Marketing your website - Getting Visitors!

When you have visitors coming to your site, those visitors are called “traffic” in Internet terms.

The cool thing about traffic is that the rich get richer! High traffic leads to even more higher traffic.

Once you get a decent amount of traffic, your traffic will grow each day. It will grow and grow and grow. But when you are just starting a site, getting high traffic is a difficult.

So, the question is:



How to have high traffic levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?
You have to have great content on your site. You have to have great content on your site. You have to have great content on your site! We have repeated this 3 times because this is the key to success. This is the key to traffic.


If you have good information on your site, the popularity of your site will grow. It will grow slowly, but it will grow! As mentioned earlier, if you just keep adding good content to your site day-after-day for a year, you will have a very successful, very popular site.


Initially, forget about everything. Think only about making you site popular. Concentrate on writing great content. Don’t even bother putting up something if you feel it’s quality is not good. If you are able to create good quality content, consistently, people will start to recognize your site as the place to go when they want quality information. Over time your traffic will gradually increase. You will see your traffic increase every month.



“Links”
Initially, you will have to try to get as many links as you can from other sites. Links are the best way to get traffic when you are just starting out a new site. You need to get other sites to link to your site. This is the way in which you are going to get your first readers.


If a popular site or site with a large amount of traffic, links to your site, then many people from that high-traffic site will click on the link and come to your site. Generally speaking, you want to get links from sites that get a large amount of traffic.


Basically, you want to advertise your site on other sites. This is how you will get your initial traffic.


Why would other sites and sites link to you?
If you have a site that is about real estate and how to buy land, then a property site will probably be interested in linking to you because the information on your site will be useful to the property site’s readers. For this too, you need to make sure that you have good content that is worth reading.


Getting other people to link to you is generally a pretty difficult. People will not just link to you for no reason. You will have to show people a good reason why they should link to you. You will have to be creative here. Also do not be disappointed, when people do not shown any interest in linking to your site.

You just have to keep trying. Two out of ten people might agree to link to you initially, but don’t be afraid of asking.


If you find a site on the Internet, whose users would be benefited and interested in the information on your site, then that would be a site that will probably be interested in linking to you. Obviously, if you are in the exact same field as that site and both yours and the other site are offering the users, the exact same information, you will not get a link from that site because you will be that site’s “competition”.


In any case, assuming you find a site you like and you want a link from it, all you have to do is go to the “contact us” page of the site, find the e-mail id of the owner or webmaster of the site and send him an e-mail saying that you would like a link. Try to write a good letter convincing him that he/she should link to you because it will also benefit him. However, keep the letter short and sweet.


Most webmasters and site owners will only link to you if you give them a link back. If they are going to send you some of their traffic, then they want some traffic in return. If you don’t mind giving them a link, then they probably won’t mind giving you a link so long as your site is moderately decent.

This is called “reciprocal linking” or “link exchange”. Generally, people have a “Favorite Links” or “Useful Links” or just “Links” page on their website. They use this page for reciprocal linking. They give other people links in this page and in return they get links in other website’s “Links” page.


Unfortunately, links from the “Links” page will get you very little traffic. If you want to get decent traffic from a link, you need to get a link from a page that gets a lot of traffic.



“Cheap” way to get links when you are just starting out:
Find forums, message boards, chat room’s etc. where people would be interested in reading what you have to say. For example if your site is about your experiences in the stock market, find a forum about the stock markets. When you find someone looking for information or asking questions whose answers are available on your site, send them a link telling them this is a good place to find the answer they are looking for.


Check out Yahoo Answers! If you are not familiar with the concept, on Yahoo Answers, there a thousands of people asking questions each day and thousands of people giving them answers. If you find a few people asking questions whose answers you know and are on your site, give them an answer and a link to your site.



One more reason why links are important!
Search engines, decide the worth of a site by looking at the number and quality of the pages that link to it. From the point of view of the search engines, if you have more links pointing to your site, you must be a good site because no one will link to a stupid site.

They use this basic thinking to run their search engines. So if you have a number of links pointing to your site, you will be considered as a good site by the search engines. You will show up in their search results. However, don’t get links for search engines, get links for getting traffic.


Maybe all these concepts are new to you now, but you will start to understand them better once you get into the game. An excellent resource to really get into the game of website design is WebmasterWorld. Webmasters, and site owners from all over the world meet at this forum and discuss various topics. You must definitely join this forum. I am there too, my nic. On WebmasterWorld is “must_learn_more”


(Once you set up a site, write a small article about indiahowto.com on your site and send this site some of your traffic as “Guru Dakshina” – Thanks ;-)


So now you know all the basics of web development. Congrats, if you read this huge article. It covers all the basic skills that are required. I hope you have benefited from it.