Boost Web Traffic in 5 Specific Steps

What's the number one problem facing website owners? It's not hosting cost or creating good content or finding good images. It's getting good quality traffic, getting visitors' eyeballs to your site. Below are five specific, easy techniques to boost your website traffic.

1. Create your own web ring. You will gain highly
targeted traffic to your web site and others will link
to your site because they'll want to join the ring. For
example, if you were selling products to net marketers,
you would want to start an online marketing web ring.
You would then draw your target audience.

2. Remind your visitors to promote your web site.
Use phrases like: "Refer Our Web Site To A
Friend" or "Link To Our Web Site". Scripts are available online to add code to your site so all they have to do is click a link or button. Offer them incentives for referrals, such as free e-books, reports, software and other informational products. You could also offer them discounts on other products you sell.

3. Blogging can no longer be overlooked as just a fad, either. A relevent blog entry with a link back to your main site is a surefire way to get indexed by the search engines much quicker than manually submitting your site to Google or MSN. If your topic is good enough, it can also be picked up by the “blogosphere” and copied to countless blogs around the net (hint: use Pingomatic.com to increase the likelihood of this happening).

4. Along with blogging is “the next great thing”, podcasting. With the popularity of portable MP3 players, getting your message out there as a free MP3 download—without it obviously being an ad—is another great way to get free targeted traffic to your site. In fact, you can simply record already-existing content that you have and not have to spend any money creating the MP3! It's yet another channel of distribution, and it's portable, so people can listen to it even when they're away from their computers.

5. Get an XML sitemap for your website, then submit it to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. This is a super-easy way to get them to spider your website and get listed faster, and you can even specify which pages to list. Search for xml sitemap and you'll find free tools to do this.

6. OK, so I'm putting in one last step, which perhaps should be the first (think of it as a bonus step). Think of a domain name for your web site that's easy to remember. It should be related to what your business does, sells or provides, such as onlineincomegenerators.com. Ideally you should try to work in some of your main keywords into the name (see below for a site about marketing). If there aren’t any business names available, use your actual birth name (or a variant thereof, perhaps with an initial, since the trend in recent years has been for companies to register last names as domains then resell the first names as subdomains). Also consider different domains—don't limit yourself to just .com when there are at least eight other domain extensions to choose from.
You could at least brand yourself. Your own name
will give you credibility. And don't necessarily limit yourself to one domain name, either.

Start with these six steps and you'll be on your way to boosting your website traffic for virtually no cost.