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Everyone loves to get something free, including those who frequently surf the web. Website operators are constantly looking not only for ways to attract new visitors, but also ways to keep them coming back. If you are looking for a way to increase website traffic, consider using the “Give Away”. By giving away free products on your site, you will likely attract many more visitors. You can also keep these visitors coming back more frequently by offering new free stuff each month. If you are interested in seeing the results of your website traffic improve, then consider using these five ways to give away free stuff.

Donated Products

You may be interested in trying to give away free stuff on your website, while staying within a reasonable budget. If so try these options. Try networking with other companies who will give you their products to showcase and give away from your site. Local businesses are a good place to look first place to look, as it provides a win-win situation for both businesses. You can also go to larger corporations if you know who to contact and make sure they realize that they too would be receiving free advertising by allowing you to showcase their products. Since you generally won’t get enough products each month to offer to every visitor, make sure you mention that only the first 30 (or the equivalent of products you have) visitors who sign up will receive the products. This will not only create urgency, but bring repeat visitors to your site.

Monthly Contests

Website visitors love contests and many of them are willing to visit the same sites each day just to enter to win something free. Therefore, by offering free stuff through a contest, you are likely to get visitors to return on a daily basis. Purchase a good prize or get one donated and give it away to the random name drawn from the entries. This is a great way to get the attention of many consumers, especially if your prizes are interesting and valuable.

Personalized Items

One tactic is to give away merchandise with your website’s name or your business’s name on them. Items such as shirts, hats, towels, cups, and key chains are perfect for this, and can be had for a very low cost. The idea is to keep people coming to your site for free stuff as well as to promote your products or services. The extra perk with this strategy is to allow them to be your advertisers as well. When they use one of these items in public, other prospects who will be exposed to your business. This also works well with loyal customer incentives.

Referral Prizes

If you really want to spread the word on your website and get more traffic, you should consider giving referral prizes. You can set your system up to allow each visitor to send an automated email from your site asking him or her to visit. If the visitor is willing to offer up 10 or 20 valid email addresses, then you can offer them a free prize. This is the perfect way to get more traffic while also rewarding those that are helping you along the way.

Reminder Emails

After you choose the method of how you plan to give your free stuff away, consider offering reminder emails to those who participate. You can offer initial free products to those that sign up, like an e-book. This is a great way to get that traffic to continue after the visitor’s initial visit. You can remind them monthly that there are new things to see at your site and they will likely visit more often. You can also use this not only to remind them of free stuff being given away but also to tell them about deals or other offers you have for them as well. They are likely to forward these emails on to friends they think might be interested as well.

Technorati Tags: Away, five, free, Give, Good, Increase, Stuff, Traffic, Ways, Website

There’s a simple idea in the world of online marketing that everyone agrees with: more people seeing your website = more potential customers = more business. But beyond this basic point, agreement among internet know-hows tends to go out the window. Everyone has an opinion on the best way to increase website traffic – and surprisingly, not many of them agree.

There are probably many reasons for this lack of agreement. But there are definitely two big ones. The first reason most online advice-givers don’t agree on how to increase web site traffic is that there’s not one fixed way to go about it. Website traffic can be increased in a handful of different ways.

The second reason, as you’ve probably noticed, is that most people giving advice have something they’d like to sell you. They want to sell you a solution and their advice needs to be related to what they’re selling.

Whether or not these sales people have your best interest in mind is open to question. But what’s not open to question, is the fact that there ARE many different ways to increase website traffic.

And of these many ways, there are 5 that have a history of being very reliable and effective. Not only do these 5 methods have a high performance record, but at least one of these five is essential for anyone that wants to have a regular flow of new customers to their web site. And the good news is, 4 of these 5 methods can be done with little or no money.

If you’re serious about bringing more traffic to your website – and tired of wading through online advice – take some time to consider these 5 time-tested ways before you invest another minute:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is probably the most recommended way to increase web site traffic. And for good reason: it works. Having your website atop search engines like Google and Yahoo! is a sure fire way to bring people to your site. Where this method often gets confusing is in the number of different ways that people suggest doing it. Some tell you to use your keywords often in the text of your web page. Some tell you to put your keyword phrase in the alternate text of your images. Others tell you that the key to a high search-engine ranking is to have other related sites link to your site. And all of this advice is correct. There are other steps to take as well, but the problem is, not many sites give you all of the needed steps in an organized way. I’ve included a link below with a detailed explanation of all of these steps.

