Sometimes it seems extremely hard to get those first 100 visitors to
your articles and it can be frustrating when this happens; especially
when you are new to the world of Internet Marketing and you just don’t
know what you are doing wrong. Well I’m here to help you with these ’10
Ways To Bring Visitors To Your Articles’ admittedly this is not going to
be a masterclass which draws on and on; this is all about helping you
to get to your first 100 visitors as quickly and easily as possible
without a ton of jargon. So here you go guys I hope this truly helps
some of you out. If you enjoy this post, you should also check David’s
other posts such as 10 WordPress Plugins for Bloggers!
1. Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! might be losing the search engine market share battle but they
still dominate in the Question and Answers arena. People ask thousands
of questions every day in almost every niche and industry you can
imagine. A quick search for “Search Engine Optimization” shows over
1,300 questions that can be answered. The key to driving massive amounts
of traffic from Yahoo! Answers is to give genuinely helpful answers.
Instead of trying to create a blatant advertisement for your website
work on becoming an authority in your industry.
This technique has the potential to send you far more than 100
visitors. When people use search engines to look for the questions you
answered often times a Yahoo! Answers result will appear near the top of
the search results. This will give you and your website a ton of
exposure if you answer commonly asked questions!
2. Social Bookmarking
If you create content that people enjoy it can easily become popular
or even go viral. The important thing is to put your website and content
in front of people that are looking for it, right? Social bookmarking
is a super easy way to do just that. Social bookmarking sites allow
users to bookmark their favorite websites that other people can publicly
view and vote up or down. If you bookmark useful content other people
will find it, share it, and vote it up so others can enjoy it. Oh yeah,
and it only takes about 30 seconds to bookmark your site.
The 3 most popular social bookmarking sites are
Digg,
Reddit, and
Delicious.
These 3 sites get over 8 MILLION unique visitors a month – funneling
off a chunk of that traffic to your website is very doable. (There’s
plenty to go around ) Just remember to create content that people will
enjoy and/or find useful. The most popular content on social bookmarking
sites are usually check lists, “Top 10” lists, tools & resources,
and breaking news – so keep that in mind!
3. Squidoo
Squidoo is a website full of 100% user generated content that allows
you to create what’s called a “lense.” A lense is a page about a
specific topic that you choose to write about (usually something you’re
knowledgeable in). After creating your lense other people can find it by
searching for terms and keywords related to your lense. Let me just
start off by saying Squidoo is an absolute powerhouse in the search
engines (by
lawrence mcmeen).
Its very easy to rank Squidoo lenses for competitive terms that would
prove to be a challenge for websites with lesser authority. Creating a
lense on Squidoo gives you 2 traffic opportunities:
- When people use search engines and search for keywords related to
your lense it will sometimes show up in the top search results if it’s
relevant enough to the search phrase. This means you can get drones of
targeted traffic to your lense from search engines that you can funnel
into your website.
- Squidoo has a huge community of active users that use Squidoo to
find things they want to know more about. Squidoo currently gets over 9
million unique visitors a month and they’re still growing steadily. Look
at Squidoo’s traffic growth over just the last year:
Creating a lense or two is one of my favorite ways to get laser targeted traffic without hours of work.
4. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to generate free traffic – all you have
to invest is the time to write an article. Get in touch with the most
popular blogs in your industry and ask if they’ll let you write a guest
post. Most website owners will have no objections to having other people
write free content for them. (ask Michael how I know…wink, wink) If
you’re having trouble finding blogs to guest post on check out
www.myblogguest.com – they have a full community of bloggers that are ready and waiting for your content.
5. Forum Posting
There are community forums setup online for virtually every niche,
industry, or topic you can imagine. The internet is a prime place for
like minded people to talk to each other. 9 times out of 10 you can find
a forum for your industry just by typing in [your industry]forum.com or
searching for “[Your Industry] Forum” on Google.
Find the forums in your industry with the largest user base, start
posting there and become an active community member. Most forums will
allow you to leave a link to your website in your post signature, so the
more you post the more traffic you get.
6. Twitter
Every time I write new content I post it to twitter. If you use the
right keywords and make your tweet interesting enough you can get a lot
of clickthroughs just from people searching.
For example if I write an article about SEO and Google I can tag the
end of the tweet with #SEO #Google and anyone that searches for those
keywords on Twitter can see my tweet about the post that I wrote. Be
sure to write creative headlines for your posts so people feel the urge
to click on them.
7.Facebook
Creating a Facebook fan page takes about an entire 45 seconds and is a
almost a necessity at this point for every business owner. Considering
that 1 in 13 people on EARTH have a Facebook account there’s really no
need to explain why you should be there. Pro tip: make sure you create a
fan page and not a group. Groups messages don’t show up in news feeds
making it hard to get in touch with members. Making a fan page will give
you a lot more exposure to not only the current members but members
friends as well.
8. Blog Commenting
Commenting on blog posts written by industry experts with lots of
followers can bring your website a lot of traffic. When you post a
comment (most) blogs allow you to leave a link back to your site for
other readers to check out – as long as you leave an insightful comment
you WILL get traffic from your blog comments. Make sure you comment as
quickly as possible when new blog posts go up. The higher in the
comments you are the more clicks you’ll get. I have
Google Reader
setup to alert me when new blog posts are made on the industry blogs I
follow and I comment immediately to lock in my first place spot.
9. Article Marketing
Promoting your websites by publishing articles to various article
directories is by no means a new idea but still an extremely effective
way to drive traffic. If you write content and publish it to websites
like
Ezine Articles,
Article Base, and
Article Dashboard
website owners will pick it up and post it. This idea is similar to
guest blogging except that you only have to write one piece of content
that can end up on hundreds of even thousands of blogs and websites.
The same rule applies here: don’t be boring – be creative and
interesting and use common keywords in your article and title so website
owners can find it!
10. Link bait
The idea of “link bait” refers to creating content that is so
extremely useful or entertaining it compels people to link to it. Put
yourself in the shoes of your target demographic and figure out what
they would enjoy or what would help them the most. Is there a tool you
can make to automate some tedious process? Can you find enough data to
make an interesting infographic? Is there a checklist or cheat sheet
that would prove handy to your audience? The possibilities are nearly
endless – survey your visitors and see what is missing or lacking in
your industry and fill in the gaps.
AUTHOR: David Sinick is the owner of
Real World Traffic, LLC – an training course specializing in traffic
& conversion. David also runs an online advertising agency, Beast
Media LLC.
