Building Website Traffic

Having posted several articles recently on passive income and included websites and blogs as a possible source, I have received several questions on how to build traffic and promote a website or blog. So here are my suggestions and the methods that I use.

1. Register your site with Google. Create an account with Google then sign in to the webmaster tool, register your site by following the instructions. If you have not registered, Google will not index your pages. You may also need to register with Yahoo, Live and Ask. I’m sure you can find how to do this for yourself by a quick Google search.

2. Create lots of high quality original articles and content. Give people useful information. If you are only selling, people will leave quickly and not come back. I would aim to write at least 2-3 articles a week and have 100 or more articles on your site. Content is key to getting traffic from Google or anywhere else. Repeat visitors and word of mouth advertising only comes from great content!

3. One way back links. The more people linking to your website from their website the better. Back links are very important in getting search engine rankings. Again it is great content that will start to generate these links. If your site is only selling it will be hard to get links. A good place to get started building a link program is by contributing to Article banks, participating in forums or submitting to blog carnivals.

4. Participate in relevant forums. You can build a reputation, gain back links and build traffic. My advice here would be that if you do use forums makes sure your posts are informative. If you are just posting to get back links your site will just be looked at as spam.

5. Look for opportunities to provide expert information. Sites like Yahoo Answers is great, again a warning, don't spam.

6. Take advantage of social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. It's easy to find people who are interested in your topic and contact them directly. Use the groups feature on these sites to find people who may be interested in your topic and contact them.

7. Blog Carnivals. You can submit articles to blog carnivals. This serves several purposes, it creates awareness of your site, plus it builds up back links. There is also auto submitter software available that makes it very easy once you set it up. You can submit articles to 20 or more carnivals in minutes. I do this once a week and find it very successful.

8. Lastly, but probably the most important, write with passion. Even when you get the traffic, you have to keep it. It is the passion in your work and the quality of content that will shine and keep people coming back again and again.

In conclusion I would say that Rome was not built in a day; to build long term, qualified traffic takes time and possibly money. Keep going, keep motivated and keep adding quality content and your site will turn into a productive business.

As always, best of luck.

Building Website Traffic