2. Newsletters – A newsletter is nothing more than a series of pre-written e-mails that are sent to people who request them from a form on your web site. There are a few tools, like auto responders, that help make this task easy and efficient. Newsletters are a very powerful because they give you an opportunity to build credibility and make repeat customers out of the customers you already have.

3. Article Directories – Article directories are websites that take submitted articles and store them in a data base so online magazines and newsletters can use them for publication. The exchange that takes place is this: you write an article and allow any website to publish your article. In return, they are obliged to leave your name and e-mail address in the byline of the article. When your article is published online, a link to your site is also published, and potential customers who read your article are likely to come see your website. If your article is published in multiple online sources, a link to your site is also published in multiple online sources. A well written article can be picked up over and over again. In the end, you’ll have a regular source of new customers without spending anything more time than it takes to write the article.

4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) – PPC advertising, like search engine optimization, is also a very talked-about way of bringing traffic to a site. The idea here is that search engines advertise your business web site and you pay a particular fee each time someone clicks on your link and comes to your site. All of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have PPC advertising programs. Depending on the market you’re selling to, PPC can be a very profitable way to bring interested customers to your site. On the down side, it’s the only one of these five ways that is sure to take some kind of money investment.

5. Improving Your Website – This sounds very basic but it’s often overlooked. It doesn’t do a lot of good to bring potential customers to your website if your site is not ready to serve them. Any profitable website needs to be attractive, easy-to-use, and professional. Making sure your site has all three of these traits will go a long way towards making the most of the people that do see your site.

By taking some time to consider the 5 methods above, you’ll not only be familiar with the 5 most proven ways to increase traffic. But you’ll also have a way to measure and organize the other traffic-increasing advice you find online.

In the end, making an informed effort to increase website traffic is never a bad idea. It can lead to better business exposure. It can lead to a huge increase in customers. And it will definitely lead you to more profitable and productive online business.

Technorati Tags: Back, Basics, five, Increasing, Pillars, Traffic, Website

1. (C)ontent – Any good internet marketer understands that having well-written, useful content is what drives their marketing machine. Excellent content provides the main building block to gaining exposure through the search engines, which is the first step to building the traffic that will ultimately become your customers or customers of whichever affiliate programs you decide to promote. Great content does this in a number of ways. Initially, well-written, useful content will have a greater chance of being recognized as a resource by other online publishers. The more websites and blogs that find your content useful, the more chances you have that these sites will reference (i.e. link) to your articles, thus promoting them higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Even after this occurs, great content still works for you in several ways. It provides information that people are looking for and may also solve problems that your potential customers have. If you can combine great, problem-solving content with relevant affiliate products that help fill a need or solve a problem, you are well on your way to boosting your sales. How do you create great content? Write about a subject you understand very well and one that you are passionate about.

2. (C)ookies – When you are searching for affiliate programs that are related to, or complement, your excellent content, one thing any savvy affiliate marketer evaluates is the cookie length of the program(s) he or she chooses to promote. In affiliate marketing, a cookie is something that ‘tags’ any website visitor who arrives at an affiliate site via an affiliate link. This is so the affiliate who was responsible for sending the visitor will ultimately be credited for any sale. Different affiliate programs have cookies of varying lengths. Ideally, you want to choose a program that uses the longest length cookies. This way, even if a visitor who you sent to the affiliate website doesn’t make a purchase today, you will still get credit as long as they make a purchase before the cookie expires. The longer the cookie length, the greater amount of time that visitor has to come back to the affiliate website and make a purchase for which you will receive your affiliate commission.

3. (C)lick-through-rate – Also abbreviated CTR, this is a measure of how well your content, combined with the affiliate program’s creatives (i.e. text links, banners, search boxes, videos, etc.) entices a visitor to actually ‘click through’ to the affiliate website. Your CTR for each different ad campaign is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on the ad by the number of times the ad was delivered (also called ad impressions). CTR is a way of measuring how effective your advertisements are. The higher the CTR, the more effective your content, combined with your ad placement, is at convincing your visitors to visit the affiliate site via one of your affiliate links. But getting your visitors through your affiliate links to your affiliate program’s website is only half the battle.

