Website Traffic Generation - Internet - Forums

Traffic generation or promotion.More specifically, driving targeted traffic (visitors) to your site. There are many ways to attract targeted visitors to your site, but in this section I will discuss five methods that you MUST use.

Method 1: Article MarketingMethod 2: BloggingMethod 3: Social BookmarkingMethod 4: Forum MarketingMethod 5: Pay-per-click Advertising

Except for the last one, methods 1 to 4 are free. Of course there are other methods of generating traffic but what we want to focus here is to drive targeted traffic that is specific to your niche market. If you can focus your time and efforts consistently on these 5 methods, you will get a lot of targeted traffic to your site. Let's get started....

Method 1: Article Marketing

The article marketing strategy is simple. You write a useful and informative article about the niche you're targeting and submit it to multiple article directories. Basically, an article directory is a website that hosts vast amount of informational articles written by people just like you. The idea is to provide free and informative content for anyone who want to publish them on their websites. So, if you write and publish your articles in article directories, they can be used freely by other people provided they keep your "author bio resource box" intact. The resource box is the one that will give you traffic because it's a place for you to put your "author byline" and a link back to your site.

As for the article directories, there are tons of them! But, I suggest you only focus on the following four as they are the most popular and considered as the most authoritative sites.

1. Ezinearticles.com 2. GoArticles.com 3. ArticleDashBoard.com 4. IdeaMarketers.com

If you write an article, make sure you submit to the above four article directories! The article marketing method really does work and I suggest you make it a part of your traffic generation strategy. As a start, try to submit at least one new article per week and if you can, gradually increase to 2 or 3 articles per week. Another point to take note is to ensure that you write your article based on a specific keyword that you want to target. If you want to know how to write a keyword-based article that can give you traffic that is specific to your niche, go and read: "How to profit from Article Marketing".

Method 2: Blogging

Blogging is the prime tool of InternetMarketing and online business today. A blog is just like your day-to-day diary except that it's now on the Net for other people to see. Most Internet Marketers are now using blogs to promote and generate traffic to their sites. Why are blogs so important in traffic generation? Because blogs are dynamic websites, they allow you to publish and update posts quickly and regularly. Blogs also get indexed by the search engines very fast (within few hours). This is because they allow you to ping the blog directories such as Technorati hence enabling the search engines to find your blog very quickly.

There are two types of blog you can use: Blogger and WordPress blog. If you've never blogged before, I suggest you start with a Blogger blog. Registering an account is very easy and free. If you know how to create a free Yahoo or Gmail account, you know how to create account in Blogger. Just visit blogspot.com (Blogger home page) and there is a clear instruction to guide you how to create an account in Blogger. Posting and publishing your blog is also very easy. It's just like using a Microsoft Word. Another type of blog is called WordPress blog. Be warned that there is some learning curve in using WordPress. WordPress has two versions: FREE and Hosted one. I don't recommend you to use the free WordPress because it's very limited, you can't even put an AdSense ad on the free version. If you want to use the free one, use Blogger blog instead. However, for more experienced Internet Marketers, they will choose the hosted version if they want to use WordPress. Hosted version m eans that you need to register your own domain name and get a hosting account. It's not the purpose of this section to discuss blogging in details. But if you want to use WordPress, I highly recommend you to check out the "WordPress Web 2.0 System". This is a plug-and-play system comes with a complete set of video tutorials showing you step-by-step how to install a web 2.0-like wordpress system, how to optimize your system for search engine ranking and how to drive traffic to your blog. It also comes with a very cool web 2.0 template. This plug-and-play system is an enormous time-saver.

Method 3: Social Bookmarking

Besides using the search engines to find information, many users are also using social boomarking nowadays. Social bookmarking is community-based sites that have become very popular and receive massive amount of traffic. It's a gold-mine for getting targeted visitors to your site.

The idea behind social bookmarking sites is that the visitors can create and rate the content. For example, when someone place a bookmark that links to an article or video, other visitors can view and then vote on it, giving it a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". The bookmarks which receive the highest positive votes will move up to the front page and easily be seen by all the visitors.

Furthermore, many social boomarking sites are ranked very well by the search engines. Some of the best known social bookmarking sites that the search engines love are: Digg.com, Propeller.com, StumbleUpon.com, marktd.com, and del.icio.us. Of course there are more but you should always bookmark your web pages to these 5 social bookmarking sites to get some good targeted traffic.

Finally, there is one bookmarking tool called "OnlyWire.com" you should take advantage of. OnlyWire allows you to bookmark 22 sites with a single mouse click. And it's 100% FREE!

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Method 4: Forum Marketing

Here is how you can drive targeted traffic from forum. When you participate in a widely read forum, make sure you put a link that is going back to your site in your forum signature. People who read your forum posts will see the signature and will often visit your site. Additionally, when the forum's posts are spidered by the search engines, your signature will serve as a link back to your site, helping to boost your site ranking.

The key to effective forum marketing is choosing the right forums and providing useful comments or posts. Never put your affiliate link inside the forum post unless you want to get banned by the moderators. If done correctly, forum marketing can produce some great traffic to your site. It's easy to find forums for your niche. For example, if your niche is about "diving", you can just type "diving forums" (with the quotes) in Google.

Method 5: Pay-per-click Advertising

Pay-per-click or 'PPC' advertising is a method which allows you to generate almost instant and targeted traffic to your site. You can create a PPC campaign and see traffic to your site almost immediately. PPC is a very popular method used by affiliate marketers and it's a big part of their traffic generation strategy. However, be warned that PPC is a PAID method so you need to plan and set apart a budget for your PPC campaigns.

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