This post is a general guide of simplistic tips and programs proven to help sites build traffic.
First above all else is remember that content is the most important thing to building your traffic. If you don't give a new visitor a reason to come back to your site, then your traffic will never increase. So above all else keep your site updated regularly with QUALITY content. This means you must have something original that only you can provide for the visitor or a unique way of providing said information. Hence the saying among pro-bloggers "content is king".
Second most important thing in building traffic is SEO(search engine optimization). It is true there are many blogs that get lots of traffic without quality seo, but this is harder to achieve and not guaranteed. You can start by creating meta tags and a sitemap. Next make sure to submit your site to the search engines so they know you exist. Then consult some seo sites for more detailed information. Don't pay someone their is plenty of free information on the web on how to make your site search engine optimized.
Third your site needs to have a way for people to find it. If there is no way for a visitor to find your site then how do you expect to get more traffic? I often see sites with no link exchanges, no social media for sharing, and what? No traffic. How can you change this. Simple link exchange, submit articles, submit your feeds, and submit your sites address to search engines. You can submit your sites to search engines through many sites and for many directly at the search engine. Don't over submit, I would recommend submitting your site once or twice a month. You can also use a pinger like totalping to tell search engines when you have updated to index your site faster. Putting a link anywhere you can helps whether it be in a signature in your email or in your forum posts (especially one way links to your site). Wiki's are also indexed regularly by search engines and are an easy way to get one way links into your site(very important for seo). Create a wiki about yourself with a link to your site and one about your site obviously linking to your site. Yahoo answers is another place to get good links to your site. You can look for questions relating to your topic and write a quick post that has the answer to the question within. Then reply to the question quoting your site as the source. Surprisingly this works very well. The same concept applies to commenting at sites related to your topic. The best strategy I've found is to do a google search for do follow blogs/sites or better yet do follow directories. Then narrow it down to do follow sites that are in your category and have either page rank or high traffic. Now your going to want to follow these sites for a couple months making regular comments that are helpful and relevant to the subject matter. By doing this you will get one way links to your site, expose your site to a new community of potential visitors that are related to your field and possibly get to know a webmaster that might be willing to either teach you more about marketing your site in that niche or link exchanging. Signing your site up for every possible web directory, related top site and rss feed submission site is also a good idea. The more ways someone can find your site the better. One more clever way I've been exposed to is to make short video responses to popular youtube videos and have your url at the end of the video. This is like commenting on a forum but with a great chance of conversion.
Fourth a very important step in getting more traffic is to make your site social. What do I mean by social. I'm referring to the social sharing communities such as digg, stumbleupon, facebook, yahoo buzz, reddit and many others. You can make your site easier for your visitors to help spread the word by adding addthis.com or addtoany.com button to your site or several other sharing widgets. I also suggest you join some of these social communities and take advantage of the floodgates of traffic available. The best shared posts are generally top 10 posts, emotional posts, controversial opinion posts, or a highly knowledgeable and resourceful post.
The fifth way to gain more traffic is to use traffic building programs and exchanges. There are several forms of these exchanges. The most common are surf exchanges, banner exchanges, and text link exchanges. I will list some of the programs I have tried below and come to like.
Link Referral is one of my favorites because you get more targeted visitors to your site who may become actual visitors that will come back. Every visitor clicks on your site and can see the short description you write, they are not forced to come like other traffic exchanges. The way it works is you set up your page for their directory filling out a accurate description and categorize it. Your site is then put in the directory. Listings are ordered based on tiered scale, involving how involved you are, how good the reviews you give, and how many referrals you have. To increase your ratings and move you up higher in your category you simply visit up to thirty sites a day and give up to 5 reviews a day(though reviews are optional). If you write a really good review someone may choose to post it on their site with your link. The longer you are a member and more referrals you get the higher you are naturally ranked. Signing in daily boosts your ranking also. Link Referral also has a search field that people can search using keywords. I get several visitors every week just on the keywords I set up, which isn't based on ranking. Any user can expect 20 to 70 (and growing as new members join) visits a day for 20 minutes or less of participation. Link Referral also has a wonderful forum which users can use to get tips on several fields and also increases their ranking in the directory. Finally add in the fact that you can upgrade anytime in the future for a one time fee to make money off every referral future or past is the final selling point. I'm almost to where my upgrade is free :-).
Here is what their text link exchange looks like.
