Ways to Increase Website Traffic Without Going Broke

It's easy to see how that can be done with an ecommerce site (such as an online store) where you're selling products. But, how do you do that with an information site, or a blog? Suddenly, it doesn't seem so easy.

Also, consider these facts...

• According to PPC expert Gauher Chaudhry, author of the Pay Per Click Formula, over 80% of his PPC CPA (Cost Per Action) campaigns either lose money or break even
• According to Internet marketer Noel Swanson, a free traffic listing in the search engines can be worth many times more than a paid ad
• People who visit your site based on a paid ad have their guard up because they expect to be "sold to" and don't trust you
• People who visit your website based on free search engine listings are more relaxed and likely to trust your recommendations
• It's been said that over 90% of the people using PPC are not running profitable campaigns

Imagine for a moment that you're buying a business, and you've narrowed it down to two very similar choices. Both are in the same industry and have the same revenue. The only difference is that one costs $1500 more per month to operate? Which would you buy? The cheaper one of course (unless you like spending more than you have to).

Given all that, we have to say that free traffic is the more predictable way to go (if you do it right). Free traffic from the search engines is like "free website advertising." Figuring 10 cents per visitor, a site that gets 500 visitors a day in free search engine traffic is getting $1500 worth of free advertising each month.

How do you increase website traffic without breaking the bank?

Unless your business is so efficient that you can afford to buy all of your traffic, you'll need to work on attracting free traffic from the search engines.

Your first step towards doing that is to master a few basics. It's a bit more complex than that, of course, but if you want to increase website traffic (yours that is), it's essential to understand the fundamentals.

Here I'll outline specific methods that you can use to boost your visitor count, but first, let's cover some basic concepts so that we're on the same page with respect to how to increase website traffic.

First, what not to do? Too many people want to slap up a page selling the deal of the week, and then try to drive visitors to that site in the hopes that they'll make money. Well, most of the time, that strategy simply doesn't work.

What does work, however, is the same thing that works and has worked for all industries, for many years... producing something of value.

In order to increase website traffic, you must do three basic things...

• First, build a website that your visitors can use
• Second, employ various website promotion techniques for your site
• Third, monitor your progress and adjust until you get the results you want

So let's get to it...

What are the best free methods to increase website traffic?

There are many free ways to bring more traffic to your website. Some of them work well, some of them don't. Some of them work well only if you do them a certain way. Some of them work well only in certain niches and markets. Let's try to sort this all out.

• Content

  Without content, your website is nothing. Perhaps the very best return on investment (ROI) is to build quality, relevant content for your visitor. In other words, it's ultimately the best way to increase website traffic. Building content also is as "close to the money" as you can get. Your Web pages can continue to attract traffic and earn income long after the work to create them is done. What is content?

  Well, website content is comprised of anything that provides information that is of value to your visitor. Primarily when we think of content, we talk about text, but it can be in the format of images, audio, video, or other format.

  Building more words into a page provides more keywords for the search engines to chew on, and building more pages builds more PageRank for your site. Content building is a labor-intensive yet profitable long term strategy for increasing website traffic.

• Inbound Links

  Inbound links (also called inpointing links or backlinks) are essential for increasing website traffic. Without links, your website will have less credibility, both with your visitors, and the search engines. If your visitors and the search engines trip over links to your pages left and right your site will gain credibility, PageRank, traffic, and will be reindexed more often.

  While I will do some link exchanging, I think for the most part, it is not time well spent. At least the way most people go about it.

  Reciprocal linking, and creating links in general often takes too much time to get it right. If you want to save yourself tons of time and avoid having to chase down sites in your niche to exchange links with, I recommend you join the free Value Exchange service to make the process easier.

  You should also read the companion ebook that goes along with it. Make Your Links Work! is filled with solid strategies on how to increase website traffic through a quality links program. You can download it at the Value Exchange page.

• Blogging

  Blogging has it's advantages, as well as a few disadvantages, but overall can do wonders to bring traffic to your site. Remembering that content is a great way to increase website traffic, blogs can be great for this. Blogs are generally easy to set up and put content on.

  Blogs have the potential to acquire links quite quickly, encourage a sense of community, and typically have an informal style. They also lend themselves well to promotion via RSS, and can add visitor generated content to your site. In addition, you can have an onsite blog, an offsite blog, or you can guest blog.

  Disadvantages: You should note that although blogs are easy to add content to, they tend to need more frequent updating than static Web sites. Also, while they're easy to set up, sometimes getting them properly configured for SEO purposes can be a challenge. Many blog owners don't focus on proper site construction, and often don't pay much attention to keyword choices and keyword density.

• Guest Blogging

  Guest blogging opportunities can be either paid or unpaid. What is guest blogging? Well, it's pretty much how it sounds. You contribute blog entries (as opposed to simply posting blog comments) to someone else's blog.

  If a blogger has a more popular site than yours, it may be beneficial for you to guest blog on their site. This not only allows you gain exposure, but you are usually allowed to create a link back to your site.

