traffic to your website

Challenges

April Mixed Bag Challenge

WOW! I haven’t done a public challenge in over 8 months, and it’s definitely time for one. I want to accomplish a lot of things, so this challenge will be a mixture of working towards getting traffic and increasing revenues for 2 sites: this one, and a niche site whose best traffic months are the spring and summer months.

In February 2010  I challenged myself to increase traffic for this site by 75% and fell short by just a little bit. But, for the second part of last year I was majorly distracted, and was very inconsistent with adding content, stopped guest posting, and even got sloppy with one of the main attractions to my blog: the free niche research.

So, in April I am planning to increase traffic by 25%. Here is a screen-shot of the the traffic as of today, March 31, 2011:

So, in April I need to come up with 948 more unique visitors, for a total of 4740. Now, in order to achieve this, I’ll do the following:

– go back to weekly free niche research

– guest post at least twice, and find at least 2 people to guest post for me

-create 2 how-to articles (these seem to attract traffic). Do you have suggestions? I’m all ears: please post below in the comments and I’ll either write it myself, or find someone qualified to we rite it for me.

Now the other site in this challenge is a niche site I challenged myself on last year as well (it was actually my April challenge for last year).

Here is a screen shot of my stats from that post last year:

April starts for niche site

And here is a screen shot from the first 3 months this year:

 

 

 

Big difference, right? My plan is to double traffic to this site in April, as well as double income (which is pitiful right now, at $122.60 for this month). It’s an ambitious plan, but I think I can do it. Here is what I am planning to do for this site:

– add content every day for the month of April (luckily, I already have all the content needed, so I just need to take a few hours to add images, links, etc., and upload them to the site

– guest post at least once (last year I wasn’t able to find a place to guest post, but this year I’ll try harder)

– build some links. Not exactly sure which route I’ll take for this. I may submit a couple of articles to article directories, send a press release, tweet, bookmark, etc.

– I’ll create and distribute at least 2 videos. I’ve tried creating videos myself in the past, but I am not cut out for it, so this will be outsourced.

– I’ll create a FaceBook page for this site (probably I’ll outsource this as well)

– create a list for the site, so I don’t have to always rely on just the search engines to bring in traffic. I already have my give-away for it (had it for more than a year and never took the time to create a list: shame on me!)

– pick 2 products, create detailed reviews, and work on ranking those 2 pages: shooting for top 5, but will be content if I reach page 1 🙂

– monetize the site better: I am using AdSense and Amazon for now, but I need to tweak it for better performance.

What are YOUR plans for the month of April? Wouldn’t you love some more traffic? Please join me in this challenge to increase traffic: just comment below.

by | Comments Off on April Mixed Bag Challenge
Website Traffic

How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

increase traffic to website

So you have just successfully launched your website and you are feeling extremely good about yourself for such an achievement. Of course, you have just jumped one hurdle (building your website) and are now moving towards the next one which is actually getting internet users to view your website daily. How many visitors would you like to get to your site daily? 100? 500? 100? More? Let’s see how you can increase traffic to your website.

There are several effective ways to increase traffic flow to your website: PPC, article marketing, video, social media, etc.

Increase Traffic With PPC

Many website owners don’t use PPC at all for fear of costing too much. But if you really think about it, PPC could actually save you lots of time and money. How, you may ask? With PPC you can test niches easily without wasting time on the other traffic building methods, only to find out that your pages don’t convert, or the keywords/key phrases you chose are not buying phrases.

Set up a PPC campaign that is very specific to your key phrase, and send a few hundred visitors to that page: then assess if the phrase you chose is profitable. If so, go on to some of the next traffic generation methods.

How Article Marketing Can Boost Your Traffic

Everyone knows about article marketing, yet so many ignore its benefits. Try this: write one article a day for the next 3 months and submit it to the top 5 article directories. Then take a look at how your traffic improved. I am sure you’ll see it’s an activity worth taking the time for. Of course, make sure your articles have a great call to action, or you’ll waste your time. Forget about writing your entire life story in the bio: be short and to the point and offer something related to your article that the reader can’t ignore.

If you want to get even more out of your article writing, why not re-purpose your articles? You could create short videos, pod-casts, and even mini eBooks to give away.

Video Traffic

Another excellent method of driving traffic to your site is creating video. If you have an ecommerce site, you can create product review videos. If you sell software, you can create a video about how to use it, and if you have an info product, you can create a video with all the benefits you’ll get from reading the eBook.

Of course, there are the fun videos that serve to endear YOU to your audience, and Lynn Terry does this beautifully with her mail opening videos. If you can come up with your own “get to know me” fun video, take that opportunity!

Social Media Traffic

There are lots visitors to be had from the social media: from twitter to Digg, Squidoo and Hubpages, and everything else in between. Of course, you can’t just throw a link on twitter and hope to get a lot of visitors: you need to build relationships, participate in discussions, be helpful, etc.

What is YOUR best traffic generation method?

by | 3 Comments