If you own a website, are planning to open one or just want to broaden your knowledge about the subject, you’re sure to have thought about the possible ways to increase the traffic to your site. But like many of us, you might not have a big budget – or budget at all – for advertising and marketing in the beginning. Thus, you may not really figure out a way to make your website or service noticed on the Internet.
Lucky for you, I’ve listed five sure-way methods to generate that initial traffic and online presence recognition you’re going to need to kickstart your new website. These free ways of generating traffic are easy to implement. Let’s get started
1. Directory Submissions
There are lots of both free and paid link and article directories that you should use for your own advantage. Most allow free submission even without reciprocal link (see tip number three).So, they’re a great way to start up. Typically you only need to provide the site with your site’s URL address, a short description about its contents and maybe a brief listing of your main keywords – and that’s it!
One thing to remember with directory submissions is that you should only submit to relevant directories. For example, if you have a site about Border Collie training, the best directories to submit to would be high quality dog-related ones or pet related. There is no benefit of submitting your site to hundreds of directories that are of poor quality.
There is another directory submission way that is a bit more demanding, but it might prove to be much more effective. Yes, I’m talking about article submission. Here, you will have to write up an article of about 400 words of your niche, find a free article directory or two and submit your article there. But remember to use separate articles for each directory, as duplicate content is not only frowned upon, it also lower the value of your links, or completely makes them ignored!
2. Search Engine Submissions
Most web users utilize search engines like Google or Yahoo to find the content they want from the vast ocean that is the Internet. Submitting your site into as many search engines as possible is essential for it to be found easily. The better search engine optimization you’ve done on your site, the easier it is for the users to find your site with the keywords they’re using. When your site is on search engines, it easily gets indexed. Here is a link you can use to submit your site to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
3. Reciprocal Liinking Systems
Linking is everything when it comes to making your website found and ranked well in the search engines. Therefore, reciprocal linking might come handy especially in the beginning. This basically means that you exchange your link with other site, e.g., publish their link on your main site, and in turn they’ll publish yours. This is quite easy thing to do, and it won’t take much time, and creating a small “Featured Links” box on your site won’t even break the layout!
However, keep in mind that the links should be put to no-follow in accordance to Google’s guidelines. The aim of getting the links would be to have your site listed among the resources that visitors can check.
4. Share your URL around
It might be a bit obvious, but to get good visibility to your site, you need to show off the links every time you get the chance. Great places are for example your email signatures, Internet forum signatures, article directories, blog comments (in the website field) and even on your business cards. This will surely increase the traffic to the site, when people not only get to know about your site, but it’s also readily available for them to take a look at.
5. Build an Email List
This one takes a bit more work with the earlier methods, as how could you collect email addresses from your users if you have none? However, after utilizing the other methods, you can create email list that you may use to inform your users about practically anything, ranging from site updates to advertising deals and whatnot. This serves also a bit in a word-to-mouth type advertising, where people receiving your mailing list might – and hopefully, will – tell about it to their friends.
To build an email list, you an use a free service like MailChimp (and a host of others). Just keep the mailing list easy to unsubscribe for people that for one reason or another don’t want to be a part of it anymore.