I also like easy hits for you. I like this site because its quick to surf, they have one to one traffic exchange and they pay you for every thousand sites you visit. On top of that you can make money off your referrals surfing and get credits from them surfing. If that's not good enough you get bonuses for being in the top ten surfers. One of my favorite strategies is to open three tabs and surf easy hits, traffic swarm and traffic g all at the same time. This way I'm getting three times the credits in twenty to thirty second intervals. The last good thing about easy hits is its banner exchange. Upgrading for any of these sites gives you nice monthly perks. I would recommend upgrading for the one you plan to surf most since it will pay off in the long run.
Traffic Swarm is also one of my favorite traffic exchanges. The reason I like traffic swarm is for many of the same reasons I like link referral. Visitors are not sent to your site without consent through a javascript, instead they come through a page showing many small links with descriptions of sites. They then can choose which sites to visit. Traffic swarm also gives you credits for your referrals surfing, bonuses for surfing and has a text link exchange that can get you more hits also and earns more credits as you can see at the bottom of my site.
Here is an example of their text link exchange.
Traffic g is very similar to traffic swarm but you don't control what site you are sent to when you surf. But i like this because you CAN SURF BOTH TRAFFIC G, EASY HITS, and TRAFFIC SWARM AT THE SAME TIME. As long as you can open three browsers at a time then you can surf them all at the same time generating lots more traffic. I set TRAFFIC G as my HOMEGPAGE using the STARTPAGE exchange, i used them for my homepage instead of traffic swarm because it will give you guaranteed hits, using traffic swarm's start page just gives you more credits and increases the chance of a visitor.
One more surfing exchange I will mention that some really like is Dragon Surf. They also have a few sister sites and have one site that combines them all to a super surf. The reason I mention them below the others is this surf community is the highest in SPAM and sends regular community emails that are flat out annoying. The others allow you to not receive this crap. However Dragon surf will send this to you no matter what. If you want more traffic though check them out.
Click Thru is also a great traffic exchange. I like them because you get visits just for signing up you get over 250 visits to your site. You can get even more by adding a small "hot spot" button to your site. When you surf with them if you see a "hot spot" on a site you can click it and earn up to a thousand visitors just by spotting it. This makes the people surfing your site actually look around and gives you a chance to get loads of traffic when you surf :-) You also will get traffic through people searching their directory, which you can list your site with key words and in several specific directories to get highly targeted traffic.
My favorite banner exchange that I'm going to start off with is advert ads banner exchange. The reason I like them is they took the concept behind viral text ads and applied it to banners, splicing banners into five sections. Giving more impressions for each impression you give and also giving you a chance to earn impressions from referrals. In fact they give you over a thousand impressions just to sign up and 1000 impressions for every referral. The key here is to come up with a very catchy phrase for your banner to make click through ratio.
X-Banners is a 1 : 1 banner exchange, earning you 1 credit for every 1 banner(s) displayed on your site through our easy to add HTML code. 20,000 Credits for sign up! 5,000 Credits per referral! Join Today! 20,000 Free Credits every time we hit the new million mark! 5 Banners per Member! These programs are great to throw on highly trafficed pages of the main page, like an affiliates page or on a contact page etc. Plus who can turn down free credits. Make sure to have a decent banner set up to get a good click through ratio.
I also like the MDX Banner Exchange because it is a 1:1 banner exchange, earning you 1 credit for every banner displayed on your site through our easy to add HTML code. Signing up give you a thousand credits and you receive 500 for every referral.
SurfCash Is A Unique Free Traffic Exchange System For Websites & Business Owners Wanting High Exposure. We have combined a Autosurf , Manual Surf, Banner and a Text Ad Exchanges, all on the same credit system. Receive 2,500 FREE Credits Upon Sign-Up To Start You Off. Personally, I just signed up for the free credits, banner + text link exchange. Also get bonus credits for signing in.
ClickMyAd™ Banner Exchange is a free banner exchange service
that automatically trades banner ad space on your website with banner ads from other websites.
You will earn 1 banner credit for every 2 banners shown on your website.
