work at home
"Four Unique Ways to Get Website Traffic"
By Jim Daniels -
Work at home
site.com
Website traffic. It is the cornerstone of any successful
business on the web. Sure, you need a professional website
and a proven revenue model, but once you have those in
place, becoming profitable is merely a numbers game...
Bring in lots of targeted traffic and you bring in lots of
dollars.
But as any webmaster can tell you, getting website traffic
can be tough. After all, there are millions of websites on
the web. Getting customers to yours can be quite a task.
Sure, you can and should utilize all the proven traffic
generators such as search engine promotion, email newsletter
advertising and the like. But most webmasters with limited
budgets usually end up coming to one conclusion.... they may
have to think a bit "out of the box" if they want to grow
serious traffic.
So today I'd like to share four unique ways to generate
traffic to your website. I'm quite sure most web business
owners have never even considered these possibilities, let
alone tried them.
1. Use "Expert Sites" to Promote Yourself... and Your
Business
When you participate in "expert sites", you develop a
reputation for being very knowledgeable about your chosen
subject, and your answers are permanently posted where they
can be seen by potential customers for years to come.
Furthermore, if you consistently provide quality answers,
visitors will notice and start directing others' questions
specifically to you as their expert of choice.
By using proper etiquette in your responses to questions,
you can offer answers that include appropriate references to
your site, and you can provide your URL in your signature.
A side-benefit of this method of creating traffic is that
you get a chance to "pre-sell" your product or service
through your answers to questions. It's better than just
providing a blind link as they'll already have some
impression of you and your site before they actually visit
it. And some level of trust and credibility will have
already been established.
Expert sites cover just about any topic imaginable -- here
are a few worth considering:
Yahoo Experts: http://experts.yahoo.com
AskMe: http://www.askme.com
ABuzz - New York Times: http://www.abuzz.com
AllExperts: http://www.allexperts.com
AskJeeves - Ask Other People: http://www.ask.com
2. Exploit Residual Traffic from Expired Domains
When domain registration fees come due, but aren't paid, the
domain returns to the pool of available names. And at that
point, anyone can register the name.
Very often, these "expired" domains were once thriving
websites that were linked to from other websites, were
listed in search engines, were bookmarked by previous users,
etc. And even though the name is no longer used, those links
and bookmarks probably still exist.
You can take advantage of this residual traffic by
registering these domains again and redirecting these
visitors to your "real" website.
There are plenty of sites with information about expired
domains, like Whois.net or ValueNIC.com. Once you have a
list of available names, you can determine how many inbound
links each name has by using a link popularity lookup, such
as the one at:
http://www.marketposition.com/linkpopularity.htm
The general rule of thumb for estimating the traffic these
domains will receive is to take the total number of inbound
links, divide it by 20, and that's how many unique visitors
you should expect per day. In other words, if you register
10 expired domains that have a total of 1000 links (the
total across all search engines), you should expect about 50
unique visitors per day.
3. Start an "Offline" Affiliate Program
I'm sure you realize that having your own affiliate program
is an effective way of generating traffic. But the usual
methods of monitoring and tracking affiliate sales don't
lend themselves for use in the offline world. Until now...
You can give your top affiliates an actual section of
geography (which can be denominated as a city, county, a zip
code, a telephone area code, a state or even a country) to
conquer, and you can credit them with all sales that come
from that geographical area.
In other words, let's say I decide to "give" one of my good
affiliates his home state of Tennessee. Now, any customers
who come from Tennessee (and do not come from any other
referral link) will be credited to him. He will get ALL
commissions from orders originating out of Tennessee.
That incents your affiliates to do all kinds of direct,
one-to-one marketing in their own neighborhoods to drive
traffic to your site. As long as they know that they will be
credited with every sale that comes from their city (or
county or area code or zip code or however you want to set
it up), they will promote in ways that would never be
cost-effective if you were to try it yourself.
They can try doorknob-hangers, flyers under windshield
wipers, press releases to their local newspapers, small
signs on utility poles, local telemarketing, bumper
stickers, and a thousand other things that you'd never be
able to do otherwise.
4. Use Testimonials - But With A New Twist!
Everyone knows that testimonials are nice to have on your
own site, but did you ever think about the value of having
YOUR testimonial on the site of others?
In the course of ordinary business, you undoubtedly use lots
of products and services: ebooks, newsletters, webmaster
services, marketing courses, webhosting, internet service
providers, books, magazines, etc.
If any of these work especially well for you, you should
consider writing intelligent, glowing testimonials and
submitting them to the people who create these products and
services.
Who can resist putting a great testimonial on their site...?
And don't forget to ask, as politely as possible, that your
url also be published.
If the potential recipient doesn't have a testimonials page,
you can still get him to publish your testimonial if you
make the page for him. By copying the same theme and layout
of his regular site, it's quite a simple matter to make a
testimonials page (Where yours is first and at the top!) and
just give it to him as a gift. This will save him time and
earn you a couple of extra points if he's still doubtful
about including your testimonial and/or your URL. And it
only takes a minute.
In closing...
There is one more traffic generating resource I'd like you to
visit today. It's the very site where the above unique traffic
generating ideas came from. A site dedicated to the "Science
of Web Traffic", called appropriately, "Trafficology"...
http://www.bizweb2000.com/trafficology.htm
Trafficology webmaster, Wayne Yeager, knows the importance
of thinking "out of the box". As a matter of fact, his site
is a great example of this very theory.
Every month, Wayne pays "cash bribes" totaling $1,350 for
the BEST traffic ideas submitted at his site. And hundreds
of them come in every month.
As Wayne's site states, "Some of the ideas are GREAT. Some
of them are lousy. But invariably, a handful of cool traffic
ideas you've never heard of will be submitted every month."
And the best part is you can read the ideas without paying a
dime. That's because Wayne puts all the BEST ideas into his
email newsletter which is 100% FREE! While there is
certainly a glut of email newsletters on the web these days,
this is one every web business should be reading faithfully.
If you're not reading it, you are completely out of the loop!
* This online business tip by
Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing Co., helping webmasters prosper since 1996. If you
want to work from home here's all
the help and expert advice you need.
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