps people feel confident about doing business with you. Confidence equals clicks and clicks equals Sales!

Use a Compelling Signature

A signature is the space at the end of every post where you can provide your personal information like a name, email address and web site address. You usually just have to configure it once and then it will automatically be added to every post you make.

People often use signatures to “advertise” themselves. The key here is to make it short and compelling.

For example, “We create web sites” is short, but not compelling. You probably won’t get any clicks with such a boring signature.

Offer a solution to a problem or pique their curiosity with a question-based link. Make people curious or excited about what they’ll find if they click on your link.

Here are 2 good examples:

“Are you losing sales because of these 10 critical web site mistakes?”

“Discover the secrets of online marketing with my free course”

As long as what you’re offering is relevant to the forum or discussion, you’ll find a lot of people clicking through to find out more.

Link Back to Your Own Web Site

Whenever you post something, try and find a helpful way to link back to your web site. For example, if someone asks a question on how to finance their start-up company, give them a tip or two, and then link to an article on your web site for more information.

This is called in-context linking and is, by far, the best way to build your web site’s traffic and search engine ranking.

This works because search engines like Google decide how important your web site is by how many different web sites link to it! Essentially, by being active on forums, you’re voting for your own web site in a very effective & ethical way. Bonus

By following these simple steps, you’ll soon find hordes of people clicking through to your site to learn more about what you do and how you can help them.

Norio De Sousa runs a web site, http://www.free-websites-from-scratch.com, where you can find more information on building free web sites, search engine optimization & more.

It is estimated that up to 60% of new traffic to your Web site will come from search engines. This means that unless you are already so well known that people will be using your name to search for your site, you need a search engine strategy. Thousands of new Web sites are created daily, so the axiom “Build it, and they will come” does not apply.

Effective Web site promotion requires a serious and continuing investment of time and resources, whether you do it yourself, or hire a professional. It is not a one-shot deal, but an ongoing process, meaning you should evaluate the return on your investment. You can collect a vast amount of crucial information about your traffic, and make strategic business development decisions, in ways that are unprecedented in the real world.

Setting your goals

We’ve all met the person who boasts of “thousands of hits a day” on his Web site, and maybe we felt a little envious. But let’s debunk the hype . . . .

It’s important to distinguish between individual visitors, and “hits”. The latter refers to every piece of your site that is downloaded, and this includes all graphics files separately. Thus, one visitor viewing your home page, which contains text and four images, will generate five “hits”. If that visitor explores your site further, he or she will generate more hits, but it’s still the same user.

You want to ask yourself whether you want every visitor that you can get – which could be thousands of indiscriminate, unqualified people, or whether you would prefer 20 highly qualified decision makers per day, looking for exactly what you provide?

There are no right or wrong answers, but you should have goals for the volume and quality of traffic that you would like, so you can measure results (more on this later!)

Designing keywords

The next step is to identify some keywords and key phrases that will differentiate you. Imagine if we all used “professional speaker” as our main key phrase. How many of us would show up on top of the search engines?

Furthermore, there are too many results for the typical search. So, visitors will be combining “professional speaker” with something that narrows down what they are looking for – perhaps “customer service” and “banking”, or maybe a location, such as “teambuilding” and “Chicago”. You will discover the keywords that work best for you when you run a log analysis – for now, make your best guess.

Think about the topics you offer, which industries you specialize in, which locations you serve, and anything else that sets you apart. Make sure that your keywords are in the language that your clients use, and not industry jargon – I have never seen the phrase “keynote speaker” in actual searches.

Then, build these into a set of keywords and phrases. Because of the frequency of most single words, phrases often work better in narrowing a search. Include your name, common misspellings of your name, and any other key element of your site. Use both singular and plural forms, and mix capital with lower case letters, except for proper names (some search engines are case sensitive and will exclude lower case searches for words that you have capitalized).

As an example, here are the key words and phrases for my site:

Philippa Gamse, Phillipa, Games, CyberSpeaker, internet speaker, internet seminars, Internet marketing programs, internet marketing speakers, search engines, online marketing strategies, Web site promotion, traffic logs, internet consultant

Not an exhaustive list, but a good start

When you have the keywords and phrases, use those to build:

1. a page title containing your most significant keywords. It doesn’t matter if the title doesn’t read well – it’s the piece that appears in the colored bar of the browser at the top, and very few people see it. Contrary to popular belief, titles are for search engines, not people!

2. a brief “knock their sox off” description. This will be displayed in the search engine results, and will attract visitors to come to you. Most search engines display 2 lines or less, so wording such as

“Welcome to My Company – a full service provider of . . .” is probably most of what you’ll get – and you haven’t said anything yet! So keep it pithy, and include the keywords.

Now – do this for every significant page of your site!

Your site is (or should be) more than your home page. The spider search engines that index every word on a page allow you to submit multiple pages. So do it! This increases by many times your exposure, and the angles that you can use to promote yourself.

For example, I have an article on my site about choosing an Internet Service Provider (if you want to read it, check out my list of articles). Many people searching for this topic find this piece as their entry point to my site. If they want to find out more about me, they can follow the navigation aids back to get more information.

