Getting Traffic

You want people to come to your site, but how do you get them to come? Starting with little money means either getting free help, or doing it yourself.

Hopefully you are excited about your new site and want to let everyone know. Just as with everything else, you do this by talking about it. Online, "talking about it" means writing - articles, guest posts on other blogs, forum entries, social media such as facebook, twitter, myspace. If you think about it in this way, all of the writing and posting that you do doesn't feel like work, it feels like fun!

However, it certainly can be time consuming. So if you want to spend a little money, there are products that can help you automate some of the processes. Or also for a little bit of money, though it can add up, you can outsource the work. You just have to decide what your time is worth.

Here is a list of ways to do free promotion online:
1. Write articles and submit them to the article directories. You can even submit them to publications that pay, both online and offline. Just because you are doing this for free promotion doesn't mean you can't try and get paid! (To automate, you can try SENuke software which saves an incredible amount of time in doing the submission process and also saves time in researching the directories and various sites.)
2. Forum posting - google: ""your topic" forums"
3. Writing on other blogs - again, sometimes you can get paid to do this. Google to find other blogs
4. Press releases
5. Email to your own contact list
6. Create an ezine which is a digital newsletter and send it to your contact list
An advantage of having an ezine is that you can possibly sell advertising, depending on how large your list is. And of course, you can also guest write for other people's ezines. Google for "your topic" ezines. Also go to Directory of Ezines to get ideas of how to maximize this, and get other useful information.
7. Social media - facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter. I find that Twitter can be very time consuming. If you want to save that time, there are a couple of products that can help automate it. One is Tweetomatic. The best part is that the task of finding and keeping track of followers is made easy and your tweets can be programmed for a certain time while it runs in the background. Also for twitter, read Joel Comm's book Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time.

Future posts will have more details on these methods of getting traffic - each one could take a book!