Using Competitor Analysis to Build Referral Traffic and Links for Your Website

Other websites in your niche often hold the key to getting more traffic for your own website. Their collection of traffic sources and links is one that you can appropriate for yourself when you are trying to build more traffic and links.

Assuming that there isn’t a huge gap in topics covered and content quality, websites that link to your competitor will generally be willing to link to you as well.

If the competing sites in your niche are older and more established, their backlink profile might just reveal the traffic sources you need to grow your own website.

Competitor analysis may lead you to websites you have never heard about and will also show you what type of traffic sources you need to cultivate to be successful in the long run.

Three Ways to Perform Competitor Analysis

1. Search Engines

Several search engines will allow you to see who is linking to your competitor, while showing the approximate audience size/traffic of the linking website. You can use these two search engines to roughly determine which referral traffic and link sources you should be developing.

• Alexa’s search engine allows you to see which sites are linking into a specific website and displays the Alexa Rank of each linking site as well. This statistic is compiled from Alexa when it crawls the web and is updated no more than 6 times a year. This is probably the reason why Alexa does not record incoming links for some websites

  To use this search engine, just type in your competitor’s website URL in the Sites Linking In search box. While the Alexa Rank is flawed, it offers a general indication of the size of the websites linking into a specific site.

• Technorati is a search engine that easily allows you to examine which blogs are linking to your a blog in your niche. You can either search by typing in the blog URL or by using the name of your competitors website. In general, the authority rank of the linking blog indicates the size of its audience.

  It’ll might be more worthwhile to target sites with mid to high levels of authority. If you’re intent on following the progress of your competitor, highly recommend subscribing to the results feed which will allow you to keep track of sites that are linking to your competitor.

2. Backlink Tools and Analyzers

Backlink tools allow you to find out who links to your competitor’s website. Bear in mind that the sites linking in might not actually send traffic so you will need to visit each website for greater detail. These tools will also allow you to build up your link profile by placing your link in some unexpected web pages.

• Yahoo Site Explorer offers the most comprehensive list of backlinks for any website and gives you the option of exporting the backlink list into a more readable list.
• BacklinkWatch will give a list of approximately 1,000 backlinks along with the PR and anchor text for some of the links listed. It also tries to indicate if the link is nofollowed as well.
• iWebTool’s Backlink Checker functions similarly as Backlinkwatch but instead of returning the anchor text, it displays the title of the webpage where the link is placed.

3. Public Traffic Stats Counters

Some websites display open Sitemeter or StatsCounter buttons which will allow you to access their traffic statistics easily. You can then examine the referral urls for the website and find out which websites often link to and send traffic to the website in question.

For an example, take a look at LifeHacker’s sitemeter stats, which can be found at the bottom right corner of every page of their website. It shows the site’s growth over time and allows you find referring sites which send it traffic.

4. Niche Top Lists

Top lists are public ranking lists which rank sites according to the amount of daily traffic or votes they receive. Bear in mind that the traffic figures you see on these lists are not always accurate because these top lists only track pages with a specific image, which means that if it is displayed only on the homepage, the top lists will only track homepage hits.

• BlogTopList.com ranks blogs according to a figure which combines unique visitors with the number of votes each site receives. Unique visitors are displayed for each blog but no other traffic statistics is made available.
• Blog Top Sites is a website which tracks the number of unique visitors which visit a blog and then ranks them according to the number of unique visits they receive each week. I would generally recommend using Blog Top Sites over BlogTopList.com because they provide more detailed traffic statistics.

These two and several other industry-specific top lists can be used as a reference tool when you are performing competitor analysis on sites within your niche. Visit the category which your site falls into and scan through the blogs listed. Look at the traffic stats and if you’re interested in examining further, check out their website.

Some of the sites will display their traffic stats publicly and you can click on their stat buttons to find the source of their traffic. If they don’t display any public stats, you can try using the backlink tools mentioned above to find out who links to them.

Long Term Competitor Analysis will Help Your Website

Keeping tabs on similar or more established websites within your niche allows you to examine what they are doing to build links and traffic.

Doing so will give you ideas on how to implement a similar traffic generating strategy for your websites and online businesses.

19 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images

One way to get more search engine traffic is to optimize your website for Google Image Search, a tool which allows users to easily find images by typing in specific search terms, phrases and keywords.

