Website Newbie – Wanna Have Traffic?

No traffic, no income, nothing. After you’ve gone through nights and days of brainstorming on what to put on your site, what to offer to your visitors, and how will your website look, now you are faced with questions like ‘What now?’, ‘How will the people know about me?’, ‘Why are there no visitors, no sales?’
As a new website owner myself, I also have gone through that tight spot. I think desperation for visitors is really the first phase of any website that has recently been launched. At the first few weeks of my site, I went through so many doubts because I relatively had zero traffic! Is my site really as useful as I think? I changed so many things, from ad placements, colors, etc. thinking that maybe people do not like the colors or that the overall production of what I have to offer is just too drab and uninteresting.
I consulted a friend who owns a website and he taught me a few points which I’m gonna share with you. This disclosure of ideas is, of course, with his permission. So, sit tight and let me share with you what I have found out.
The first thing I learned is to make my website appearance neat and orderly and to avoid colors that are hurtful to the visitor’s eyes. Also, I should try to make everything look good and harmonious. Next is to embed some kind of a traffic monitor in the code so I will know how many visitors I am getting everyday. The traffic monitor can also be used to observe from which referring link the visitors came from. In choosing a traffic monitor, be sure that it could provide the needed stats so that from the stats, a website owner can better optimize his/her site for traffic. Better choose one that is free. I personally recommend http://www.statcounter.com
Next is to make use of every free advertising that I know of. This includes word-of-mouth or telling everyone I know about my site and asking them to spread the word. I also made use of forums where I can advertise for free and most importantly I made use of the thing called ‘site linking’. I exchanged links especially with those sites that have high PR or high search engine rankings. The more important are the sites that have my link, the more important my site becomes.
Another mode of advertising that cost me nothing is to write free reprint articles with my byline or bio at the bottom. Free reprint articles are like crumbs to hungry ants. Everybody loves them, especially if what you’re writing about is of interest. Readers will surely be curious not just about the article but also about the author and what he/she does. This move actually has a dual purpose. Chances are, readers who loved reading the article will click on the link to the site or if not, someday, somehow, the keywords in the article will be crawled by search engines and from there, more readers will be able to read it as a link to the article will be displayed on the search engine’s results page when the keywords are searched, therefore resulting in more chances of gaining traffic.
Speaking of search engines, it is an established fact that 89 f any website traffic comes from search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google. When you land on the first ten of a results page, that will guarantee you instant boost in traffic. Therefore, in order to land on that prestigious spot, a website must be search engine friendly.
For a website to be search engine friendly, it should be constantly updated, teeming with fresh content, and the keywords should be strategically placed.
Actually there are many more ways to build traffic. The ones I mentioned are the ones I have tried and I am happy to add that never did I once regret my moves in building my website traffic. If you decide to follow my simple techniques, expect your website’s traffic to increase from 10 per week to a hundred and then to a thousand. Words of caution though, do not expect these changes to happen overnight. One thing good about owning a website is that it teaches you patience and it teaches you how to learn to work at how to get what you want.