If you want to get traffic to your website and increase the number of visitors to your site…. this is where we get into the realm of “Internet Marketing”.
The internet is full of opinions and advice on internet marketing! But it seems to me that, these days, there are only two approaches:-
Traffic Option 1
Are you prepared to write about the subject of your site? For example, if your website is about men’s shirts, can you write lots about shirts, men’s clothes etc? (Or are you prepared to pay someone else to do it?)
If so, your internet marketing approach can focus on writing:-
You can build up a database of email addresses and contact them regularly, building up a following who trust you and are eventually prepared to buy from you.
An additional benefit of this approach is that other sites link to yours (other sites which have published your articles, or link to useful items in your blog…) – which increases the likelihood of your ranking high in the search engine results.
If you don’t want to put the time, effort or money in to writing, then the only other real option is…
Traffic Option 2
Paid links or Ads – Advertising, to get people who are interested to click through to your site.
Google Adwords is the obvious way to manage this kind of thing. There is also Yahoo Search Marketing and advertising on Facebook is growing in popularity.
Including ads/site links in other people’s email newsletters can be useful, if the emails are going to your target market.
There are also various Directory sites which usually allow you a free listing but charge for something bigger and prettier, and may also be worthwhile.
But I think you have to be discerning about this. There is no point in paying for a site to show an ad (or a link) to your Shirts site if the visitors to that site will have no interest in buying shirts.
Option 1 – writing is really the only way to go if you want to come near the top of Google natural search results today, especially if you are looking internationally. Have a look on Google and see what comes up for your search terms… you’ll find that most of the top listings are sites with pages and pages of good content.
That’s what we’re up against today!