Zeriouz is a great text link exchange. Zeriouz displays the five upline members links in an easy to read text link. You get lots of easy one way back links to your site from people joining under you. This is awesome for getting more links and for your seo. This is one of my favorite text link exchanges. Below is a vertical example of how it works, they also feature a horizontal version.
zeriouz Partners
www.gazettedaily.org
www.c76.info
www.new-world-order-website.info
www.tubegatherings.com
www.media-proxy.com
Add Your Link
www.gazettedaily.org
www.c76.info
www.new-world-order-website.info
www.tubegatherings.com
www.media-proxy.com
Add Your Link
Another great text link exchange is the 23 text links exchange program. They give you a widget that shows ten text links along with your referral link. The advantage of this program is that you get more links shown, the downside is that its hard to blend this widget to every template it would be much nicer if the text links showed up more simliar to zeriouz to keep a more professional look. Though this is a great source for traffic if you remember to switch your slogan or text link ad occasionally and get lots of impressions already.
One of my favorite widgets to use to gain new traffic is blogrush. I like this for two reasons, it displays your latest post and its viral. The more referrals the more displays you get, the more pageviews you get the more it displays. This widget has unbeleivable potential for people who write with catchy headlines and get decent traffic already or have a halfway decent approach to getting referrals. The downside is they are really strict about who they approve and there terms of service, hence the lack of a referral link :-( . Though I know several other users who use this site and have given rave reviews to me about it. I have yet to hear anything bad about their service.
Another great widget that will bring you traffic is entrecard. Entrecard is kind of a surf exchange. They give you points or credits for clicking or "dropping" on another persons widget. If you do this enough you will have enough credits to buy a ad on another persons widget. By clicking on an entrecard widget you also leave your "ecard" in their inbox. Many of these surfs are highly loyal and check their inbox. So you will get a reciprocal "drop" on your widget giving you a credit. My advice for this program is download their toolbar and find people with the u drop I follow banner under their widget. This normally means they are a reciprical dropper. This programs has its pros that its easy to use, you get traffic and you get a chance to put ads on several different sites. The downside is a strict admins, you don't really get what you work for in terms of traffic. The traffic you get is what I call bounce traffic, only their long enough to drop on your widget. I recommend using this program for a month or so to try and gain new loyal visitors or when you need a boost in topsites etc. Other than that just leave your widget up and drop on the people who drop on you. I wouldn't invest too much time in this, though others will argue with me that this community is a wonderful source of traffic and you get thousands of hits a day. Which is true but you gotta be religious with this community about dropping. Half the time I find I load a site the widget is gone or doesn't work. So I think to myself I could be surfing three quality traffic exchanges that are guarenteed hits to my site instead in the same time...Just my two cents.
I also like the 125 banner exchange for the simple reason that they are small and not obvious. You can put them anywhere on your site and you get extra impressions for referrals, plus its based on page views. This is great way to get some easy advertising on a great range of sites to bring in new traffic.
Another 125 system I like that can get you some crazy amounts of traffic is the publicity wheel. This system is set up so that whoever gets the most clicks and referrals on their widget gets their ad shown on everyone's widget in their category for a set time frame. This means you get crazy amounts of exposure. I have won this several times and let me tell you when you do be prepared to have lots of traffic. The key with this program is having a good 125 banner so that when you do when you get the traffic you want. I doubled my traffic by changing my 125 ad the second time I won. If you don't win no real big loss its just a 125 space.
Spottt is a one to one 125 banner exchange. Its a good program but the only down side is you must have the 125 above the fold, so that it is seen upon loading without any scrolling. This is the only downside and a very enforced requirement. The good side of this is your 125 ad is always visible to every visitor.
Growurl is kind of a cross between a link submission to relatively unknown search engines to me (probally be cause they are forgien countries from my usa), a text link exchange (called mini ads by them), and a referral incentive based program. You can earn points to get more links by referrals and showing mini ads. Also a certain number of times a month you may submit your site to their affiliates with a click of a button. Everything on their site is free and worth a quick glance. I signed up and set my account on autopilot using their autosubmit and then I just blocked their notification emails telling me when I got refferals or my credit levels.
Blog Explosion is a cross between a blog directory, a blog search engine, and a blog surf exchange. Whats great about this place is its all blogs. You can meet lots of cool bloggers and while using their services. I like to use this to find out whats going on in the blog world and of course get more traffic. Not to mention they got some cool promotions and contest that can give you killer traffic.
Another Good Method to Increase your traffic is to use binary traffic. This is a viral system that will help you get links faster and easier than any other way I've seen yet. Only downside is you can only get roughly a 110,000 links. (NOTE I HAVE THIS ON 4 OF MY SITES THE ORIGINAL HAS OVER A HUNDRED LINKS THIS BEING ONE)
ALSO CHECK THE SIDE BAR FOR A LIST OF TOP SITES AND WEB DIRECTORIES I USE!
