Getting traffic to a website can be one of the most challenging issues a webmaster may face. Many people believe by putting a website up people will simply just turn up, by the masses. This just simply is not true. It is the equivalent of opening a water shop in the Sahara desert. Although I'm sure people would love the water, if they do not know about it they won't find your shop. Ok this is a slightly silly example as there are not that many people there to be potential customers but I hope you get the message.
So we have identified people don't just turn up at websites. So how do we get them to visit? You have several options:
Paying for advertising
This can be very expensive and may not deliver the type of traffic you want.
Reciprocal link exchanges
Another technique is to exchange links with other sites. It provides a virtual path to your site, while many will not exactly be a highway they will still give you a little traffic. Also as you get more links, search engines will start to improve your ranking so you'll start getting free traffic from search engines
This is a technique that is really starting to be in fashion now. The idea is you submit an article about your sites' topic to various article directories. They publish the article with a back link to your site and this article is picked up by lots of sites. This gives you lots of back links and have the benefits of reciprocal linking and more. As you are not linking to the sites that link to you the links are one way. It is thought that one way links have much higher values in the search engines.
Through my testing I've found article marketing to bring me the greatest benefit for minimal effort and cost. Let's face it, time is one thing we cannot get more so anything that makes us the most profit for minimum effort has to be a winner!
