As a follow up to my last blog about driving web traffic with off-line activities, here are some ideas about how you might drive traffic to your website using the web.

1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising. This can be done with Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many others. If done right, this is cheap and effective.

2. Article Marketing. Write short articles for article directory sites such as EzineArticles.com. This improves search rank and creates frequency in a search. This is one of my secrets to success in web marketing.

3. Free Classified Ads. Post ads on free classified ads sites, such as Craigslist and Kijiji. These sites get incredible traffic and you will be found.

4. Blogging. My web business strategy is based on this method. It really works. Write with key words.

5. YouTube. YouTube is coming of age. A clever video can drive monster traffic to your site. If you have not been to YouTube recently, you will be blown away with the volume of content. It is no longer just a novelty site—you can do serious research there.

6. Forums and Social Networks: Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or “groups” on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Both forums and social networks are great web tools that have come of age, but you have to be a player to get the benefits. Get involved.

7. Blog Comments. Visit blogs that cover your industry or space and leave comments with your URL. Position yourself as a thought leader by commenting back to other bloggers.

8. Email Newsletters. While you may forward these to existing customers, they will get forwarded to buddy lists. This is viral marketing as its best.

9. Content Aggregators. Submit your content to aggregators. The easiest way to do this is to burn your feed to FeedBurner and enable the feature to distribute your feed to blog aggregators. There are many others. Do a search for content aggregators.

10. Blog Sites. Subscribe and post to blog sites like Digg and Delicious.

This is just a small list of the on-line activities that will that drive traffic to your site.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

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4 Comments
  1. Rob Lescaille

    Don’t forget SEO. Viral traffic is free, make sure you’re set up to maximize it.

    Also depending on the budget here are some things some of the larger SMBs and corporations do:

    – Sponsorship (with URL everywhere) – this could be sponsoring a section of a website, and event, a person, etc.

    – Display ads through some of the larger networks (Platform A/AOL/Tacoda, Google/Doubleclick, Specific Media, and viral sites like forums, blogs, etc).

    – Retention ads – This is not so much to drive traffic just to your site, but to keep traffic away from competitors. If you sell a product and there is ad inventory available on a reseller’s page that shows your product (amazon, download.com, etc), you may want to think about purchasing all the available inventory (ad space) on that page to avoid the possibility of competitive ads snagging your customer. Sometimes this isn’t cheap or even available on some websites.

    – Behavioral targeting – This is another expensive option, but it works. To avoid wasted clicks on your ad, you can have the the ad served to a user based on their behavior. This is done by demographic, “endemic”, or even how many times they have visited your website or have visited websites related to your product. The only network I know of that does it as simply as Google’s “point and click” setup is Live.com (MSN). All other behavioral targeting has to be set up with an account rep. Google, however, is working on integrating this product (doubleclick behavioral) in to their same user friendly interface.

    And lastly, I would recommend setting up landing pages based on what “creative” they are clicking on. This can help lower your “bounce rate” by sending the customer to a familiar place on your website tailored to the look and feel of the ad they clicked on. If there is an incentive/coupon this landing page can go in to more detail or have a call to action. If you send everyone to the front page chances are some will get lost and confused because they clicked on a “free estimate” promotion and went to your home page. It’s not necessary with all strategies, but think about it when it comes down to it. It can be expensive depending on how much your web agency charges per page.

  2. Yes, Rob, my list is very incomplete. Thanks for adding those comments.

    This helps emphasize the point that there are many ways to drive traffic.

    JBJ

  3. dq,

    Yes, there is a proliferation of free sites like this one.

    JBJ

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