Reviewing and updating your pages

When you have your keywords, key phrases, titles and descriptions ready, it’s time to insert them into every significant page of your site. You may need help from your Web designer to do this.

First, you need to incorporate these elements into the header record for each page – in special places called “meta tags”. These tags, which aren’t visible to visitors, are used heavily by several of the major search engines.

As an example, the header record for my home page looks like this:

Also, make sure that the text of each page includes the main keywords again – but don’t spam – that is, repeat them incessantly. At best, the search engines will ignore more than about 7 occurrences of each word, at worst they may even exclude your site.

While you are reviewing your Web site pages, look for any hidden roadblocks for the search engines that your Web designer may have unwittingly introduced. These can include:

* Frames: the separation of the screen into different sections. Several search engines will not go inside these.

* Java: a programming language used to create “cool” animation effects, and other applications on your site – again, the search engines will not work with Java script.

* Images: pages that contain only graphics with no text, (even if words are part of the graphic) will be passed over by the search engines unless you include alternative text tags for the images.

Note: there are big differences between the various search engines as to what and how they will index. My suggestions here will help you well through the basics, but for much more detailed information, check out “The Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines”.

Submitting to the search engines

Now it’s time to submit to the search engines.

By the way, they all (currently) accept your listing free of charge – they raise revenue from the advertising banners at the top of their pages.

You may have already received some unsolicited e-mail (not from me!) offering to submit your site to 500+ search engines for a seemingly very low price. My advice would be to avoid these services, for several reasons:

1. Most of the 500 search engines will be obscure (such as “Fred’s Cool Links”), with few people ever visiting.

2. These services will submit your site to all the engines on their lists indiscriminately, whether or not it is applicable. Worse, some of them may be adult-oriented.

3. The services use software to submit your site automatically, which means that they do not take the time to ensure that you appear in the optimum category within each directory. Also, some of the search engines are now rejecting automated submissions.

If you decide to do your own submissions, these are the ones that I recommend using:

Alta Vista; AOL Netfind; Excite; Google; Hotbot; Infoseek; Lycos; Microsoft Network; Northern Light; Webcrawler;

Be aware that the search engines take vastly differing amounts of time to list you. Alta Vista and Infoseek are usually very fast, while Excite and Lycos can be delayed by several weeks.

You should also get yourself listed in the major directories – these are reviewed by human editors, so make sure that your site is ready for close scrutiny! These include:

Looksmart; Snap; Yahoo!

If, and only if, you are selling product directly from your Web site via a secure server, you can apply for Yahoo!’s Business Express Service. This costs a one-time fee of $199, but seems to virtually guarantee you a listing – and Yahoo! is still by far the highest trafficked directory.

And, if you are willing to pay per click (visitor to your Web site), check out Goto. This search engine is arranged on an auction system – you bid per keyword or phrase (bids start at $0.01), and the highest bidder’s site is displayed first. Your account is debited by the amount of your bid when someone clicks on your listing. Again, this site is controlled by human editors, so the results are pretty clean.

Traffic analysis – evaluating results

Once your site is promoted and starts appearing in the search engines, you can evaluate your traffic. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) should provide your site’s usage logs, which give you incredibly useful information. (And if they don’t, take your business elsewhere!)

You will need a good analysis tool to break down this data (some ISP’s and / or professional Web site marketers provide this service as well). I currently use Hitbox, which is excellent.

The report will show you how many individual visitors came to your site, as well as the hit count. You can see which pages of the site are the most popular, and which pages draw little traffic. Maybe this is because you haven’t made them enticing enough in your links.

Armed with this analysis, you can intelligently review your site structure and content. For the purposes of this discussion on search engine promotion, look at the sections on search engines and keywords (you can find these by using the navigation links in the left-hand frame of the report):

“Top Referring Sites” “Top Referring URL’s” “Top Search Engines” “Top Search Phrases” “Top Search Keywords”

These charts and tables show you which search engines (or other Web sites that link to you) are driving the most traffic to your site, and what keywords and phrases people are using to find you, broken down both by individual search engine and overall. Here’s where you start getting some great feedback. You may have been fairly sure that you knew the keywords that your markets would use to find your site, but you could be wrong! With this information, you can adjust the titles, keywords and descriptions in your pages, and then resubmit the site. This ongoing process helps to improve your position in the search engines where you may not be so well placed.

This also provides wonderful market research on your audience. Rita Risser’s company, Fair Measures, provides legal training for managers in the area of employment law. Her Web site is an extensive information resource, attracting over 6,000 visitors per month.

Rita told me that her logs showed that many visitors were searching for a specific topic that was a total surprise to her. But there was such demand for this subject that she decided to write a book on it.

If you view the Webtrends report while online, you can click on the most popular search strings and perform that actual search. This will show you how your site appears, and also what other pages are being returned. So if your competition is ahead of you, it may be possible to look at their promotional techniques and work out how they do it!

Conclusion

Take your Web marketing seriously. The Web affords you the opportunity to track the results of your marketing investment in ways that you never could with traditional advertising. You can learn something about literally every visitor to your site.