Many people utilize Google Image search to find images for a wide variety of topics, which can range from pictures of cars to celebrities and furniture.

Images can not only make your website visually attractive: they can help you to gain more daily search engine traffic.

Highly relevant image results show up at the top of Google’s search results page when one searches for specific topics. Getting listed in this prime position can possibly send a great deal of traffic to your website.

Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization

Google Image Search optimization is not a difficult process and only requires that you pay attention to how you label and use your images within the regular framework of your website. A lot of image optimization involves basic search optimization factors such as the inclusion of relevant keywords in the content, title and meta tags.

19 Ways to Get More Traffic Using Google Image Search

1. Insert keywords into your Alt Text.

This is the most important part of image optimization and you should include a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the image and your webpage. The alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file.

2. Name your Images with Descriptive Titles.

If you have an image of Lindsay Lohan, you could use the term ‘lindsay-lohan.jpg’ to name your image, instead of simply going with the original file name which could be something like ‘b473.jpg’.

3. Use relevant text around your images.

It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find that a short description of 20+ characters beneath every image. You’ll probably notice that the keyword is listed in bold as well.

4. Use Adsense to assess overall content relevance.

Insert an Adsense unit on the page where your googe images are placed and see what type of Adsense ads show up. This will tell you how Google thinks the overall theme of what your page is about.

Change your content until the Adsense units reflect the keywords you want to target. This is not only applies to Google images but is a generally helpful method as it improves your overall latent semantic indexing score and makes your site appear more relevant to Google for targeted key phrases or words.

5. Optimize Your Title and Meta tags.

This should already be part of your overall optimization strategy and it purportedly helps your site to rank better in image searches as well. Like the use of Adsense for testing, paying attention to this point will help you to have better visibility in Google’s main search engine as well.

6. Use anchor text keywords in links to images.

When you link to a specific image, use keywords instead of a generic phrase. For example, instead of using “See here” or “Click for Full Size“, try something like “Lindsay Lohan Picture” or “Lindsay Lohan in Rehab“.

7. Use Internal and Social Site Tags for your Images

If you are using images with little or no textual content, it might be helpful to tag your images using internal tagging functions or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it to rank better. If you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use the appropriate keyword tags as well.

8. Use Broad Categories of Images to Get a Larger Audience

If you’re running a gadget website, you don’t have to only upload pictures of gadgets. Try upload pictures of web 2.0 sites, web applications and pictures of items related to your gadgets. For example, you can upload pictures of living rooms instead, if the gadget was designed to complement residential space.

9. Make Your Image folder accessible to search engines

Ensure that your robots.txt file does not limit search engines from accessing your image files. This is essential if you want your images to be ranked on Google Image Search. Try not to use javascript links on image files as well as it will limit search engine access as well.

10. Re-upload your pictures to maintain search freshness

If you have a picture that focuses on highly popular keywords, you can try to remove and re-upload another version of your image because freshness might affect relevancy and may rejuvenate your ranking on the Google Image Search engine.

11. Make your Google Images Standards-compliant.

One way of making your images fully standards complaint requires you to include not only the alt tag but also the width, height and title tag for the image as well. Here’s an example of a fully compliant image reference you can follow.

12. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Central.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and click on the Diagnostic tab on the menu bar. After which, select enhanced image search on the left sidebar and click on the checkbox to opt into image search for your website. This can only be done after you verify your website with Google so do that before proceeding further.

13. Try out Google Image Labeler.

Apparently, the Google Image Labeler is some sort of a online game which allows you and others to write tags for images that show up. These tags are then taken into consideration and may influence the Google Image search results.

14. Use Javascript to prevent framing of your webpages

By adding a piece of javascript code, you can prevent your images from being framed when users click on the image within Google Image Search. Visitors will not see the Google image frame but the full site and this may encourage more pageviews for your site as well. This practice may not entirely be endorsed by Google so try at your own risk.

15. HotLink Images from Google Search

This involves going to Google Image Search and to do a search query for the image you want. Visit the original webpage and copy the image location to hotlink it on your own website. This helps your website to show up high among the image search ranks. For an example, check out these search results for Jessica Alba (slightly NSFW).

