Online Marketing - How to Generate Traffic Your New Website

Link building is the most effective way of generating traffic to your site. Search engines will judge how much of an authority your website (or blog) is by the number of links back to your site. These are the methods I use to kick off a link building campaign. I can guarantee that if you follow these 11 simple (and free!) steps, you will generate traffic to your site!

- Post in Forums - there are two plans of attack here. Firstly, you can post links to particular posts/web pages in your forum replies/posts (but read the forum rules carefully, as there are often restrictions on blatant advertising and/or including affiliate links in the body of your thread). Secondly, you can insert links to your site in your signature, so a reader can click through directly to your website after reading your post.

If you have several sites, you can either include details of all of your sites (although again, check the rules on signatures), or you can periodically change your signature, with details of different sites.

- Article Submission Sites - write a short article about your topic/area, and submit it to a number of free article submission sites. The sites I use regularly are Ezine, Articles Base, Article 1888, Articles Factory, Go Articles and Web Pro News. One word of advice: dont include the article as content on your website, as Google will penalize you for duplicate content!!

- Social Media Sites - the rage at the moment, you can include a link back to your site on your profile, on sites such as My Space or Face Book. You can gradually build up your profile on these social media sites, and exchange links with other people interested in your niche.

- Submit a press release to press release sites. These sites will then distribute your press release to numerous news organizations, and place it on their own site, which in itself can be a great way to get some free linkage. PR Leap, PR Web Direct and PR Newswire are some of the biggest release sites you can use.

- Comment on other blogs. Leaving comments on blogs relevant to your niche is a fantastic link building strategy, and only takes a couple of minutes of your time. Try and get your comment in as early as possible after the blog has been posted to ensure maximum coverage!

- Web directories - an obvious starting point, but submit your site to Dmoz and other free directories. Consider listing your site to paid directories if your niche has a particular directory devoted to it, but beware of shelling out hard earned money to a directory which wont generate much traffic.

- Social Bookmarking and News Websites - these sites are crawled by search engines, and can be a great way to build links and traffic to your website. There are literally hundreds of sites out there, but concentrate on a) the biggest ones Stumbleupon, Digg, Furl, reddit, Technorati, Mixx, Newsvine, and b) those sites which concentrate on your niche such as Small Business Brief for small business related sites, or PlugIM for search engine optimization and online marketing related news.

- Lists - everyone loves a list! Lets say youve got a blog related to SEO. Create a post which lists the Top 10 SEO Blogs. Not only is this useful content for your readers (who may themselves link to it), but its flattering to the bloggers on the list, and they may even link back to you if you ask them nicely, and if your site offers good quality content.

- Set up a squidoo lens. It only takes 10 minutes to get started, and you can set up a feed to your blog to appear at the top of your lens. Then you can gradually add to the content on the lens, become an expert in your chosen field, and increase your linkage.

- Reciprocal links with other websites or blogs. Do your research and produce a list and contact details of other websites and blogs in your particular niche area. Drop them a line, and ask them to link with them, in return for you linking back. A great way to build up lots of links quickly, and with minimum effort. But note only link to relevant sites Google will penalize you if you have too many links with sites which have no relevance (eg a site promoting diet pills linking to a video game review site!).

- Reviews - how about writing some reviews on Amazon of books related to your site, and leaving a link back to your site? Whatever your niche, go out and find sites where you can review related products, and youll get some highly targeted traffic as a result.

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