The main goal of any website is to be able to get Traffic. The best designed website, most user friendly website, quickest website or a brilliant website idea are useless without people visiting them. Getting Traffic is the primary goal of Internet Marketing. There is tons of method getting traffic and some may just cost your some money and others are simply free.
Let us explore some method that we could get traffic that does not cost us a single cents.
Digg
It is not easy getting to the very first page of Digg or getting 100+ diggs is already hard for me. If you were to hit the front page, you will easily get more than 1,000 visitors on that day.
But the very fundamental of Digg is to participate in their community. In this game, you needs friends to help you out while you had to help them at the same time.
StumbleUpon
It carries a very similar effect from Digg, but rather than having friends stumbling your post, you have other users who are stumbling post when they see a good one. Write something good, something different or something unique, then you will get a good chance of getting Stumble.
Friends do help a little since they are able to view your profile but StumbleUpon have a low limit of friends.
Feed Aggregator
I like this a lot because they provides a more consistent traffic compare to the two method above that would give you a huge spike in your traffic. There is a lot of feed aggregator out there and some may just be regional and others are categorizing according to categories. Currently I am using PPS, Blogged.my, Ping.sg and PlanetMy. These are great service and requires little to no effort. I have used them since day one.
As for PPS, I am doing it automatically through trackback, so it is easy as well.
Social Networking Website
I like Facebook features because I could use it to post my feeds and share them with 500+ of my existing friends. Plus on top of that you could do it automatically through Wordbook. If you have more time and would like to get more traffic, post a summary and then link them to your Facebook’s short message that says “What’s on your mind?”
Also you could try starting a group to generate discussion that is related to your website and include a link on the group. I have few groups that have decent members and it does bring in some traffic.
A more direct method is to message all your friends regarding your website. You can do this often as it will be regarded as spam and you will lose the effect easily. It is only good to promote a new website or something special about your blog post.
I have also covered some other method that was used previously to gain traffic from Social Networking Website.
Microblogging Platform
This is all new to me. But if you want to be connected to your reader, this is definitely the way to go. Twitter is the king right now, so you should start here, but other platform are also generating traffic. The easiest way is to have your RSS to update Twitter automatically but it is advisable to have conversation and replies to other Twitter’s Tweets.
Another platform that I like is Jaiku. Not because it is owned by Google, but because it started with RSS feeds feature and I like the design and the usability better. Not to mention it has groups too. Unfortunately feed is no longer supported after Google decides to let to community to develop the site.
A recent service that I used is Trigga.me because it updates my Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk and many others with just one post and I could access m.trigga.me through my Opera Mini. Unfortunately, it does not support feeds and any url shortening service, but once it does, it will rock!
Forums
This is a lot of work but you basically have to do a lot of posting to get backlinks and to get your link visible to more people. Some forum like Digital Point that allows feeds to be included are good source of traffic. It will always depends on your credibility (number of posts) and the attractiveness of the text you used for your link.
E-mail
Email is usually sending towards your friends & family. Because it is more direct and people intend to check their primary email daily, the chances that your email is looked is high, but clicking the link to visit your website will all depends.
You have notice that this mainly covers the Internet or Website Marketing, but some of them will have double effect on Search Engine Optimization at the same time.