4. (C)onversions – As mentioned above, getting visitors to whichever affiliate programs you are promoting is only half the battle. They must also become customers (i.e. make a purchasing decision and buy something) in order for you to get paid. When a visitor actually buys something, this is known as a conversion. How well any affiliate program converts is a combination of how effectively you were able to presell your website visitors, as well as how effective the affiliate program’s landing page is at convincing them to purchase the product or service the program is advertising. Understand that many visitors to the affiliate program’s website may not buy on their first visit. This is why cookie length is important. In addition, the sales process that the affiliate program utilizes to keep in contact with that visitor and ultimately turn them into a customer is very important. Keep an eye on your conversions for each different affiliate program you belong to. The higher the conversion rate of a program, the better they are at converting the visitors you send into customers that ultimately make them (and you) money.

5. (C)alls to Action – Throughout your content, and especially towards the end of any write-up, you want to take the opportunity to encourage your visitors to visit the affiliate program’s site or purchase a product, or sign up for a free membership. Whatever action you need a visitor to take in order to get them ‘tagged’ with your affiliate cookie is what you need to tell them to do. Tell them (in a nice way of course) what you would like them to do, don’t ask them. For example, at the end of a thorough write-up about an online service for which you are an affiliate, say something like, “Take the next step and join XYZ service to see for yourself. Membership is free…” and hyperlink that phrase using your affiliate link to direct your visitors to the program. Notice that the visitor was not asked, but rather given a simple command, or a call-to-action. Pepper your content with a few different calls to action in logical places and this will increase the number of your visitors who end up clicking through to the affiliate site (i.e. your CTR will increase!).

So remember the five C’s of affiliate marketing to improve your odds of success. Begin with great content to encourage backlinks and gain exposure through the search engines. Find affiliate programs that offer products or services related to your content, which your visitors will find interesting. Evaluate the cookie length’s of each of these affiliates. In general, try to join affiliate programs offering the greatest cookie lengths. Next, once you have joined some programs and placed their banners and text links throughout your content, keep an eye on how many visitors actually click through to the affiliate site using your affiliate links. This is called your click through rate, or CTR, and is a measure of how well you are doing with your affiliate ad placements. Remember, the higher the CTR for any ads or creatives you have on your sites, the better. Keep an eye on conversions, which are how many of the people you send to the affiliate program actually make a purchase. This is one of the most important affiliate statistics to keep track of because, ultimately, this will tell you how effective your affiliate programs are at making the sale. Conversions are the most important ‘C’ for any affiliate marketer to monitor because they are directly responsible for how much money you will earn as an affiliate of that program. Finally, use ‘calls-to-action’ in order to convince your visitors to take whatever action is required for you to benefit. Whether you want them to join something, buy something, or click a particular link, use a simple command to tell them what it is you would like them to do. If your content was helpful and you structure your calls to action in an affirmative, but friendly, manner your visitors should be more than receptive to these simple commands. Ultimately, it is up to you to constantly monitor your five C’s of affiliate marketing to measure how well the affiliate programs you are promoting are performing.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate, five, Marketing

Any profitable affiliate marketing business relies heavily on website traffic. Affiliate marketers and most any website owner looks to get as much targeted website traffic as possible.

Depending on the webmasters motivation, this traffic can help he or she build a community or increase sales and website conversions. Here are five ways most successful affiliate marketers use to increase website traffic for long term success.

#1 Blogging. This is similar to keeping a journal where you write informative and interesting articles for your readers. The articles you create for your blog can also contain links to your static website.

These are called backlinks and the links provide extra weight in the search engines which gives your site higher rankings and more website traffic. Make a blog on Blogger.com and you will start getting traffic in 2-3 days from Google. Google will also spider and promote your blogs RSS feed in many sites across the net for free.

#2 Forums. This is a fun and guaranteed way to promote your online affiliate marketing business. Simply find a few forums related to your niche market and interact with other members by asking questions and posting answers.

This is also a great way to learn your market, help others and sell to your target market more effectively. It is not okay to blatantly advertise in a forum but most forums will provide you some space below every post you make in what is called a signature to add a link back to your website.

You usually set this once in your forum profile area and every post you make in the forum automatically has your signature attached to it. It can be changed any time.

#3 Viral Marketing. This is one of the oldest, most effective yet least used forms of online marketing. It can be done in many ways to good effect and can bring you steady website traffic and income for life.

You can get your feet wet with viral marketing by giving away an ebook on your website and have a couple of links to an affiliate product or back to your website right in the ebook.

