List of ways to effectively market your site and attract visitors

WillL · 10-22-2006, 09:08 PM

No matter how much work you put into it , or how much you try a % of how well your site will do is dependent on pot luck.

People make sites and they want to get indexed and get a load of traffic like it's a race or something. It's not a race. People that go crazy trying to get more traffic , probably won't have good content. "Content is the king" probably one of the best net quotes. If you don't have content it can't be indexed. The more content you've got the more visitors you're going to get.

But don't go any copy other peoples content. That will just lead to more problems. Write your own content , pay someone to do it for you. Once you've "established" your site (got some content , put some time into the layout , made it user friendly , researched competition , etc) Then keep adding content until you've been indexed and got some back links from people that you did not ask to link to your site. That's because if some one's linking to your site chances are there's something on there worth looking at.

Once you've got some back links and you're sites been indexed or been crawled (you can check this in cpanel awstats). Then it's time to either , add more fresh content , or if you're sites "complete" then it's time to get some traffic.

Some methods for getting traffic.

Social Networking Sites (non myspace)

Now these are bit tricky , if you want you can add every post or article on your site with a link to your site. Be careful when submitting and adding the URL to the story not to put in your homepage. You can only do that once.

Example One of my stories posted on Digg

Now if you click the story title (VEGEMITE BANNED IN US) it will take you to The Original story on my blog

Notice how it's 2006/10/vegemite-banned-in-us.html Now no one else can post that story using my link , as links can only be used once.

I added that story last night and my site's revived about 45 unique visitors. It can takes articles days/weeks to reach the front page.

Digg
Reddit

Directories

Directories are very helpful for increasing pagerank and getting some very good backlinks. They can also get you some good traffic sometimes too if you're lucky. It's very important to do some research to get the write discription , tittle and other things to help increase ranking for searches. The more you submit to the more it will help you. You can also pay some people to do it DigitalPoint Has some people who offer submissions for reasonable prices.

Here is a list if you want to do them yourself. Some directories are expesnisve but if you own a serious site it's a good investment.

Social Networking Sites

Myspace , what a great way to reach 100 million teens to even adults and growing. A good way is make your profile about your site , put links to your site , get as many friends as you can and do bulletins. You can also pay others to do bulletins for you.

Craigslist , one of the best sites to drive traffic. It's a great way to recch millions of people. It oftens gets spammed with sites in a desprite attempt to drive some heavy traffic from it. That's a bad idea as you will get blacklisted. But it is a good idea to post stuff and articles from your site on there. Much like Digg

www.craigslist.org

Press Release Sites

These are also a bit tricky , not every one's site is "eligible" for a press release. It's best to read the TOS of the press release site.

It's also a good idea to post the press release on your site so it can be indexed by search engines and also to be seen by your visitors.

Here are some free Press Release Sites

http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
http://www.prweb.com/
http://www.trueadvantage.com/
http://www.usanews.net/submit/archives_post.htm
http://www.click2newsites.com/press.asp
http://www.worldannounce.com/plogin1.asp

Link Exchanges

Find some sites that have got similar content to yours and depending if they are a forum , blog , site. Either , exchange a simple link on the blog , exchange banners , exchange small affiliate buttons.
A good example are the small banners above my post. But some of them may be paid.

Some good sites to link exchange on are

V7N and

DigitalPoint

Buying Links

If your site does not have enough traffic or is not of a high enough PageRank some "better" sites might not want to exchange , in this case. If they are offering selling links you could buy a link. Always check the "true" PageRank of a site. And make a estimation on how much traffic it will bring you , how good the back link is and if the traffic is targeted or relevant to your site. eg: You don't want 100000 Chinese people going to your site on teaching Australians to speak french.

A good place to buy links is

Digitalpoint

Other Ways (online)

There's heaps of other online ways to get a bit more traffic that can add up. Putting your msn name as your site's a good way. Playing computer games with your websites name can help. Be creative see what you can think of.

Other Ways (offline)

Offline marketing has proven in the past to be very effective. Take for example myspace.com , most of it was spread by offline marketing. Teens talking at school about it. That's how I heard about it.

Tell people at school/work , tell friends , write it in random places.

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I hope this has helped some of you. I hope this info is informative and correct.

Please don't post more info about any of this , and if there's mistakes or wrong info pm me please.

Remember , it's content what's going to bring back users.

shahab6 · 10-22-2006, 09:50 PM

very usefull info. but Offline marketing is not that effective.

WillL · 10-22-2006, 09:53 PM

trust me it is

IslaScotts · 10-22-2006, 10:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shahab6

very usefull info. but Offline marketing is not that effective.

I think it can be depending on what the site is.

WillL · 10-22-2006, 10:22 PM

I'd love my site to go on the 6 news.

WillL · 10-23-2006, 10:43 PM

sticky please.. lol.. nah , just don't want this to go down the toilet...

CTABUK · 10-24-2006, 02:13 AM

Firstly apologies for not posting here as often as I should, it is still a great forum.

I guess I have been busy trying to create the best ways of attracting traffic.
I have totally done away with PPC -in fact I have enjoyed success without advertising for two whole years now and have turned CTAB into one of the UK's larger Brokerages.
We introduced a Google News Alerts feed into the site for our keywords, so that content is changing almost on a daily basis. We have created more and more pages each optimized for the keywords or search terms that our Statcounter has shown proven results for. Each page is based on a HTML keyword so that Google in particular picks up on. At the last count we have 300 odd search terms all on pages 1,2 or 3 on all of the SE's.
We have also managed to pursuade several .gov sites to link to us and that in itself is a bonus. The other joy about Google Alerts is that we get Newspapers releasing stories on our chosen subjects so we reply to them as press releases, these in turn act as a Blog system without actually being 'quotes' a blog, although I do contribute to Matt Cutts.

I have also discovered that certain SE's give good results on Forum postings, those of you that know me will know that I mod over at WPW and that in itself has helped my ratings. It is quite easy to locate the SE's that pick up on forum postings on your subjects. Simply search your keywords and keep scrolling down until you reach them. But only join if you feel that you can contribute on a regular basis, otherwise you are in effect 'drive by spamming' But as Aaron Wall once wrote 'all successful marketers have spammed'

Best wishes David