Targeted Traffic to Your Blog/Website

How to Get Free Targeted Traffic to Your Blog/Website

How do I get free targeted traffic to my blog or website? This question is becoming most asked question in the online community. Everybody seems to be finding a better way to get thousands of visitors to their sites without paying a single dime. It is a good idea anyways. Not everybody has the resource to go for paid advertisement especially the newbies. There are two types of traffic has regards our topic – Free and Paid.

The paid traffic deals with paying a certain amount to buy advertisement from advertising company like Google Adwords, Yahoo Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. But our focuse today is how we can generate targeted traffic to our blog/website free of charge. And there are numerous ways to do this. Below, I have listed few ways (I can remember at the moment) to get free targeted traffic to your websites/blogs.

Free Traffic Sources:

Article Marketing
Video Marketing
Blog Marketing/Joint Venturing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Niche Forums
Blog Commenting
Viral ebooks
Free Reports
Free Video Distribution (Youtube, MetaCafe, etc)
Answering Communities (Yahoo Answers, Wiki, Google Baraza, etc)
Free Press Release
Directory Submission
RSS Feeds
Traffic Exchanges
Banner Exchanges
Link Exchanges
Safe Lists and List Swap
Backlinks
Article Resource Boxes
Video Descriptions
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google+
Word of Mouth (offline)

The above lists are not limited to free ways to get traffic to ones websites. They are just few of the few ways to do it. In my upcoming series of articles, I will be analyzing all these free traffic sources one by one. So if you do not want to miss all the tutorials on how to get free targeted traffic to your blog/website, Click here to subscribe to our post updates. Then go to your email inbox to activate your subscription.

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Once our website gets live, we implement Google Analytics or any other traffic tracking software on our website with the intention that we will start seeing 100’s of visitors to our website from day one. But that does not happen except you are starting a website around big brand or advertising a lot about your new website. So we need to work really hard to increase our website daily traffic from zero to 100 and then from 100 to 1000.

If spend time on Internet to find out ways to increase traffic to your website, you will come across 100 plus ways at least. But all of them will not work for you. You need to go for the ways that actually helps you improve your website traffic. If you are selling services, products or plain advertisements on your blog, your revenue will depend a lot on your website traffic. As your website traffic increase, sales, leads and money from direct advertisement will increase accordingly. Suppose I’m able to make $200 from advertisements on my website with a monthly traffic of 6000. If I’m able to double my traffic in next six months type somehow, my monthly earnings from advertisements should reach near $400.

In today’s article, I’m going to share 20 tips that will help website owners and bloggers increase traffic to their websites and blogs for free.

1. Write High Quality Contents

As you know more content means more traffic for your website. So you should look at ways to publish more content on your website on regular intervals. It would be great if you could add 2-3 new articles on your website around your website niche. And before writing article around a topic, you should do some keyword research around the keyword you want to target through that article.

2. Active on Social Bookmarking Websites

If you are feeling that your website content are good enough to shared on social networks, start sharing them on social bookmarking websites. If your website contents are good, other peoples on social bookmarking websites would like to read, share, vote and comment on them. When we submit our website articles on these websites, that will help us drive some instant traffic to our website, help towards faster indexing of website contents, brand building and high quality backlinks for better search engine rankings. So I would suggest you start sharing some of interesting articles from your website on top social bookmarking networks including Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Google Buzz, Humsurfer etc. if any of your article gets viral on these networks, you can get even 10000 hits from these social bookmarking websites in a single day on your website.

3. Use Yahoo Answers

I have seen lots of Internet marketers using Yahoo Answerseffectively for driving lots of targeted traffic on their websites. I himself have used Yahoo Answer on some of my websites in health niche. I was able to get even 100 visits from Yahoo Answers in a single day. To be successful with Yahoo Answers, you should start answering questions in niche you are most interested in and knowledgeable about. Your interest and knowledge should match with the website for whom you are thinking of driving additional traffic. I have noticed lots of Yahoo Answers results appearing in search engine results for related queries. Apart from search engine traffic, Yahoo Answers has its own huge fan base that used to browse various categories to get solutions for their problems. You should aim at solving the answer problem with your answer and your answer should not look like a marketing copy of your website. If you do so, your account will be suspended. If other members in Yahoo Answers community feel that your answer is the right answer, they will vote for you and the answer with maximum votes will be declared a winner. The only downside I feel with Yahoo Answer is that all links that we add on Yahoo Answer are nofollow, so we will not get any search engine rankings benefits on Google at least. And we need to be active on Yahoo Answers to keep on getting regular stream of traffic from it on our website. For one of my blog for which I used Yahoo Answers for driving additional traffic has so far given me 20000 plus visits. Here is a screenshot showing traffic that I get from Yahoo Answers for that website.

4. Create Squidoo Lenses

Squidoo gives us the facility to create pages popularity known as lenses around topics of our interest. I have seen lots of people are able to get 100 plus visits on their single lens only every day because Squidoo is top authority website and chances of our content getting higher rankings are quite good if they are published on Squidoo as compared to our own websites. I have even noticed some people are able to make their living from Squidoo lenses only. People use Squidoo lenses to publish their knowledge and interest around a particular topic. So lots of people use Squidoo for creating topical pages. Apart from this lot of guys from seo and blogging communities use Squidoo to build traffic, backlinks and branding for their websites. Squidoo has a huge database of visitors, so lots of people will use Squidoo categories and search options to find desired information. Apart from this, Squidoo lenses rank really high on search engines. So you can expect good amount of high quality traffic coming to your website from Squidoo. You should include few links pointing to your website targeted pages from Squidoo lenses to get maximum benefit of Squidoo lens creation.

