Low Cost Traffic Generation For Your Website
Before you even think of getting any income from your website, or the products you market there, you'll need to create a flow of traffic to that site – or to your product offer. Certainly without visitors you stand little chance of making any money from your online business.
But how do you create that flow of traffic? Where do you find it? And what will it cost you to get it?
I'll show you 7 tips, or techniques, for attracting the traffic you need, and where to use those techniques, in a moment.
Before I do that though, let me ease your mind a bit about the cost.
Understand that in order to start an online business, and grow it toward success, you must be ready to invest in that business. Not as much monetarily as the offline (brick and mortar) entrepreneur invests, and you can bootstrap the cost by investing your personal time, but you will spend some amount of money to get your business off the ground.
The main intent of this article is to show you methods for getting your traffic at low, or no, cost to start your business growing. You'll want to use paid advertising eventually. But you can put that off until your business income grows to a level that supplies enough money to pay your add costs from that income.
There are a lot of ways to create a low cost traffic stream. I only talk about 5 here because, well, there are a lot of different techniques, and explaining just one in detail requires enough information to write a whole book. In this short article I want to give you enough of that information to get you started attracting low cost traffic to your offer. Once you learn the basics you can study each technique in more detail – and become good at using it.
Let me give you a word of warning before we start. You can drown in information overload if you try to use all of these techniques all at once. I advise that you choose one method that you feel you'll be comfortable with, and put just that one to work for you. Work with that method, study more about it (there's plenty of information available on the internet), and learn it so you can work it near automatically.
Then choose another technique, and learn it.
Over time you'll have a whole arsenal of traffic magnet weapons that pull hoards of visitors to your offers.
Lets get started shall we?
Write and Submit Articles
The easiest way to start generating low cost traffic is to write articles about your niche subject (keywords), and publish those articles on article submission sites. Or publish them on a blog site of your own.
A word of caution here: Article submission sites won't bring you high quality traffic because those sites cover a wide range of niches. Much of the traffic you get from them consists of the curious (though little interested) tire kickers that most likely won't buy.
There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias that accept articles for publication. When you publish on these article submission sites always include a bio about yourself that includes where your readers can find more information about you and your product. This small blurb (bio) goes in a author resource box at the end of the article space.
Your only cost when writing articles yourself is time investment. If you don't want to write your own articles go to a service website such as http://fiverr.com. You'll find authors there who sell articles for $5 each. Once you hire an author, and pay for the article it belongs to you. You have the right to publish that wherever you want.
I suggest you only publish each article in one place. Google punishes websites for duplicate content, and you do want to stay in Google's good graces because that's where you'll get a lot of your visitors from.
The best way to publish on a blog is to host it yourself. There are different applications out there you can use for this. The most popular, and the one I use, is WordPress. It's a very versatile software you get from http://wordpress.org, and doesn't take a long time to learn.
If you don't want to host your blog you can always build a blog site that's hosted at http://wordpress.com. Another place you can go to have your blog hosted is http://blogger.com. At either site you open an account, and they give you a personal area to upload your blog posts to.
When you write an article keep in mind that it must entertain and inform. If you don't give your reader something to think about, a new idea, something that jolts the paradigm – information that contains high value knowledge for them – they'll not buy from you, and they won't come back to read your stuff for more information.
And you want them coming back. Return customers are way more profitable than new customers.
Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is a powerful way to drive low cost traffic to your website – if you do it the right way.
Do a search for blogs that relate to your niche.
Find a few high quality posts on that blog.
Write very valuable comments to each post that you found.
Make sure you include your website address with your comment.
The important thing is to make sure your comment gives value, and useful information to those who read the posts. If you give them interesting information that they can use to help themselves in some way, they'll visit your website to learn more from you.
Also, if your comment is spammy, and gives the reader no, or little value, the blog owner will delete it.
