Forget PR, how to increase traffic?

[lauraddirectnet]

I had originally posted a question about Google PR, which I now understand, thanks Larwee, to be of less importance than before.

Here is the question I am more interested in now that I understand Google PR and such.

What are the best ways to increase traffic?

Thanks for everyone's help!

[Oregon Coast Guy]

1. Lots and lots of quality content that visitors will appreciate and want to share, link to and return to. Add a couple pages a week if you can. I would recommend that you do not monetize your site until you have at least 30 pages of content. Keep it real. SE's and getting smarter all the time and they look for visitor response. The better the content, the more the traffic will grow.

2. Lots of backlinks from quality sites associated with your content. Don't try to get links that have nothing to do with your site or are trashy.

3. Write articles and submit them to the article directories.

4. Consider offline sales such as newspaper ads, fliers, get some business cards and hand them out. Vistaprint.com is great for that type of stuff.

5. Find blogs and forums that center around the same niche of your website and participate. Make sure to add your sig with a link to your site.

6. Add your sig to your emails.

7. Create a MySpace

8. Create and use video to drive traffic to your site. YouTube.com and LiveVideo.com are the people you want to use. Video is becoming huge.


That should get you going and eventually, it will begin to snowball for you.

[AIA]

Do you have a budget? If you're looking for immediate traffic you'll probably have to purchase it, and depending on your market, price can vary wildly. Oregon Coast had some great suggestions and it shouldn't deter you from using the majority of them even if they don't provide instant traffic.

As for just a ton of traffic instantly you often get what you pay for. There are companies like Zango that will target your ad (popunder) and serve it very cheaply to hundreds of thousands of people. It's not everyone's idea of great marketing (including mine) but it does achieve what you want, however, you'll also have to contend with the fact that you're promoting a business via an Adware company...but like I said, you often get what you pay for.

My recommendation would be to work on establishing content and the traffic will eventually come. If you start a blog and submit it to Technorati then submit the RSS to Yahoo - AND write well, you'll find a target audience quickly.

I also know there's an ad co-op out there somewhere (digital point I think?) that gives you credits for exchanging links and you share traffic with other webmasters, but I've never used it, nor do I know if it's still active...maybe you'll want to look into that as well.

[lauraddirectnet]

Those are some great ideas. We are working on submitting our articles, so I have that one the way, so I see we are on the right path. I have also recently started getting into blogging. I will definitly look into the MySpace, I created on for a website, but not for our affiliate program. So I will have to do that. Are you on MySpace?

[TUTTI]

Here are some of my favorites:

1. Free Traffic Bar (of course) Very Happy
2. Traffic Swarm
3. Top Surfer
4. SQUIDOO
5. linkcrews

[lauraddirectnet]

Thanks I will check out those top 5. Tony T, you said you use MySpace, what kind of luck have you had with using it?