You've built your website and it's brimming with cool features and great content. All you need now is visitors to come along and enjoy it. And maybe buy a thing or two as well. But somehow they seem reluctant to cross your virtual threshold. What can you do?
People are arriving on the shores of Internetland in shiploads. There is absolutely no shortage of them! But if they don't seem to be heading your way then perhaps your site needs a health check. Below are some techniques you should be using to make sure you get your share of eager surfers.
1. Start your very own newsletter or e-zine. It's really not that difficult. You must be interested in the theme of your website, right? So that means you know more about the subject than the average person. Just write a few paragraphs once a week about a single topic related to your niche and send it out. There are free auto-responder services if you are just starting out and if you want subscribers there are free advertising websites such as trafficswarm.com that are designed to bring your ad to people looking for what you have to offer.
2. Give your visitors lots of free quality content. If you can write your own articles, that's great. Otherwise the web is heaving with great articles on practically any subject you care to mention. Try ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com for starters, or search on the term 'e-zine directories'. The secret here is to refresh the content often so that visitors will eagerly return to read the latest article.
3. Make sure you have some freebies for your visitors to download. These could be eBooks relating to the topics that your target audience will be interested in, or maybe software. There are sites where you can obtain both eBooks and software as give-aways. You could also include shareware and demos.
4. Run a contest from your site with prizes connected with your site topic. Advertise the closing date then publish the winners on a special winners page. People will keep coming back to your site to see who won. To run your contest make things easier for yourself by using a free service such as surveymonkey.com.
5. Submit your site to the search engines. This is a vital part of your traffic strategy. You can do this manually, and there are also services that will do it for you.
6. Write interesting chatty articles which you can then submit to some of the many article directories. The cool thing is that at the bottom of every article you can and should put a resource box or brief writers' bio. Here you can put a link back to your site. This has two benefits. First the readers of your article will visit you site to see what benefits it has for them, and secondly, for every directory and every website that picks up your article and publishes it there is a link back to your site. The search engines pick these up and your search engine ranking is improved.
Building your visitor traffic is an ongoing process and you should take it seriously. If you devoted just an hour a week to putting into practice the things I have recommended above, your visitors will steadily increase.
How to Use Time Transitions to Make Your Story Flow
Most stories we write take place over a period of time. That time may be very short - even a few minutes; or long - over several years or generations or anywhere inbetween. But whatever it is, the reader needs to have a clear sense of how time is moving throughout the narrative.
Your Readers Love an Element of Suspense. Here's How to Give it to Them
Whatever kind of book you are writing a dollop of suspense will do to your readers precisely what you've written the book for: so that they will read it and keep on reading it to the end!
Parts of Speech for the Timid Writer
Dear writers, we are gathered here today to bring together these Nine Parts of Speech into a holy matrix of well turned out sentences which, by the grace of God, no publisher or editor shall cast asunder. A bit hesitant about parts of speech? Don't know your verbs from your conjunctions? Read on...
