Having a website or blog live on the internet is not enough. Off course you need to offer something so others come to your website: knowledge, products, services… But how do you get these visitors?

There are various ways to drive traffic to your website. I will try in this post to present a part of them, from free methods to paid/sponsored ones.

Signatures

As you have a new website you should invite your friends and family to visit it. Have your website / blog link included in your email signature, show it as your IM status. If you get to post in forums or any social websites (such as comments on other blogs, Yahoo! Answers) remember to have your website address included in your signature. Also, in these cases, a greater effect would be if you post an answer and give away your link as a back-up or for more details, this just if you have content on your site related to the answer.

Search engine results

Another way of getting traffic to your website would be organic search results. That mean that if your website, for example, is about basketball, with reviews on NBA players and teams, than when someone searches for “Chicago Bulls” or “Player Name”, your site to get listed in the search results. If that person clicks on your link in the search results, than you got a search engine visitor. Visitors sent by search engines are maybe the most important you could get from a few reasons: they are targeted traffic (those visitors will come to your website because of their interest on what you offer), these visitors are free (you don’t have to pay search engines to send you all this traffic). In order to get as many search engine visitors you need to do some Search Engine Optimization to your site, but this is another chapter I have wrote about in SEO variables.

Link exchange programs

Link exchange programs help you place your website URL on different sites, partners in that program. Usually these programs are free. You get to join, and in order for your link to appear on the network websites, you will also have to integrate a code that will show links for other websites. That’s why it is called a link exchange program. The exchange ratio is made differently in these networks, from 1:1 showed links (that means your link will be shown one time on a partner website, for each one time you show a link of one partner), or 1:1 visited link (that means that your link will be shown until you get one click/visit for each click/visit to partner websites resulted from your pages). Also, some exchange networks have a 1:2 ratio, meaning that your link will be shown once for each 2 links shown on your website. This way the network gets to show a link on their own, usually a sponsored link, in order to keep their service free for you.

Of course, if you don’t want to show links on your website from that network, but still would like to place links in the program, you can buy such a package so your link will appear as a sponsored link. This would also have a greater effect for SEO and rankings, as they would act as quality backlinks for you. For a list of such programs visit Link Exchange page on Webeki.com

Online advertising

Online advertising is a good way of getting traffic to your website, but could be quite expensive if not used properly. You have several options here.

One would be to use an Ad Network, where you could create all sorts of campaigns, based on text or graphical ads, pop-unders or text-links, on pay-per-click or cost-per-mile conventions. As I said, using an ad network could be expensive, especially pay-per-click campaigns. In order to reach success in such a campaign you need to control costs (bids on clicks, not to go over what you have in mind) and target as best as you can (contextual targeting based on keywords or channels, so that only interested / possible consumers to see your and click on it, or geo targeting, in the case you offer services / products to a limited geographic area). Your ads will appear in the network of those programs or in some cases as sponsored results in search engines (all major search engines have such advertising programs, listed on the Ad Networks page on Webeki.com).

Also, in this online advertising category I would include the affiliate networks. These networks would be a great way of advertising for websites that sell products or services online. If you are such an eMerchant, and would like to advertise online your products / services and in the same time to keep the marketing costs to a certain level, than you have to use an affiliate network. The great thing about affiliate networks is that your products / services will be promoted on many websites, but you will get to pay for advertising only when a specific action is taken by a visitor referred by the network. This means you will pay only for performance (cost-per-action). The action depends from case to case, from simple sign-up in your emailing list, to buying a product or service of yours. For each action, you will have to pay the referrer a commission, fixed or percent from the value of transaction referred. This way you will pay for advertising, but only when it is covered by a sale.

Email marketing

I presented you some of the ways to get visitors to your website, but how do you keep them, convert them in returning visitors?

The gold rule here would be innovation, content, promotions. Most visitors you will get will probably come back, but if you are not able to offer new content that would interest him, or products/services, he might be looking at your competition. Online market is very dynamic, therefore a combination between good quality new content and/or promotions (if you act as an eMerchant) is the key to returning visitors. But just in case they forget you, you should be able to develop an emailing list of your visitors and send them regular emails with news and promos. This is email marketing. Some applications that can help you develop such a list and make email campaigns are listed on Email Marketing page at Webeki.com

Hoping that you got the essence of this article I wish you good luck in promoting your website and getting quality visitors.