  There are a number of blogging networks that will actually pay you to blog on their site. They get fresh content for their visitors and the search engines, and you get paid. You may also get exposure, traffic, and potentially a link back to your site for SEO purposes. Unless you've got the time, though, you're probably better off spending time building your own site.

• Social Bookmarking

  Social bookmarking can be a great way to generate high powered links back to your site and increase website traffic. Some social bookmarking sites (such as Mixx) use followed links, and increase link juice and search engine placement. They thereby provde both a direct and indirect increase in traffic. Basically, instead of keeping your bookmarks to yourself, you can share them with the rest of the world by posting them to a social bookmarking site.

  There are many social bookmarking sites now that you can take advantage of, and use to propel your site forward. The most popular of these is probably Del.icio.us, and is probably the best site to use to generate traffic. If you can get a link to your site on the first page of Del.icio.us it can drive large amounts of traffic.

• Other Social Media

  In addition to social bookmarking, there are a host of social media sites as well. They work in various ways. Mahalo.com, for example, says that they are the "world's first human-powered search engine." Stumbleupon.com says that you can "channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar" and as it learns what you like, it will make better recommendations.

  Digg and Reddit allow visitors to vote submitted sites up and down, but Stirrdup only allows you to vote them up, leaving those pages that are disliked ignored. Any or all of these social media sites can increase website traffic, and many of them can provide a very high powered backlink to your site as well.

• Other Web 2.0 Methods

  Social bookmarking and social media fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella label, but I thought they deserved their own categories. There are perhaps some other sites or methods that deserve their own list entries as well, but for now, I'll sumarize them here. I use these sites mainly for the backlinks, and only secondarily for branding, traffic, and exposure.

  Two of the most popular sites in this category are Squidoo and Hubpages, and they compete directly for attention. There are also some others, such as newsvine.com that are worth looking into if you feel your niche would fit.

• Article Marketing

  Article marketing is one of my favorite ways to increase website traffic. Partly because I used to be horrible at it and thought it didn't work, only to find out it's still one of the most powerful website promotion methods around.

  Take it from a reformed article marketing failure. If anyone tells you article marketing doesn't work, then they aren't doing it correctly. It's highly likely they're making these article marketing mistakes.

  I've made it an even more powerful way for you to increase website traffic by combining my article marketing techniques with social bookmarking and social media.

  If you follow my concepts, including these article marketing principles and avoid these additional mistakes, you'll be that much closer to getting plenty of traffic.

• Forums

  Finding niche related forums and posting useful information, especially in response to questions can be a great way to get traffic. For those forums that allow a link in your signature to your site, you may also get some SEO benefit as well.

• Other Traffic Building Techniques

  I prefer to spend most of my time on methods that either produce a lasting increase in website traffic, create more content, or create backlinks that pass PageRank. There are, however, some fairly easy to do methods that can bring bursts of traffic, regardless of those elements. Sometimes, these methods can bring some lasting traffic as well.

  I don't use them often (if at all), though, since most of them don't bring higher search engine placement, and don't have much leverage. Some of these include Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag.com. Be careful not to spam these sites. Sometimes it doesn't take much to get banned.

  I've left press releases off the list, as that is not something that I have in my traffic building arsenal as of this writing. Press releases need to be done in very specific ways, and when I get around to testing them, I'll write about them. For now, I think the above list is plenty for you to get started on.

Paid methods to increase website traffic

Paid methods to increase website traffic can be risky, expensive, and often do not produce the kind of return on investment (ROI) that will sustain a business. There are some exceptions to this, however, and if you expand your definition of paid traffic for just a moment, you might see some opportunities.

If your business model is efficient, you can buy traffic via various methods and turn a profit. You can also work a little smarter by outsourcing some of the same free traffic building methods described above. I'll get into the details of the paid methods to increase website traffic in some future articles, but for now I've listed some of the paid methods below.

• Outsourced Content
• Paid Links
• Paid Article Marketing
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Pay Per Impression (PPI)

I'll warn you that if your business model is to put up a one page site and then buy traffic, you'd better really know what you're doing.

Gauher Chaudhry is one of the best Google Adwords marketers I know of. As I've mentioned, he tells us that in his experience with Cost Per Action (CPA) pay per click (PPC) campiagns, most (over 80 percent) of those campaigns either lose money or break even. I'm not saying you can't make it work, only that it is difficult.

Increasingly, top PPC marketers are finding that the best way to market is to create search engine friendly content websites, and create something of value for the visitors. One of the very best ways to do that is by using SBI!

One page websites typically have only one of two purposes... either to sell something or to collect email addresses. There's nothing wrong with this if you're selling a product or building a list, but it is not designed to attract traffic.

If your business model relies largely on paying for traffic, you'll have an expense that your competitors may not. If you don't build your website in a way that attracts free traffic, then you will end up paying for traffic forever.