Everybody wants more traffic, and not just any old traffic - targeted traffic. Streams of prequalified visitors who are genuinely interested in your website and product are every smart webmaster’s dream.

If you’re mainly interested in your hit counter, you can sign up with any old autosurf program and you’ll soon be happy. However, if quality counts for you, then here are 5 methods of getting genuine, interested and ready to buy visitors to your site:

1. Testimonials.
2. Writing Articles.
3. Forums.
4. Press Releases.
5. Your Newsletter.

Testimonials
Sometimes it really is better to give than receive. Internet marketers are always on the lookout for testimonials - it lends them credibility. The next time you use a product or service that you genuinely like send the supplier a testimonial. Include a link to your website and, if they use your testimonial, they will almost certainly include the link - so that their customers can verify that you’re a real person.

Depending on the product and the type of website that you have, you could even host a review on your site. You would be highly likely to get a link using this method. You will get traffic using this method and, since the supplier of the product is likely to be promoting his site quite extensively, you could get a very high quality back link - which will help your search engine rankings as well.

Only endorse products that you are genuinely happy with. Remember, your name will be associated with it, so make sure it’s a good one.

Writing Articles
This is a great way to promote both yourself and your site. All you have to do is submit articles on your chosen topic to one or more of the free article banks available and content hungry webmasters will use your work on their sites and in their newsletters. It’s amazing how quickly these can be distributed around the internet.

Put a link to your site in your signature file, along with a few words of explanation on the content and purpose of your site. The visitors that you get in this manner have already read your work and know about your site - so they are highly targeted.

Three of the best article banks on the net are listed below - but just type “free articles” into google and you’ll soon find plenty more places to submit your purple prose.

http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/

Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself to be a great writer. You can submit a list of 10 or 20 things to do in order to ……. whatever.

Forums
These can be a really good way to get your name in front of people. Put your website’s URL in your signature - you’ll be surprised at how many visitors you attract by this method. The good thing is that, as with the articles, they already “know” you from your posts - so you can consider them to be “targeted” visitors.

Press Releases
Press releases can be an amazingly powerful way to market your website. You can pay for these but it is possible to get them for free.

Don’t worry that you know what to say - a couple of paragraphs is all that’s required. Visit the site below and have a look at some of the live releases available - you’ll soon get the hang of it.

http://www.prleap.com

Prleap is free and has good statistical reporting so you can keep track of how many views your release gets and which of the search engine robots have indexed it.

Your Newsletter or Ezine
You should have your own opt-in list and be in communication with your subscribers on a regular basis. Some webmasters send out a full e-mail newsletter, with the contents in the newsletter. Others just send a notification that the newsletter is available to read online.

Whichever method you use, make sure that your newsletter contains plenty links to your main site.

All of the above methods will provide you with very high quality traffic. It may take time to implement them but it’s well worth investing a little time and effort.

Hamish Hayward
Starting A Home Based Business?
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If you have a website then you are certainly interested in having it do as well as it possibly can in the search engine rankings. However, did you know that you do have some control over getting good rankings and increasing your traffic? That is right; you can take your website’s success into your own hands and increase your traffic and income by blogging and pinging. Don’t know what blogging and pinging are? Read on to find out!

Blogging

A blog is just the short way of saying web log, which can be compared to an online journal or diary. However, blogs don’t have to be personal information. They can include news, thoughts, opinions, challenges, history, and anything the blogger wants. The most important aspect of a blog is that it is updated on a schedule and a regular basis with fresh new content. Some bloggers add new content once a week while others blog daily or multiple times per day. This is where increased search engine rankings come into play. Since there is always fresh new content the site is given heavier weight than if no new content were provided. This results in higher search engine rankings and increased traffic.

Pinging

A ping is simply a program that sends out a message to another server or computer in order to get a response. So, for instance, if you update your blog you want to ping the search engines so your pages are indexed and your site ranked higher.

Why Blog and Ping?

