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Getting Free Traffic to Your
Domain
Make Your Marketing Budget Stretch
Paul Smithson - 28th October 2008
You’ve just
launched your brand new web site using XSitePro,
Dreamweaver or other favorite web building tool, and
published it to the Internet. The next thing you want is
traffic - and preferably lots of it.
You’ve thought about using pay per click
ads to get the ball rolling, but having to pay for traffic
means your bank account takes a hit and your profits are
decreased every time a visitor clicks through to your
domain. How about if you could attract people to your
site by using traffic generating techniques that don’t cost a
bean!
Free traffic is sometimes viewed as being
less effective because you don’t have the ability to fine-tune
it like you can with an AdWords ad, honing in on specific
keywords and phrases that are only shown to an audience that
would care, but it is an avenue you should seriously consider,
whether it is for your primary method of generating traffic or
in addition to various other methods.
While the free traffic options may not let
you pick and choose the keywords in the same way as Adwords
would, you can still create content built around specific
keywords and phrases so that the pages automatically get
indexed for your specific target audience.
Take a Squidoo lens, for example.
Squidoo allows you to have multiple free accounts (so that your
expertise isn’t diluted) and an unlimited number of free lenses
(pages) per account. Take advantage of this opportunity and
point every lens toward your own website and you have a frenzy
of feeders that funnel visitors from Squidoo to your domain
through text links and banner ads!
Article marketing allows you to do the same
thing. Write an article based on keywords and phrases you
want your website to be found for and then submit it to the
various high-ranking article directories for
inclusion.
A press release can achieve similar
results. While many online press release sites charge a
nominal fee for inclusion, some have free options - and they
create RSS feeds so that interested publishers can find the
content that is relevant to their niche.
Forum posting can also act as a conduit
between your target audience and your domain. Join the
forums for your topic and include a link to your website in
your signature file. Don’t give your web site blatant plugs in
any posts you make as this is usually frowned upon (unless it
is relevant to a particular thread on the messageboard), but
the inclusion of your web site url in your signature (i.e. The
bit that appears at the bottom of each of your posts) is
usually fine.
A spin-off benefit of the forums is that as
you participate in group discussions not only will your traffic
will steadily increase, but your reputation as an authority
figure to your target audience will be given a massive boost
too. Don’t forget to add a link to your web site into
your forum profile, too! Profiles are the perfect tool to
help channel people to your
domain.
The above are just a handful of ways that
you can generate a stream of free traffic to your web site.
Unlike paid for advertising, the response will not usually be
immediate, but over time, and with sufficient effort, you will
generate a constant flow of traffic to your site and it won’t
cost you a single cent.
About Paul Smithson -
Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving
force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development
tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct
Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul
has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is
now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business
strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software
development, and maximizing the potential of on-line
businesses.
For more information about
this, and many other Internet Marketing-related
topics, visit Paul Smithson's site, www.xsitepro.com. |
Source:
http://www.xsitepro.com/getting-free-traffic-to-your-domain.html
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