Fastest Top Five FREE Ways to Gain New Traffic

Submit your content to social network sites

I've touched upon this concept several times in previous blogs (How to get indexed by Google in ONE hour). This is one of my favorite ways to gain new traffic. Popular content will gain hundreds to thousands of fresh visitors in a short period of time. These are really tough people to convert to regular traffic. However, don't let this discourage you, if you constantly provide good material, you will win them over!

My favorite sites for sharing to are Digg and Reddit. I suggest adding a "Share This" or "Bookmark" content button to all of your content to allow your visitors to vote for your content. Later on, when your site becomes more popular, your visitors will begin sharing your content. This will take some time and patience, but the wait will be well rewarded.

Share your content with article directories

There are hundreds of websites that exist solely for the purpose of sharing other people's content with their viewers. A lot of these sites already have a good following. This is a great way to get exposed as a new author and gain your own following.

I found an excellent site here:

http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php

This site lists the top 50 article directories. It's extremely useful because it provides the websites Alexa Ranking as well as their Google Pagerank. Each time you submit content to these sites, it's important to include links back to your site. I would suggest two types of links. One back to your main website, be sure to include this appropriately in the content. The second kind of link I would include is a relevant link to "deep content". For example, if you are writing a new article that is related to another article, be sure you state this with a link to that article.

Next time the search engines crawl the article database, and this will happen quite frequently for the popular ones, the search engine will index your links. This will help significantly increase your pagerank on these pages!

Create a Twitter following

Twitter definitely seems to be the next big thing. Every one under the sun seems to have a Twitter following, including the President of the United States! This is a great place to make an RSS like feed of your latest content.

It's important to try to create a following using popular, relevant keywords to your content. This will increase your chances of having a successful following.

Submit to Blog Carnivals

Blog Carnivals are similar to article directories. People create a carnival and then accept articles for their carnival. At a specified interval or when they have reached enough submissions, the carnival is created.

This is an excellent opportunity to expose your content in a new capacity. A great site exists here:

http://blogcarnival.com/bc/

This website let's you search for relevant blog carnivals and you can submit the same article to multiple carnivals easily. Depending on the type of content you are working with there might be carnivals each week, so submit as often as you can. These are great one-way links to your content, just like article directories.

The more links to your website and content you have, the more people will find you and the higher search engines will rank your content!

Comment on other relevant blogs or forums

This one needs special care, if you do not do this properly it can easily be interpreted as SPAM. If you plan to comment on blogs or forums, ensure your comments are useful. A good example of this is provide an example on your site that confirms or refutes the topic in discussion.

If you are posting on forums, if you find a topic where someone is asking for help and your website has something that will aide them, point them directly to that content.

Be careful you are not lazy and don't just post simple things like, "Great article, check out my web site here <link here>". This will quickly get your comments flagged as SPAM.

I've used all of these techniques on many different websites that I run. Each site I have achieved excellent results with.

Obviously some content works better than others. Don't expect a result to quickly, this is almost like a diet, slow and steady wins the race. Be patient, create good content; share it, when people start liking it you will start seeing excellent traffic increase.

Published on May 28, 2009

Tags: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) | google | twitter | reddit