7 Ways to increase traffic to your site.

1. Affiliate Program

This is the risk free way to advertise on the web, you can pay your affiliates a commission on any sales they bring in. Some affiliates specialise in high ranking landing pages that could be used to drive traffic to your site, and all they want in return is a slice of the action. You can either create your own scheme using some of the free scripts available or use a middle man such as www.cj.com (very expensive) or www.affiliatefuture.co.uk (a bit cheaper).

2. Email Marketing

Are you collecting e-mail addresses of your visitors ? if not why not ? Emailing your customer list can be one of the cheapest ways to generate traffic as you already have built up a relationship and hopefully trust. It's only Spam if they have not consented to have being sent an e-mail and you must give them the option to opt-out. It's called list management and sites such as ContactImpact.com email marketing service will manage this for you initially for free.

3. Website Monitoring

There's no point executing a bunch of campaigns to get traffic to your site if your site is down when people arrive. If your site is down now how would you know ?, if you're not sure then you need a website monitoring service. try AlertRobot.co.uk website monitoring (shameless plug)

4. Offline marketing campaign

Don't write off traditional marketing techniques - classified adds, leaflets, business cards, cold calling !!!. The big boys may have cornered the market for search terms such as mortgage and loans, but a leaflet drop in your local area can be very affective.

5. Forum signatures

Contribute to forums that concern your area of focus. Always be on topic and useful. A forum post is not....

"I've found this great site, go and have a look http://www.yoursite.com"

It's obvious and irritating, instead contribute helpfully to discussions and leave your signature at the end, put your URL into your signature and place some keywords into the URL title, that way if google spiders the forum it will associate those words with your site. See the example at the end of this posting.

6. Link with high PR sites.

PR = Page Ranking

Google gives all sites a PR value based on a proprietary algorithm, you can use the Google toolbar to figure out your own and other peoples PR. The higher your PR the more likely you are to figure highly in search results, your PR is affected by how many people link to you and what PR they have amongst other attributes.

Find other sites in your area of concern with the same or higher PR values and ask to trade links.

7. Some more content.

Google loves content. You may not want to write a new article every day, but what about some of the content you already have as a business. News items, white papers, company announcements, product descriptions, put them on your site.

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