Give Your Site A Shot In The Arm

If you want to grow your business, you’ll need to invest in some website promotion. This article outlines some free ways to drive traffic to your site.

These days, you can’t afford to be without a website. Every reputable business has one. However, when you’re in the startup phase, you may not have a huge budget for promotion. How can you increase site traffic without breaking the bank? This advice comes straight from the superaffiliates – the handful of people who are making megabucks from the internet. 

The first step you should take is to write some free articles for article directories. These directories provide a one-stop shop for content-hungry web producers and your article could easily be picked up. Most of these sites (ezinearticles.com is one example) allow you to include a resource box at the end. This is marketing gold, because you can include a description and link to your business, with an elevator pitch and call to action. People will click on the link and traffic to your site will increase. As an added bonus, your name (and therefore your site) will appear on Google.

A twist on this strategy is to write consumer reviews for any of the popular sites, such as Epinions and others. These sites are seen by thousands every day and although you can’t advertise directly, you can link to your home page in your profile. Many of the consumer review sites feed information to several other sites as well, so you can generate quite a lot of free publicity.

 Use Overture and Wordtracker to do some research and make sure you’ve got the best keywords for the business you’re trying to grow. This will make it easier for search engines to find your site. These keywords can also be seeded through your free articles and used in your resource box. Make sure that your site includes a search box, so people can find what they’re looking for easily, as well as a sitemap and a way for people to contact you.

Get a blog and an RSS feed and submit these to blog directories. There are hundreds of directories out there, but Pingoat provides a good starting point both for sending alerts about new site content (pinging) and finding a list of relevant blog directories. Search engines love blogs and posting regularly will raise your profile even further. Sign up for an Adsense account and you can make additional money from your site and blog through the increased traffic you’re going to get.

Finally, give people a reason to keep coming back to your site. How do you do this? By giving away something for free. It could be tips or advice, for example. Collect people’s email addresses by having a free email newsletter and allowing them to opt in to site updates. That will give you another chance to sell them something.

Do all this and your site traffic will skyrocket - guaranteed.