Get serious about your Web site marketing; set your goals, invest in an ongoing strategy, and then become even more successful!

Copyright, Philippa Gamse, 2000

It would seem from all the comments and attention I have received so far, that I have struck on a common complaint from website owners. So much so, that I have decided to write Part 3, which wasn’t originally intended.

Yes, all website owners are looking for that magic formula which will give them added traffic to their sites.

You have created a brilliant site, full of wonderful information. You know people will just love it. However, there is one major problem. Nobody knows that it exists. Sound familiar? You are Michelangelo and you are confined to the Sistine Chapel where there is not a web-cam in sight for you to show your work to the world.

Enough joking around! This is meant to be serious.

You have already submitted to all the free search engines and directories. You wait. Weeks pass and your site is still not listed. You need traffic. You’re desperate for traffic! So you do what thousands of others do, you submit to the temptation of all the clever marketeers who are out there waiting for people just like you (and me).

“Welcome to my parlor said the spider to the fly…” (er, sorry to inform you but you are the six-legged one here)

Have you noticed a few things about the “professors” of website traffic techniques? They all huddle together. They all refer to one another. They are all “cyber-friends.” And, why shouldn’t they be?

They are using one of the best marketing techniques since the day dot! Word of mouth, or in this case, word of click. They are in the business of referral. What better way to generate leads? It’s a nice cosy little arrangement.

Marketer A promotes marketer B who promotes C who promotes D who promotes A. Hey presto! What do we have? We have a marketing web-ring of referring “experts” and “gurus.” If you stumble into this web-ring you might just find yourself wanting to buy all those seemingly fabulous and heavily cross-referred products they offer. A, B, C and D all win. But what about you? I’m reckoning that four “information” products at an average price of US$39.95 each will set you back a cool US$159.80. Then of course, you will be bombarded with all manner of emails encouraging you to buy the latest “cutting edge” techniques as word goes out (via email) that you are hungry for information. Get yourself ready for a SPAM attack!

Here’s a hint – when you get those ezines full of junk and forty lines of boring advertising links, simply go to your email settings and do the following. Highlight the line containing the offending email, go to the toolbar at the top of your screen, open up “Message” then come down and highlight “Block Sender.”

This will divert the unwanted junk email to your “Deleted Items” list. When the list fills up you can then simply highlight the very top and bottom emails and everything in between by holding down the “Shift” key. Once they are all selected you can send them all to the rubbish tip by clicking “Delete”.

Of course, you can always ask for the SPAM not to be sent but all that tends to do is alert the sender to the fact that you are a real live person on the other end. This can then become a signal for them to up the ante on you even more. Sometimes it is best just not to acknowledge certain emails. This is particularly true for all those annoying pornography sites that seem to specialize in this type of acknowledgement game. It’s your choice.

So, you now have four or more “special reports” which you hope will reveal all the secrets of increasing web-traffic. Here’s a sample:

A – “How I Generated 1000’s of Hits Per Day Using This Little Known Trick.”

B – “The Amazing Web Traffic Secrets I Literally Stumbled Across While Playing Golf.”

C – “The Guaranteed no-BS Way to Getting 100,000 Hits in Just Three Months.”

D – “How I, Homer Zantuck, a Dumb High School Drop-out Fooled the Search Engines.”

(Side note: Those titles are fictitious but if any budding new “gurus” would like to use them – please, be my guest!)

Sure, they might all contain a little snippet of information that you might find useful. But is the $29.95 or $39.97 or $47.77 price tag worth it? My experience says no. What you usually get are a few sheets of paper, often only one or two surrounded by hype and testimonials about what a marvel the author is. That is the “report.”

You should be wary of testimonials. All websites use them, mine included. However, if you are basing all your hopes on what “Fred Jones from Albuquerque” or “Doreen P of East Norway” allegedly said then you should think again. Many testimonials are fictitious. The only truly credible testimonials are those which carry a “live” email or website address and even then such a person may be an “affiliate” (see Part 2). So, perform your own due diligence before you buy. If you do you will certainly save money.

I have a bit more to say yet on other web traffic promises and scams. However, if I include them here it will make this article unreasonably long. Therefore, stay tuned for Part 4 where I will reveal my experiences with those schemes which promise a deluge of traffic from banner advertising on “start up pages.” They are a real doozy, so make sure you have a read.

Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this topic are covered by copyright. However, all three parts may be freely used providing there are no changes whatsoever to the content and the following resource box remains intact.

PS: If you think this information might help a friend from falling prey to these dubious practices you can send them a copy of this article (or any related parts) or direct them to the website URL above. Let’s get the word out and put a stop to this.

About the author: Gary Simpson is the author of eight books covering a diverse range of subjects such as self esteem, affirmations, self defense, finance and much more. His articles appear all over the web. Gary’s email address is budo@iinet.net.au. Click here to go to his Motivation & Self Esteem for Success website where you can receive his “Zenspirational Thoughts” plus an immediate FREE copy of his highly acclaimed, life-changing e-book “The Power of Choice.”