You probably know that if your website does not show up in the search engines you are unlikely to get a ton of a traffic, and if you have a website you want traffic. So, the best thing to do is write a regular blog, ping the search engines, and your site will get indexed significantly faster than it would otherwise. By putting in a little bit of extra work you are getting your site indexed with the search engines and inevitably more traffic.

There is a lot of free blog software out on the Internet that you can simply link to your site and start blogging. Including RSS feeds, which are the pings, means the search engines are going to know you are out there and as a result start indexing your site. So, if you want to increase your traffic start blogging and pinging and you will see a difference in traffic in a hurry.

www.SearchArticles.net features hundreds of seo and web site promotion tips

Today, the biggest problem that new website owners have is: “How they can get traffic to their website?” Significant amount of time and energy is spent today on this single task. You or your webmaster needs to commonly focus on:

- Get ranked well on the most important search engines (Google, Yahoo, Msn, Ask.com, etc.)

- Pay Per Click (PPC) programs

- Cost Per Click (CPC) programs

- Link Exchanges

- Directory Submissions

- And more…

All of these methods are valuable for getting traffic to your website. If you are not competent enough to rank well your keywords, you can obviously hire a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) for this work. From search engines you can get a very large portion of traffic to your website.

Today, everyone wants to know the big secret to driving traffic to their website. Every day I see an article or an ad talking about driving people to your website; driving traffic to a website has become the “holy grail” on the Internet. People are realizing that if you build it, they won’t come… unless you give them a reason. Website traffic just doesn’t happen by itself. Your website is just one of many millions on the web and people rarely just stumble upon your site by accident.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. You can buy traffic from vendors that will pummel your website with hits from automated programs. This will increase your hits but will it increase your bottom line? Probably not. You can set up blogs that spider (connect to) your website increasing your traffic count. Does this drive users to your website? Only if your blog is so interesting that people are reading it. There are thousands of blogs posted on the internet and your blog is just a needle in the internet haystack.

Another trick is to create RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for your website and subscribe to other RSS feeds. This again will increase your hit count but will do very little to drive potential customers to your website unless you’re providing valuable information. Tricks will increase your hit count but do very little todrive potential customers to your website.
People often turn to traffic exchanges. Quite simply, a traffic exchange is a program where you sign up and agree to surf sites in exchange for some credits. These credits are then used when other members of the exchange surf to your site. This traffic is not highly targeted traffic. In fact, if this were your only method of advertising your website, you’d probably fail. BUT it is a great method of getting traffic to your site in addition to the other methods listed above.

So, why do people use traffic exchanges? Here are a few of the benefits:

- Increase your Alexa rating! Did you know that some search engines factor your Alexa rating into their algorithms? More traffic means higher search engine placement!

- Increase your branding awareness. Any marketing expert worth his salt will tell you that branding is extremely important to stand out amongst the billions of websites out there. More traffic equals more sales. A percentage of people surfing will be enticed by your ads and click on them to find out more information. Another source of revenue. Many traffic exchanges will actually pay you money to surf. More importantly, as you refer other people to the network, you’ll earn a percentage of the money that they earn! It may be small amounts but if you work the system it could amount to a lot of money.

Now, before you head over to Google and search for Traffic Exchange, I’d recommend knowing a few facts:

- Some traffic exchanges are simply out to get money from you and will refer very little traffic to you.

- Some traffic exchanges have poor systems in place to stop cheaters from running programs to increase their credits faster.

Finally, some traffic exchanges will allow popup, active x controls, site rotators, etc. in their network. Any of these can stop your auto surfing from working, or even worse, allow your computer to be infected with a virus.

The best part about Traffic Exchanges is that you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The worst thing that could happen to you is you get a little bit of traffic which increases your Alexa rankings and you don’t get any money.

Of course, for the system to work, you’ve got to make sure that you do some surfing yourself. The makers of the exchange programs realize this and some of them even have an auto surf feature where you get a reduced number of credits while your browser happily loads page after page every 10 seconds or so.

Matt Bacak became “#1 Best Selling Author” in just a few short hours.
Recent Entrepreneur Magazine’s e-Biz radio show host is
turning Authors, Speakers, and Experts into Overnight Success Stories.
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