Developing Traffic

by Paul on August 11th, 2004

Developing traffic is a fine art on the web. Sometimes we get lost in the fact that just because it is easy to build a website it does not mean that it will be easy for people to find it. When it comes to personal sites, maybe it is not your goal to have a large amount of traffic come through your site, but for almost every other site in existence, the site will need traffic to survive. The question then becomes how does one go about developing traffic for their website?

Getting Linked

The best way (and one of the hardest) is to get linked to by other sites. Once you are linked by someone else and that site has more than 2 visitors you will more than likely receive a small boost in traffic. However, keeping that traffic is another story altogether. Of course no one will link to you if it is not worth their time. They are trying to enrich the content of their site so if a link to your site does nothing for them, well then don’t expect a link.

Of course for someone to link to you they have to know that your site exists. So what are you to do about this situation?

Comments, Linking, Forums, and Email

These are not guaranteed ways, but they do usually provide some success. The first one involves simply commenting on other people’s sites or in forums where signatures are allowed. The key here though is to post an insightful comment where people will be interested to find out more about you. “Awesome idea!” is the kind of comment that people will quickly bypass. Don’t get me wrong, I love those kinds of comments, but the chances of someone clicking on your name drops.

In forums the more popular people in the community have sites that become well-known because they are associated with the people and therefore gain respect.

The second method involves including links to other sites, be it within an entry or a blogroll. I can only speak from my own experience, but I often check my referrer logs and if I notice a new link pointing to my site I will always check it out. It’s always fun to find that diamond in the rough on the web.

Link Exchanges

Many sites make deals where they will post each others links on their sites. This can be either good or useless. If the site linking to you gets absolutely zero traffic then a link might be useless and only benefitting that individual. Also if their link to you is in a place where no one will find it then it again becomes useless. When doing a link exchange do not expect the person to always be so helpful for you. Work a deal where both parties will benefit.

According to some people Google blacklists “link farms” whose sole purpose is to just provide links to other site without offering anything useful on their site. You may encounter emails from individuals looking to exchange links only to find they will put you on a page that already contains hundreds of links.

Traffic Generators

A technique that I have yet to try, but have been putting some serious thought into for the future on other non-web related sites is using traffic generators. An example of one can be found at Targeted Visitors. These types of sites guarantee that they will send you X amount of people for Y amount of dollars.

The problem with these are that most of the time the traffic is generated through pop-unders and if you are like me you close those windows quicker than they appear.

Text Ads

On certain sites you can purchase text ads for a reasonable price and this will help in bringing users to your site. An example is at the CSS Vault.

Email Signatures

Do you use email? If so, why not include your url at the bottom. It won’t bring you thousands of visitors, but all you need is one person to start spreading the news.

Content Still Wins

Popular sites are popular due to their great content. It’s a simple formula that always works. However, you have to get people to your site to see the great content and you should have some success if you follow the methods outlined above.

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