An Introduction to Traffic Generation.

Content Is King

I know you’ve heard that phrase before, and probably one too many times. But, like all good sayings, there’s a reason why people say that. This is where you’re going to start generating content and marketing products. It's no secret that you need to create compelling content in order to attract attention and build your audience.

There’s no way around this so don’t kid yourself. Now I’m going to go over the very best ways about generating free traffic. I will exclude many different “methods” because they simply do not work and are only promoted by self proclaimed gurus that don’t know what they’re talking about.

For example: pinning pictures and links on Pinterest is not a good idea and is not effective for driving traffic, and neither is tweeting tweets on Twitter. In fact, you should not even bother using social networking sites at all when it comes to traffic generation, especially when you're first starting out. You will use social networks for networking, and that’s about it for now.

You can worry about using social networking sites only after you’ve established yourself, have a decent sized audience, and are making consistent money every month. I’ll talk about this more later, but having Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are only useful once you’re a recognizable brand...not a nobody. Anyway, before I run off on a tangent, I need to talk to you about traffic generation.

If you’re ever feeling unsure about what you should do to get traffic to your site, refer to this website since we're telling you exactly what you should be doing. I guarantee that if you use these techniques consistently, then you’ll get traffic to your site. How much traffic you get will from these strategies will ultimately be the result of how well you use them.

Also, you can’t expect to write generic, half assed comments/articles/emails and expect people to just show up. You need to always strive to be creative, engaging, and on top of your game. Sometimes it’s hard to know where you should focus your efforts when it comes to traffic generation, so this is why I’m really being clear when I tell you what you should and should not do.

I’m not a fan of bullshit, and so I’m only telling you to do things that I know that will work for you. Some things will work for you better than others, but you have to do them all to find out which ones they are. Once you do find those out, you will want to focus on those tactics heavily.

Oh, and before I forget, you should install some tracking tools such as Google’s Analytics. Why? It’s free, easy to implement, and will enable you to measure your traffic stats more reliably than if you used your cPanel’s traffic counters. Anyway, I digress.

Types Of Content

It's important to understand that content can be in the form of Advertisements, Videos, Ebooks, Podcasts, Newsletters, and the like. Because we want to keep things simple, you’re only going to focus on articles, then you're going to recycle that content into videos, ebooks, and newsletters. If you have some money to invest, this is also an area where you can outsource on the cheap and get things going rather quickly. So let’s talk about creating articles, and how to leverage them for maximum results.

There are so many ways to drive traffic to a website using offline and online methods. However, not all traffic is created equal, and using the wrong traffic generation method will result in having the wrong people seeing your site...or worse, no one seeing your site at all.

We want the right people looking at your site, and that means that we want really focused and highly targeted traffic coming to our sites. The most accurate method of doing this is by using paid traffic, but that is a whole other course in itself that we'll get into later. For now, I’m going to show you the next best thing, and it’s completely free.

Coming up in the next article, I’m going to go over the top 10 traffic generation methods. These methods are the ONLY methods that I recommend that you use until you’re making at least $2000/month. Seriously, you shouldn't bother with Social Networking sites for traffic, and don’t bother paying for traffic unless you have disposable income to invest in advertising. In all seriousness, you don’t need it at this point, and if you’re starting from the bottom, you can’t afford it right now anyway.

The Top 10 FREE Traffic Generation Methods.

In the last article, I introduced you to the idea of content marketing and traffic generation. In this article, you will get specific strategies and tactics that you will use to generate traffic to your website. Although there are ways to generate traffic through paid advertising, this article will only focus on FREE traffic generation.

#1: Blog Comments

You can search around for blogs that are related to your niche. You should have found some by now through the preliminary research you conducted before you even bought your domain name. You can use Google’s Blog Search to aid you in that matter too. You won’t get thousands of visitors from blog commenting, but it is a good way to get yourself out there and get noticed. From there, it can open up doors to networking - something that I will be talking about at a later time. Remember to actually read the blog before commenting on it, and be sure to keep it real.

#2: Forum Marketing

Jump into one or two forums and make a splash! Spend the first 2 weeks aggressively posting useful, helpful, and funny content. You will start to get noticed as a cool person around the forum and the mods will know that you’re ok. I recommend one month, but definitely wait 2 weeks before you add a signature file to your forum account.

When you do create a signature file, make sure that you keep it real. You don’t know how many signatures I see that are so blatantly full of shit that it’s almost funny. Don’t make that mistake. You can style it as an advertisement and get creative, but oftentimes it’s best to just let people know what you’ve got and then link to your site. Also, many forums do not allow affiliate links in the signature files, so be aware. Plus, you should only be linking to your website anyway, so that you can build your list!