Most reputable bloggers set their sites up so that all comments must be approved before publishing. They monitor their sites for low quality comments, and comments that are merely duplicated information (just a copy of content already published elsewhere on the internet). They send every one of those comments straight to their trash or spam folders.
They DO NOT approve content that doesn't help improve the quality of their blog sites.
Guest Blog Articles
Writing guest articles for blogs is a little different than commenting to posts.
You contact the blog owner, and first find out if he accepts guest articles. Not all do that.
If guest submissions are accepted by the blog you're interested in writing for you'll compose your article, and send it to the blog owner.
The owner reviews your article with the following questions in mind:
Does it fit the theme of the blog in question?
Does the article make sense?
Is the article interesting?
Will the blogger's readers enjoy the article, and find it useful?
The blogger will then either reject the article (and MAYBE give you a chance to re-write it), or accept, and publish it.
Most blog owners don't mind including your author information with articles that they accept, and may in turn ask to write an article for your blog – if you have one.
Join Online Forums
This low cost traffic gathering technique is similar to blog posting, and commenting.
You share your knowledge, and expertise, with online forums in your business niche. You present your information in the form of forum posts. The content you create varies in length, and again must be informative, and hold value for the reader.
Rather than include your author bio on forums you create what we call a signature, or sig file. You set your signature up in your profile settings so it appears at the end of everything you publish on the forum.
The signature normally contains a link back to a product or product review on your website where the reader gets even more information from what you publish there – and a chance to buy from you.
And you want to present your signature in a way that if intrigues your reader enough for him to click on your sig file.
Most forums won't let you create your signature until you've published a minimum number of times in either comments, or whole thread creation, and proven that you can provide positive content.
HINT: Don't just read the original post, and then jump to the bottom of the thread to give them your 2 cents worth. Be sure to read every comment/post in the entire thread, think about what others have provided, and then give your thoughtful, unique addition.
Too many people jump on forum threads, and post junk that either don't make sense, or merely repeat information that someone posted earlier in the thread.
Write a Newsletter
This sounds like hard work because of all the articles you'll write to build a newsletter, but that doesn't have to be the case. You have access to many writers, and author sites that provide free articles as long as you include their author bio (name and website address) after each of the articles they give you for your newsletter.
As your newsletter grows in readership, your opt-in list grows, and you have the opportunity to send regular emails to that list to promote products on your site.
JV Partnerships
JV Partnerships is a technique that you most often use in the form of an email broadcast.
You find another marketer in your niche, and get him to mail to his list. You provide your email marketing message to the other marketer along with the website address of your sales page, or your squeeze page. That marketer sends your email message out to his list, and you then grow your own list when those people opt in to your offer.
The agreement between you and the other marketer stipulates what form of compensation that marketer receives for sending your message to his list. He might want a percentage of the profits returned from the mailing. He might want you to send a message about his product to your list. Or he might charge an advertising fee to mail his list on your behalf.
The important thing to keep in mind when you form JV Partnerships is that the result should always be profitable for both sides.
Nurture Back Links
When another website posts a link to content on your site that link is known as a back link.
And it means free traffic coming your way if the other site is in your same niche.
This type of link holds variable value to you depending on the importance of that other site as seen by the search engines.
Any back link coming to you from an authority site adds very high value to your site because search engines rate authority sites as high in value. An authority site is one that has high value, and unique, content. It's also a site where fresh content is added on a regular schedule.
Although you want to attract authority sites to sharing your site with others, any site in your niche – as long as it's in good standing with the search engines – lends its ranking to you. If a site is not well viewed by the search engines it tends to detract from your site's value when it has a link back to you.
So you want to watch what sites do provide you with back links – when you find a low rated site linking to you it's wise to request they remove the link. If they refuse you can go to Google Webmaster Tools, and deny that site.
And you want to keep your site in good standing with the search engines so high value sites want to link to you.
Get access to a high converting traffic funnel. Click on my affiliate link:
