How to Get More Web Traffic

Your strategy for getting more web traffic will depend largely on -

A - Your Budget

B - Your skill level

C - Your industry (type of website)

D - Your time frame

Obviously a company with a large multi-thousand dollar marketing budget is going to approach traffic building strategies differently than a small company with more modest resources. This article is really geared towards smaller companies trying to develop web traffic on a shoestring budget.

Let's assume that for arguments sake you have fully built your website, have it hosted on a reliable host platform with a unique IP address, have covered basic on-page optimization steps, and you're ready to start marketing your 'finished' website. Let's also assume that you have a $500 initial budget and a $100 month ongoing budget and you do not have a particularly aggressive time frame for getting sales. In fact, lets state that with a budget in this region your traffic growth will more than likely be quite slow.

This will vary for everyone, but a possible approach to getting more web traffic on a modest budget could be as follows -

1. Create an Adwords account with Google and deposit $35.00 into your account. Using Google keywords tool, create a list of 25 of your search terms and setup bids avoiding the more generic and high cost search terms. Set a $35.00 monthly cap on your account so your spending is controlled and predictable. Install ad tracking so you can see how your investment with Google converts into sales or leads. Each month you'll need to sit down and asses your return on investment and decide if it's positive or not. You can switch off your spending after a couple months if you decide it isn't cost effective.
2. Do exactly the same thing at Yahoo Search Marketing. Create your account and use the same keyword phrases that you've setup with Google, and install Yahoo tracking to see how your clicks convert. After 2 months look at your Google and Yahoo results side by side and see what your true cost per click is on each, and what your real ROI is. You can then decide whether to keep both accounts active, close one, or close both. You may also decide to close one and transfer the budget from the closed account to the other open account. For example, you where spending $35 each month on each account ($70 total) and you found that Yahoo has a better conversion rate so you closed Google and increased your spend with Yahoo to $70/mth
3. Take $200.00 from your budget and use it to pay for an incoming link building service. Research the subject and look for those companies with real testimonials and who offer full reporting on where your links will be placed. Ensure that they place links only on sites from compatible industries and target at least a few high PR websites. Try to speak with a person before paying anything and be sure that they never post links on gaming/gambling sites etc.
4. Take $75 from your budget and find several industry website directories and pay to add your link into their database. Make sure that they use real links and not javascript links that won't create any link juice for you. Write different descriptions based around your primary keywords for each directory, so they don't look too canned.
5. If your website is regional, or if you think you can benefit from local traffic, join your local area Chamber of Commerce and pay for a website listing. These sites often command higher PR's and do well on local searches. You should expect to pay around $125 for a local directory listing, and will need to renew it each year. You could divide this by 12 in some instances and pay monthly or quarterly if you prefer.

At this point your $500 budget looks like so

$35 Google + $35 Yahoo + $200 link building + $75 directories + $125 Chamber = $470

So you're pretty much at your limit for the first round of investment but you can start to think about your next month strategy which should be split between some PPC ads on Google Yahoo and continued link building.

If you've found, as many people do, that the ROI from PPC is negative and you prefer to drop that expenditure entirely, then use some of the money to have articles written for your website. You should obviously be the primary source for written content, since you know your industry best, but sometimes the writing just dries up and it's OK to pay a company $25 or so to create a press release or article for your business. Make sure that any new content of this nature appears on your website first, then once you see it indexed by Google, you can add links into the article and submit it elsewhere. If you become more proficient at article writing and can turn them out at a good rate, you can reserve some unique first-time content for the better rated directory/article websites.

You can also spend some of your monthly budget on Press release distribution, as a means to building more web traffic. You won't gain a lot from this but it will help directly and indirectly.

After 3 months or so you should hopefully be able to increase your marketing budget and start to develop into other area's of marketing, perhaps some higher-level SEO or intensified link building campaigns.

If you haven't already, you might think about adding a blog or forum to your website, but think carefully about the format before you make the commitment. If your website gets very little traffic then a forum might create the wrong impression since there will be too few members and too few posts, and you'll look like one of the many abandoned websites out there. If your site has low traffic stats you can still create a blog and write more announcements about your trade/businesses which do not read as though they're trying to solicit a response from people. As your traffic builds you can change your writing style to encourage more visitor interaction. Bottom line is that a blog or a forum is a great way to build content and traffic, as are articles and reviews.

Here's a link to a website which receives around 800 visitors per day and has never spent a penny on marketing www.newaudiosociety.com They get all their traffic via an article/review database and an extensive forum. The forum alone raises the indexed page count from less than 100 to almost 2000 pages on the sitemap. There's a 'who's online' box on the homepage that shows typically from 15 - 75 visitors online at any one part of the day, and that number excludes traffic into the forum!