Most of the images in the top row are hotlinked and actually rank better than the original image source. You should probably note that hotlinking is frowned upon by most webmasters because it leeches their bandwidth, not to mention that you might be violating copyrights as well.

An alternative method of hotlinking is to hotlink Google’s cache itself. This short tutorial gives clear indication of how to do it but this method only allows you to use thumbnails, not to mention that some webmasters have reported seeing no results after trying this method.

16. Use Image Sizing to Target a Search Term.

The size of your image may determine the amount of visits you receive from Google Image Search. Some people use Google Image to search for wallpapers and if you’re targeting a specific keyword, try creating it in the form of a wallpaper or in the form of an icon, depending on how much competition there is for the specific image.

17. Use Images about ‘Hot’ Topics.

One easy way to get more visitors from Google images involves the deliberate use of images to catch visitors who are searching for ‘hot’ topics, some of which can be easily found through the use of Google Trends. For example, screenshots of popular ongoing TV shows could be integrated in some way in some webpages. Note that for maximum effect, your content should be relevant to the image used as well.

18. Create a separate page and link to the page and image

This process involves adding an optimized page webpage on your website along and link the image to that specific page which visitors can access via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page whenever they find your page through Google Image Search.

19. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed

An important part of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google Image Search to see if you are taking the right steps to optimize your images.

The easiest way to do this is to use a site search operator. For example, here is a list of images indexed on Boing Boing. Simply change boingboing.net to your url: http://images.google.com/images?q=site:boingboing.net

Sphinn Launches

A new project for Search Engine Land, Sphinn is a social website that is designed specifically for search and internet marketing professionals.

Utilizing a Digg-style voting system, Sphinn allows you to share and discuss news stories and articles specifically dealing with topics like search engine optimization and social media/search marketing.

Self-promotion and submission of your own content is actually encouraged. Here’s an excerpt from their submission guidelines:

Yes, you can submit your own stories. In fact, we’d rather you directly submit your own stories you think are of interest to the community than have someone do it for you.

Yes, you can submit your own blog post about a news story you read. However, we’d prefer you only do this if you’ve added something unique to the general news topic, such as an extended opinion or further clarification.

First Impressions: Design and Features

In terms of design, Sphinn looks rather similar to Search Engine Land (SEL). The same overall color scheme is used and the site appears inviting, particularly if you’re familiar with Search Engine Land’s interface.

While they are neatly aligned to the right, they are still pretty in-your-face and do distract me a little from reading the description for each news item.


Community Building and Networking is Always a Good Thing

Social networks provide excellent branding and can serve as a strong source of defensible traffic, particularly for the host website. Digg-style social voting platforms are also avenues of expression for your site audience.

And what better way to encourage visitor loyalty, then to allow them to get some exposure for their own brand, website and content? The lure of free web traffic and interaction with like-minded individuals is a main draw for all social websites.

Using Flickr for Traffic Building and Brand Marketing

Flickr is a social photography website which allows you to upload and share your pictures with friends and family, registered Flickr users as well as the general internet audience.

Like its closest rival Photobucket, Flickr functions as an image host but its main attraction lies in the social sharing of images with a large community of the interested viewers.

Many amateur and professional photographers use Flickr to showcase their work in return for constructive criticisms from others. Bloggers are also avid users of Flickr because it helps them to save on bandwidth while providing image backup in the unlikely scenario that all their files are wiped out from their servers.

Flickr’s built-in social features, strong user community and growing mind share has transformed it into a viable platform for marketing your website or business. Some bloggers like Barry Schwartz and Matt McGee have written about how Flickr can be used to drive traffic to your website or online business.

Why Should I Use Flickr for my Website?

According to HitWise, Flickr is currently the #2 photography website in the U.S, UK and Australia, while holding a U.S marketshare of 38%. While it still trails Photobucket in all three markets, Flickr’s global presence means that it possibly has a greater market share in various other countries.

Flickr’s recent integration within Yahoo! Image Search meant that Flickr pictures will be displayed when anyone uses Yahoo to search for images on specific topics. HitWise’s data shows that this has clearly lead to the increased and continued adoption of Flickr by new users.

Flickr’s photos are also listed in Google’s search results, Technorati, personalized start pages (Netvibes etc.) as well as various other portals, websites and blogs which pull in and display public Flickr pictures via RSS.