5. Create Hubpages

Like Squidoo, we can get some additional traffic to our website by creating hubs on Hubpages.com website. More and more Internet marketers have started including websites like Squidoo and Hubpages into their website promotion plan as these websites give them good traffic and backlinks to help them with promoting their websites.

6. Write Guest Posts

Next thing I would recommend doing is writing guest postson top blogs in your niche. You should create a list of most popular blogs in your website niche and contact them with the intension to contribute guest posts on their blogs. Most of bloggers will reply positively as blogs need lots of new content on the targeted topics. Once a blogger shows interest in accepting your guest post, you should write a high quality guest post matching that blog niche and follow the guideless given by that blog owners, you should follow during guest blogging on that blog. Once your guest post gets publish, you should share it on social networks where you are active and reply to incoming comments on your guest post. You will get lots of additional benefits apart from instant traffic from guest blogging efforts. You can expect receiving few clicks to 1000 plus visits to your website from a single guest post depending upon your writing style and the popularity of blog where your guest post is actually published.

7. Work As An Expert in Discussion Forums

There are thousands of active discussion forums available, so you will end up getting few discussion forums that are active in your website niche. You should start replying to open threads for which you have a solution. With most of discussion forum, you can add few links to your website in Signature sections. So if people find your solution really helpful, they may go to your website to know more about you and your website services. You should not think of spamming these forums with unrelated self-promotional links. If you do so, your account will be banned from that discussion forum. You can expect some regular traffic and backlinks for your website from discussion forums matching your website niche.

8. Do Lots of Blog Commenting

Make a list of high traffic blogs matching your blog and start making comments on them. As you know, you get a backlink from each approved comment that you write on other blogs. So lots of readers on those blogs will click on the link placed against your website and thus will bring more traffic to your website. To get maximum traffic to your blog commenting efforts, you should try to the first commenter on most of posts as your comment will be more read and clicked there. Lots of people use Google Reader to track their favorite blogs for doing comments. As they notice a new post publishing on any of blog, they will simply go and write their valuable comments so that their comments are actually approved by the blog owners.

9. Do Article Submissions

Write some high quality and interesting articles around your website niche and start publishing them on 5-10 top article publishing websites. Most of article directories will allow you 2-3 links in Author sections that you can use to drive traffic to your website targeted pages. Some high quality backlinks from article publishing websites will help you get top rankings for the targeted keywords and that means more traffic for your website from search engines.

10. Do Press Releases

You should write press release if you adding new product or functionality to your website and submit that on top press release accepting websites. Some topics you can think of doing press release can be latest news, latest development on your website products or services, latest trends etc. If people likes your press release, they will click on your website links that you have placed in your press release. Apart from this, you will be able to get additional links for your website for improving your website search engine rankings and Google Page Rank.

11. Add Links for Your Website on Wikipedia.org

I would advise you to create a page around your brand name on Wikipedia.org website. Apart from this, you should find some topics that you have covered in detail on your website and add links to those pages in Wiikipedia.org articles References or External Links section. For one of my blog, I got 21000 plus visits so far from Wikimedia.org website where I have added a link to one of my blog post in Wikipedia article’s External Links Section. Here is a screenshot showing the same:

12. Facebook Fan Page

Start a Fan Page around your brand and start promoting it. Look for ways to increase your Facebook Fan Base. We don’t need to discuss the popularity and the kind of user base Facebook has. Lots of businesses are able to survive using Facebook marketing only. Having a fan page with thousands of fans will not only help you get lots of direct traffic to your website from your fan page but also helps you improve your website search engine ranking and brand awareness. I have created a Fan Page for Bloggers Passion here, in case you want to check and like my Fan Page.

13. Twitter Profile

Create a strong presence on Twitter and start sharing interesting articles from your website on Twitter. You should write engaging and knowledgeable tweets on Twitter. If people find your tweets interesting, they will click on your website links. You should include some related tags towards the end of your tweet using hash tag. When you use hash tag with your tweets, people may find your tweets while searching for topics of their interest using Twitter search functionality. You can follow Bloggers Passion on Twitterhere.

14. Use Classified Websites

If you are a website focused around certain services or products, you should use classified websites. You will get highly relevant traffic when you do classified submissions as most of users visit classified websites to get solutions for their problems. So if they like your product or services, they will surely go for it. So classified websites will help you with more traffic, sales and branding of your website.

15. Directory Submissions

You should submit your website into high PR web directories. Apart from high PR directories, I would recommend submitting your website into web directories having Alexa in five figures and directories that are related to your website niche and demographics. Submission into web directories will give you some gradual traffic and keyword based links which will help you improve your website search engine rankings and thus help you in increasing traffic for your website.

16. Search Engine Submissions

If you have a brand new website, you should submit your website to some popular search engines. Submitting your website into those search engines will help your website faster indexing into their databases and chances of increasing more traffic to your website from most popular search engines.

17. RSS Feed Submissions

If you are offering RSS Feeds facility to your website readers that they can use to subscribe to keep track of latest content coming on your website. I would suggest you submit your RSS feeds into RSS directories. There are hundreds of active RSS directories where you can submit your website RSS. Again you will get some traffic and backlinks for your website through RSS submissions.

18. Use Your Website Links in Email Signature

It is advised to add a link for your website in all of your email signatures. Presence of your website links in signature sections will help people know in detail about you and your company. And when you send emails to someone who is receiving your email for the first time, may even go on checking your website by clicking the link available in your email signature.

19. Show Your Presence in Groups

You should join and be active on groups that are focused around the topics you cover on your website. You will get lots of targeted groups on Google Groups, Yahoo Groups and Facebook Groups section.

20. Do Link Exchange

Link exchange is still effective if done properly. While doing link exchange, you should go for websites and blogs only are related to your website niche. So when you get seo optimized links from related websites and blogs, will help you drive lots of traffic to your website from Google, Yahoo and Bing.