The volume of traffic an online business receives directly influences it’s success or failure. The more traffic a site gets, the higher percentage of potential sales there are. In days past, it was fairly easy to gain traffic through forced link building methods and buying cheap links. Today, most of those methods don’t work and can actually have a negative effect on your business. Instead, you will want to focus your attention on natural link building and the great thing about this method is you can do it with little to no budget. Here are a few cost effective ways to increase your website traffic.
Social Networking – It’s free and takes very little time once you have everything set up. The key to using social networking to build traffic is the way you interact with your followers. It isn’t enough to just set up a profile with your business information. Nor can you post updates but never respond to comments. In order for social networking to work for your business, you need to have a compelling profile, interesting posts and you must interact with your followers.
Blog Commenting – Again, think natural traffic. Blog commenting doesn’t mean spamming blogs with irrelevant comments with links to your site. Nor does it mean commenting on blogs that have nothing to do with your industry. To get the most traffic from blog commenting, you should first locate active blogs within your industry. Look for ones that have similar beliefs as you. Then follow that blog, get to know the content and post appropriate, relevant comments when you have something note worthy to say. "Great post! I agree with what you said" is not an appropriate comment. Remember, your comments are a reflection of you and your business. If your comments are junk, people will naturally assume your business is junk too.
Guest Blogging – Providing well written content on someone else’s site is one of the best ways to quickly grow your traffic. Guest blogging not only helps you build traffic, it also helps to establish you as an expert and it allows you to build relationships not only with website owners where you guest blog but with their audience as well. Before you start writing your guest blog posts, consider how your posts will benefit the other person’s business and how they will best benefit yours. Sometimes your posts may be more beneficial to the host blog offering great information with only a reference to your business. Other times they might talk more about your specific thoughts, services or findings and include links to resources and such on your site. If you plan to write a series of blog posts for someone, consider mixing your posts so both you and your host will have equal benefits.
Affiliates – Having an affiliate program means letting other people do the hard work for you and you only pay for results. For a percentage of sales they send your way, affiliates will drive traffic to your business. Starting an affiliate program isn’t hard and it doesn’t cost much. You can start out small and build your affiliate program up as you go along.
These are just four ways you can increase traffic with little or no budget. By creating goals and planning ahead, you can quickly see great results from the above methods.