#3: Guest Posting

This is a form of active article syndication in which you submit some of your best content to another webmaster for them to publish on their own website. For example, the articles you see here on this site are examples of guest posting! Sometimes, you can guest post with content that you’ve already published on your site, but oftentimes, your host will want exclusive content that won’t be published anywhere else. You will want to try to get at least one guest post done per month, so get out there and make those connections.

#4: Search Engine Traffic (Organic)

There’s not much you can do here, except to do a bit of research and find good keywords and key phrases that you can use for article titles, and/or article keywords. Generating content related to a specific keyword, or a key phrase, is a good way to not only create compelling content- but to rank a page with the search engines so that people find you naturally. Also, if you are using a Gmail account, then you might consider signing up for Google’s Authorship. This will definitely help your organic search results rank higher than the other guys. Also, don't neglect the other search engines! People still use Yahoo and Bing, and there is less competition to deal with too!

#5: Referral Traffic From Your Network

A lot of people know that I always stress the importance of building a network, and this is exactly why I do it! You might naturally get mentioned in someone else’s content, or you could ask someone in your network to do an interview with you, or an article about you. This will result in content for them, and a link to you. Inbound links from authority sites results in higher page rankings within the SERP's. Also, please note that letting other people provide content for you in the form of guest posts also falls under this method.

#6: Write “Link Bait” Articles

This strategy is also known as creating “Round Up” posts. In these articles, you will find the best or the worst people/places/things within a certain category. So you could write an article about the best bloggers within the personal finance niche, or an article rounding up the top five young actors in the US, or even write about the three worst XYZ people. You’ll have to include some links within the post to bait the content, but the search engines should do the rest.

Breaking news is also another form of link baiting. You’re being opportunistic in that you are publishing content about a trending topic faster that almost anyone around. You’ll have to be “johnny on the spot” in order to make this work, but it works very well if done correctly.

On that note, you can also piggy back off of trending topics too, so if the super bowl just happened, then you can write about the worst commercials of that event. Exploiting current events can do wonders for your traffic generation efforts, but you have to be relevant when you do that. If your site is about surviving an apocalypse or something, it’ll be hard to piggy back off of a stupid cat video that is currently trending. You know what I'm saying?

#7: Recycling Content For Web 2.0 Properties

I’ve talked about recycling content within the content here so far, but the idea is that you take your existing articles and recycle them into additional unique content. This can be done by taking the very best parts from a written article, and writing another article that goes into more depth about the best points within the original article.

Or, you can create a podcast that is basically you reading your original article out loud. Or you can create a pdf report that contains one or more articles that go over a specific concept. Or, you can create a screen capture video in which you display a powerpoint presentation while you do a voice over. Or you can make a vlog type video in which you’re just talking to the camera while going over the concepts you went over in the written article. You know what I'm saying?

With the exception of written articles, which you’ll post to your site, you’ll then post this recycled content to web 2.0 properties. These properties include:

• YouTube, for video content.
• Scribd, for written content. (pdf/powerpoint)
• BlogTalkRadio, for audio content. (podcasts)
• HubPages, for a little of everything.

#8: Social Bookmarking

Once you publish a piece of content, whether it’s and article, video, or whatever - you can share it using social bookmarking. The idea is that this will help stimulate immediate traffic to your new content, and subsequently, to your website. Social Bookmarking sites include:

• Blog Engage
• Stumble Upon
• Reddit
• Triberr

All of these services are free to join and work fairly well, depending on how you use them. Remember that you need to be compelling with everything you do, because the days of gaming the system for profit are coming to an end.

#9: Emailing Existing Subscribers & Buyers

If you’re building your buyers list and your subscribers list, you should be doing everything you can to keep them engaged with you so that they read your content and buy products from your recommendations. You can send out an email broadcast to them notifying them about new content on your site, but the tick here is that you need to make sure that the content is absolutely relevant to your list. More information on this method is included within the Email Marketing Volume.

#10: Passive Article Syndication Using Article Directories

Take your articles from your website and post them to an article directory like EzineArticles. Articles from directories don’t rank in the search engines anymore, and remember that the point of doing this is not really for the backlinks either. The point of doing this is for other publishers to use your content for their own website or email newsletter.

If they do, then they will include a link back to your website which will result in you drawing traffic from their subscribers. While I suggest that you focus on active article syndication (guest posting), it is really painless to simply copy and paste your articles to a directory. So you might as well do it.

Conclusion

These 10 traffic generation tactics are all you will need for your first year online. Apart from paying for traffic using advertising methods, these are really the only free methods that actually work nowadays. Also, these methods will keep you plenty busy, so just take your time and follow through with this consistently. Once you get the ball rolling and you start getting traffic, subscribers, and sales coming in- you’ll be hooked.

In the next article, I’m going to talk about the details within content creation. More specifically, I’m going to put to rest all of the hoopla surrounding the pointless argument between blogging and article marketing. Those two terms really mean the same thing even though they are made out to be different around the internet.