Building and Maximizing your Site's Traffic
by Charlie Abbott, MagicLinx.com
http://www.linkleads.com/sitetraffic.html
If you have ever owned a commercial web site, you know the
vast majority of the time you spend working on it is dedicated towards
promoting it. In this article I'll explain how to generate more traffic for
your site using methods other than search engines and more importantly how
to maximize traffic when it's there.
The days of simply submitting your site to the top engines and sitting back and waiting for the hits to arrive are long gone, and a popular site relies on a variety of online marketing techniques...
Banner exchanges
Take a look at how most of the top sites make money on the web and the
chances are it's through banner advertising (selling space on their most
popular pages to other sites). Whereas your site may not be in that league
just yet, you can still benefit from having banner ads on it in the form of
banner exchanges. Many of the banner exchange companies offer a 2/1 ratio,
which means that for every two ads you show on your site your banner is
displayed once on another site. By placing your banner exchange banners on
your pages that visitor spend the most time on, like form pages, articles
and resource lists, you limit the traffic exiting your site through banners
listed on your site. Provided you sign-up to a good Banner Exchange who
offer detailed statistics and targeted sites for your banner to appear on,
this method of promotion should generate a steady flow of traffic to your
site.
Exchanging links
Exchanging links with a popular related topic site not only generates
traffic from the site linking to you but also improves your standing as far
as search engines are concerned. The reason for this is that the more links
to a site, the more highly regarded that site is on that topic, which will
help your site's overall rank with the top engines.
Top list engines
Well known among the adult webmaster world, top list engines count clicks on
a link from your site and send the clicker to a topic-specific ranking table
made up of a list of sites on a similar subject. In some cases the top ten
sites on each list can display their banner ad as well as the site title and
a brief description. The more clicks a site receives the higher up that top
list it appears for that day, week or month, depending on when the list
resets. Top lists are an excellent way of utilizing your dead traffic, i.e.
visitors that want to leave your site. By placing a top list engine
reciprocal link at the bottom of your most popular exit pages (like your
credit card order page or the foot of your index page) you are making the
most of your site traffic. For a more in-depth explanation of how top lists
work check MagicLinx.com.
Utilizing the above marketing methods I've managed to increase my site's traffic threefold, without the use of a top search engine ranking.
Copyright August 2000 C. Abbott -
Web developer and Online Marketing Consultant, currently working on
MagicLinx.com Free TopList Engine.