There are easy ways of bringing traffic to your website, and there are hard ways.
Most people focus on the hard ways.
They spend hours playing around with their keywords and their Search Engine Optimization. They spend vast sums on AdWords and other forms of advertising. And they send out email after email in an attempt to swap links and create exchanges.
That's fair enough. It's all part of the job of being an online publisher and you have to do it.
But if you aren't doing the easy stuff too then you're making your life much harder than it needs to be.
Every content page on your website should have a "Send a Friend" link so that each user can bring another user. That feature shouldn't actually send the content; it should simply send an email with a link and a subject line that says something like: "I found this at [your website] and thought you'd love it!"
Of course, not every viewer will use it, but many will and there are no more valuable users than those that come by referrals from friends.
You should also add links that let people recommend your content at various bookmarking/social networking sites.
There are lots of these now but the main ones are Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon and even Facebook.
Each article should have a link to all of them.
You could put these links at the bottom of the article. Although in general, ads at the end of articles perform less well than ads at the top of the page or embedded in the text, only people who read all the way through to the end of a post are likely to recommend it. And because the link should open in a new window, the recommendations shouldn't compete with your AdSense ads.
Publishers have seen their page views rocket after their articles hit Digg's front page, so add the links, check out what's being recommended... and write something similar.
It's much easier than SEO.
Great point Joel, especially about the send to friend link. I have the bookmarking shortcuts, but I don't think I have the send to friend. I used to have a plugin that put this on my posts, but...it stopped working properly with my theme upgrades.
By the way, I have one chapter left on "click here to order" so be looking for a review this week :)
Great point Joel, in the first place, i cannot find a great source where i can get a script for send to friend anywhere. But in my blogsite where in it contains helpful articles like most have, i have included DIGG, STUMBLEUPON and other social bookmarking stuff possible. I hope to drive traffic sometime soon.
I am in the dewelopping stage of my own website and, and will now add the "send to friend" link to each page. It is so simple, but as often simple things are also effective!
Dear Joel!
Please teach me to use my blogsite, because I didn,t use it.
Connection with Listbuilding I think it,s not hard for me, because I can get 22700 emails which I don,t delete, but you can think that this not can be healthy for my computer, so I am in trouble because off that. Most of all they ask persmissions from me to give me informations, but not everybodyes.
What is your opinion what can I do with them? I think it is time to delete them before my computer will be demolished.
Please write for me. Thank you.
The only way i try to attarct more website traffic is by commenting on other blogs like yours Joel and include a link back to you, so that in that effort, hoping that it would increase my SEO. i also comment on TechCrunch,Reuters, FOX Business, CNN Anderson Cooper, Alley Insider and a few good others...:-)
thankyou for the article. ill give that a try
This is the basic call to action principle that always work wonders for me.jimmie
I have used share it, that has all the bookmarking built in, it also has link to tell a friend. Does this stuff works? I do not see you using it.
Thanks for the great tip re links to Digg etc.
Something more to work on for our sites at
www.captainslacko.com and www.shippingcontainerhousingonline.com
Love your work
I found addthis.com which is one button for all sorts of media sites (twitter, myspace, facebook and email). It also has tracking capability.
I've been trying to build traffic to my website (www.girlsgathering.com) and was excited when I could see which content was being shared and which service they used to share it.
Christy
Or you can use message boards like italkabou.com, to create link to your site and build more traffic