No matter how good your copy is, and no matter how smart and creative you are, without traffic, you are dead.  The fancy graphics don't matter, the best products don't matter either if you are not getting anyone to see the website.Traffic is always the needed element for anyone trying to publish ads or sell products.  It seems like its a mystery to most, as most products sold on the web focuses on content, PPC (which is not bad, but also very hard to get right), or management products to help with productivity.Very few really work on the nuts and bolts of where you get traffic from.

The number one source of free traffic will come from natural search engine ranking, and the consistency is hard to beat.  Why?Once you work on a few keywords that get decent search volume, this source of traffic is FREE and consistent.  PPC or other methods are fine, but are also subject to other risks that must be managed.  Basically you need links and content - this is the key to getting higher rankings on Google.

One way to get links is through  submitting niche articles related to your site to an article directory.Once your site topic is decided, you will want to write at least 20 articles that are 300-500 words in length.  Before you write the articles, make sure you have signed up for an adsense and adwords account even if you are not going to use them.  Google has some terrific free tools for researching keywords and how often they are searched.  You don’t need to spend days researching keywords BUT you really need to pick 3 or 4 keywords to focus on for your articles that get decent traffic in the search engines and are related to your topic.  Another tool you can use that is free is PPC Web Spy (just google it) - it allows you to see what keywords people are bidding on for their PPC ads on Google - again, they have probably done extensive work since they are paying for the ad clicks - no reason you cannot just benefit from their work and use some of those keywords.

Once you have done this, make sure you write at least 5 articles using 2 of the researched keywords as links to your site.  Do not try to tackle too many keywords at once - you need about 200-300 links realistically for each keyword to move up - depending on how popular they are it may take more.  This is where any article directory comes in handy.You then sumbit your article which is then redistributed for you by the directory to others looking for content or to learn about a subject.This really does make getting links easier and faster in the long run - it just takes a bit of time to start working.  In addition, you may want a tool to help rewrite your articles so that many different versions are distributed to thousands of sites.  This is a key to quicker ranking on the engines as the same thing distributed over and over just does not do the trick.

In addition to article writing, you will want to submit your site linnk to all the major social networks like Digg, Facebook, StubleUpon, MySpace,and others.The more of that the better.  You will want to create an account on all of them - very time consuming but needs to only be done one time.  You can search on Google for a list of the major ones.Once this is done, you can also use tools to automate posting to all of your accounts at once which saves a huge amount of time.

Almost anything you want to do on the web can be found for free, but there are tons of stuff that will save you huge amounts of time for a small fee.  I usually opt for the time saving tools - in the long run its really worth it as there are only so many hours in the day.There is always a trade off of time saved vs paying for this saved time.  Some stuff I do with free tools, some stuff I pay a monthly fee to use because it saves me so much time I could not achieve any goals without them.

Of course there is more than these 2 steps - but if these 2 are only done you should start seeing results in about a month.  Longer term, even once you get ranking, you need a plan to continually feed articles to directories - not as often as the beginning, but you really want to do at least 1 per month per keyword to keep fresh links coming into the search engines.  Over time, the content you distributed that Google finds links to disappears as sites go offline, content is deleted and replaced etc.Once you have a decent amount of articles written, you can often just do a complete rewrite of an older article and then submit that again.

 

 

 

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