Give the ebook to your visitors who sign up for your newsletter and if it has useful information, they will happily send it to their friends. This can easily make your website traffic snowball as new people are reading your content who want to read it all from this initial promotion.

#4 Social Marketing. One example being MySpace, one of the largest websites online, which is now widely used by Internet marketers to market products in very specific markets. MySpace is a social site that makes it very easy for people interested in a topic to get together and share content, and for marketers to blend in and promote their niche products and services.

#5 Article Distribution. A powerful way to increase backlinks and website traffic, there are hundreds of article directories that will accept your article and small resource box with links back to your website, and post it on their site. From there, other website owners will pick up your article and post it on their site!

This will bring you direct website traffic from people reading the article on the other sites, clicking to visit your site. You will also increase search engine traffic to your own website from the increase in backlinks you get from these other websites publishing your article and its author resource box with links back to your site.

Of course, all of these traffic generation techniques are different in how hard they are to do for a beginner affiliate marketer. The smart affiliate marketer tests each technique by itself and learns how it works before testing a new technique or method.

They also differ in how much money you may need to really make a decent impact in the use of the technique. For example, in viral marketing you may want to hire a flash designer to create a viral video for you, and hire someone else to submit the videos to the 50 or so video sites to get maximum exposure.

Or you can start for free by submitting free rewritten articles to article directories. This will increase targeted traffic to your website and some affiliate programs now give you free articles to use to make getting traffic and thus selling their products easier.

Technorati Tags: Easy, five, Increase, Targeted, Traffic, Ways, Website

Now your website is up and running, don’t think you can just sit back and get traffic to your website without lifting a finger. It is not that easy; well, it can be if you know what to do. Think of your website as organic, something that continually evolves and grows into the future. So how are you going to get website traffic? I will give some tips here in principle.

I will later introduce you to traffic knowledge that will have you operating at the top end with other traffic masters. Let’s take it one step at a time.

You have done everything right. Now you need to let people know you exist. Maybe you are wondering if you should buy website traffic or, maybe, if there are things you can learn to get more website traffic more quickly and easily.

Some ways to improve your website traffic include content and article marketing, in-bound linking, Web 2 strategies, free website directories and search engine optimization. If you do nothing, you will likely get very little traffic.

1. Content and Article Marketing

To get traffic you need top quality content on your website. If you don’t, any visitors you do get will click away from your website immediately and move to the next one in the list.

Article marketing can be used quite affectively to drive traffic to your site. Write good quality articles relevant to your website’s content and submit them to online directories.

This will help get you noticed and listed in the most popular search engine directories. Remember to stick with quality. Check places known for their stringent approach toward quality such as ezinearticles.com to get an idea of what you should be doing.

2. Creating Links

Start a link campaign. The best way is to get in-bound links commonly known as back-links from similar or complementary website owners. Another way to create links is to make informed comments on blogs and forums that allow you a link to your website address. This is effective and many will click your link simply out of curiosity, especially if you have interesting things to say in your field. But remember, it is not the quantity of external links that is important; it is the quality of them. Keep away from reciprocal linking, it is most often not worth the effort.

3. Web 2.0 Strategies

Web 2 strategies, often known as social marketing, have become a huge online marketing tool. YouTube, Flickr, Reddit, Propeller, MySpace, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Digg are all examples of social marketing tools that have come to the forefront in recent times. There are many ways to use these communities to promote yourself and improve website traffic in an ethical manner.

4. Free Website Directories

Promote your website to online newsgroups and free directories. These can be invaluable for getting your name out there quickly. Take care with directories and make sure you’re not submitting to a link farm. Search engines despise link farms. Make sure the directory offers significant traffic. Google themselves promote Yahoo directory and niche directories as good places to list your site. Yahoo charges a hefty fee but you have to decide how much credence you place in your site.

5. Search Engine Optimization

Make sure your website is optimized so search engines list you. Once you are listed your web address will come up when people type in your keywords. To optimize your website use keywords in your content, the same keywords in you meta keyword tag, a sensible and relevant meta description, headlines and page titles. Don’t cheat! You need to learn a little more about On-page and Off-page optimization. You can Google these terms and find out more in detail later.

No longer do we live in an age where we can expect people to come to us. It is essential to know your target market and tactfully encourage folks to visit. Usually with quality. Remember, that in the end, real people will decide the future of your site so don’t be in a rush.

Technorati Tags: five, Inrease, Traffic, Ways, Website