How Can I Increase My Website Traffic ?
The owner of Finance-Maker.com contacted me with a few questions:
I get roughly 30 unique’s a day from google. My question is how can I increase my traffic but before you answer this question I would like to say please don’t tell me to submit articles and link build and leave a footer on forums and do press releases and so on.
I can only tell you what’s worked for me, which was a combination of link building, SEO and a bit of creative forum-posting and blog-commenting. When I first started GrownUpgeek.com I sent out hundreds of link-requests to webmasters of websites with content related to my site. I sent these requests the ‘old fashioned’ way, with a personalized message including why I thought a link from that site would benefit his visitors. I sent several of these requests each night for months – and the ‘hit rate’ was very low, but the links I did get were from quality sites with related content (which is important).
I didn’t know much about SEO back then, but I knew enough to know that I should cross-link the site heavily – which I did. Virtually every page had links with my keyword anchor-text to two or three other pages on the site, and I also added one outgoing link to a very high PR website with content related to that particular page.
I also went on a comment and posting spree at blogs and forums. I was always careful not to “spam”, but to only post comments on blogs or forums that were related to my site and the posts/comments were always genuinely helpful. On most of these comments I left “deep links” into specific pages on the site, not just to the home page. I also watched the “upcoming” stories on Digg.com looking for upcoming stories that were related to the content of my site – I went to every site, and if it was a blog that allowed commenting I left a comment with a link. After dropping hundreds of comments on these blogs that had been submitted to Digg, ONE of those blogs hit the front page of Digg.com. That very helpful comment that I left on the blog sent hundreds of visitors per day for months and I noticed very soon after that my Google ranking for searches related to the anchor text I left on that comment skyrocketed – maybe coincidence, but I doubt it.
Early-on I read that leaving signatures with links in forum-posts might be considered ’spammy’ by Google so I never did that with my site – and only recently started doing it with my blog, and only on ONE forum. I would be careful about over-doing it with forum signatures. As a matter of fact, for a new site I would recommend not doing it at all.
Article submission: Now with Article submission why would people come to “your” “my” site if your articles are posted on another site and ranked in the SERPS higher than you and then on top of that WHY wouldn’t google just punish “you” “me” for duplicate content.
I have never submitted an article – partially because I’m just not good enough of an article writer, and partially because I don’t see how it can be very helpful as you’ve pointed out. I suppose that if you can write an awesome enough article to get it posted on a high-traffic, high-PR site and you are able to give just enough information in the article to get people’s interest, then give a link to your site it might work – but I am the king of lazy-webmasters and that just seemed like too much effort with too-little (guaranteed) return on my investment of time.
In general if you keep your content unique and update it often you will give people a reason to visit, and hopefully come back for more. I also noticed that you had a finance forum, which is a great way to build some user-generated content. I would suggest building your forum by seeding a few interesting posts, replying to other posts, etc. You might also consider allowing anyone to post without having to register. I have found that if someone has to take 30 seconds to register before they can make a post they just wont bother. The first few months after creating our forums we left them open to anonymous users to create new topics and post comments, then slowly locked it down over time. Opening the forums this way generated a lot of posts & comments (food for the Google bot), but it was also a lot of work to delete the spam which slowly began to crop up. Do everything you can to make the forum look as busy as possible. Increase the window of time that shows how many people are online, show a (big) number of members, be creative – make it look like a place that people want to be.
Good luck and I hope you don’t mind the free links I gave you.. Maybe a few of my readers will check out finance-maker.com and post a few additional comments/suggestions.
Over a cup of coffee yesterday my friend was talking about a concept in website marketing ‘Publicity Wheel’ that it could boost traffic for websites and exposure. I am thinking about it, perhaps the system would be worthy for one of my sites. A percentage of stumbleupon members probably don’t visit sites as the part of their strategy and Digg’s system targets mainly blogs or single article pages.
Nice tips.
Why haven’t you included Digg/StumbleUpon. Those websites can give you huge hits of traffic and some do convert.
Trevor said:
Stumbleupon is a good source of traffic – but it’s usually short-lived (like an hour or two). IF you can make it to the front page of Digg it can send you traffic for years.. i still get several hundred visitors/day from a page that was on the front page of Digg 2 years ago.. But making it to the front page of Digg is NOT an easy thing to do.
In my experience though, Digg and stumble traffic do NOT convert very well, if at all..
Hey Randy, your post made me think of something you didn’t even mention…
When I clicked this link over from Sphinn (or somewhere like that) I recognized your picture as “that guy from DigiPoint that gives no-nonsense advice.”
So yeah, its definitely got me thinking more about personal branding and building trust! I’m not sure if those signature links do much either, but there’s still a place for forums (and I’m hoping someday vB will have some user-specific RSS feeds so the forum thing can go live with the aggregators and lifestreams of the net)
Randy very nice article on how to build traffic to your blog or website. Thanks Greg Ellison
Thanks for the tips randy! you just remotivated me.