Traffic generation is a complex business of trial and error. It often involves a lot of tinkering with strategies and techniques to find the ones that suit you best. And most of all it's a case of building momentum.
Early on, your traffic will be small and efforts to increase it will often have small increases. Over time you can get bigger and bigger wins as you not only fine-tune your techniques,but also build momentum behind the site in post quantities, readership, and brand awareness.
For those just getting started, grassroots techniques can be very helpful. There are different phases of site growth where certain methods are more effective than others, and some rely on a certain amount of critical mass (particularly with regard to generating traffic from social media). Grassroots techniques have that name because they don't require anything except some enthusiasm. If you and your site don't have a following yet, you'll need to start at the very beginning, and that means:
The most effective means of traffic generation often involve you, your staff, or your friends having well-developed social media profiles with plenty of reach, or money. These techniques don't require any of the above points, except perhaps networking, but we'll discuss that in a moment.
This simply means publishing great content and then reaching out to influential people who might be interested in that content. Here's the thing: all influential people are busy. If they weren't, they wouldn't be influential. There are people competing for their attention all day long, and they have their own job to do.
They may ignore you – not to discourage you, but that's just how it is. So when you send them content, you need to make sure it's your best, or they'll blacklist you as someone who likes to waste their time. You then need to sit back and hope that they read your message to begin with. Many will not, and it's not something you can really blame them for.
Your email needs to personable, honest, and humble. Simply direct them to your piece and suggest that if they find it useful, you'd appreciate a link. A single link – even from a big blog – doesn't always mean a whole lot of traffic, and it certainly won't mean overnight success.
This is a long-term endeavor, and you're just building up a foundation of inbound links and a trickle of traffic to start you off. Once you build enough of these inbound links the hard way, the trickle will add up to something worthwhile, but remember that it takes work to get to that point. Be patient. Be persistent. And get used to people ignoring your emails.
Forums are great because they allow you to identify a bunch of highly targeted individuals who you know for a fact are interested in whatever it is you're publishing content about. Marketers realized this many years ago, and unfortunately for us, the abuse of these communities means there are a lot of obstacles in the way between them and you promoting your site.
This can be a good thing: if you were a participant in one of these communities, as you wouldn't have to filter out more promotional material than actual discussion. But it's still something you'll have to deal with nonetheless.
The best thing to do is to by become a bona-fide contributing member of the forum, answering questions and helping people, participating in discussions and debates, and generally becoming a well-known contributor of the forums, before you can even think about including your URL in a signature without raising eyebrows.
This is a very time-consuming process, and it's tough becoming known as one of the forum's regulars, which is why once most blog owners start developing an audience of their own, they stop maintaining their presence on forums. There comes a certain point where it doesn't provide enough of a return for the time invested. But, when you've only got two or three readers on your site and one of them is your mother, it's certainly a way to attract some interest and make some relevant contacts without spending money.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Kenneth Wilson at 02172011
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