All of these sources direct visitors to individual photo pages and each of them can be funneled to your website or at the very least, made aware of your business or personal brand.

This is also the slight benefit of having link juice from Flickr: All the links you place on Flickr are currently followed and so they do benefit your website’s link profile in some way.

Getting Started with Flickr

Head over to Flickr’s homepage and sign up for an account if you haven’t already got one. After which, log in and edit your settings by filling in some information. Here are the items you should complete:

• Buddy Icon. The avatar size is a small 48 x 48 so upload and use an avatar that is noticeable and visually appealing. You can either use your favorite image, company logo or site brand.
• Screen name: You would have already chosen this earlier but you can edit it now if necessary. McGee suggests that you could use your site URL (DoshDosh.com) as the screen name but I don’t think that’s really important. You can use the handle that you’ve always used around the web or simply go with your brand, site title or an abbreviated version of your name.
• Profile. Write a little about yourself or your business and include some relevant links (link to your About page etc). HTML is accepted so use proper anchor text links instead of a string of URLs. You might want to add in your location and some of your interests to personalize your profile even more.
• Your Flickr Web Addresses. You can create your own Flickr web address which makes it easier to share your pictures with others.

Should I go with a Free or Pro Account?

According to Flickr, there is a bandwidth limit of 100MB per month. This limit is reasonable if your blog does not see a lot of daily traffic, recommend to try the Pro Account because there are a lot more benefits as well.

The Pro account is $24.95 a year and you’ll get unlimited bandwidth along with unlimited sets and permanent archiving for high res pictures. Free accounts are limited to 3 sets and your photos can only be posted up to 10 group pools (instead of 60 for a pro account).

If your website receives a lot of traffic and you use a lot of images everyday, the pro account would be much more useful for marketing purposes.

Alternatively, go with the free account and test Flickr on your site first to see if it actually works to send you any traffic at all. You can always upgrade later.

Uploading and Tagging Pictures

You can easily upload pictures through the Flickr web interface or you can use their uploading tools, which I highly recommend. Using Flickr Uploadr, a fast loading desktop program and its a really quick way to upload and tag images.

Tagging your pictures with the relevant keywords is important for them to be found by search engines and other Flickr users.

For example if you’re uploading a picture of an iPhone in a New York Apple store, you could possibly use tags like “iPhone, Apple, New York, Gadget, Cellphone, Mobile” along with your site name or brand.

If you’re uploading something like a picture of Lindsay Lohan, you could go with a series of tags that relate to elements within or external to the specific picture:

• Profession (Actress, celebrity, singer)
• Name (Lindsay Lohan)
• Location of the Picture (Los Angeles, California, Tokyo)
• Medium (illustration, photograph, video screen)
• Type of shot (Magazine shoot, candid, swimwear)
• Accessories or Items in the Picture (Halterneck, brown skirt, Ferrari, iPhone)
• Affiliate or Relevant Publication (Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vogue)
• Your website name (LindsayLohanRocks.com etc.)

How to Turn Visitors into Supporters of Your Website

Social media websites like Digg, Netscape and del.icio.us are bridges which connect your website with a large audience beyond your site’s normal reach. These websites will send visitors that can become future supporters of your site or brand.

Social media communities also expose your site to other webmasters or bloggers, the source of editorial links that will get you referral traffic and better search engine ranks.

Social websites are reliable sources of defensible traffic and should be cultivated as a means to increase your site reach and audience size.

The best way to achieve this is simply to consistently promote usage of a specific social website that is highly relevant to your site theme. This article will examine the methods which will allow you to do so.
Setting Your Social Media Objectives

First of all, determine what you want to gain from a social website. Are traffic or links your priority? Are you intent on getting more customers or subscribers?

The ideal scenario occurs when your audience promotes your content to social websites regularly on their own accord. You also want your site to be well received on these social platforms, in order to get the greatest exposure possible.

How to Make Your Site Social Media Friendly

There are several ways to develop a close relationship between your web site and the specific social community in question. Done correctly, these methods will encourage users to promote your site through social media communities.

• Pick the Right Social Platform. Choosing the right social websites is important because your website might not mesh well with every social media site out there. A tech-oriented website will do better on sites like Digg while politics is more strongly emphasized on Netscape. Experiment and find out which social communities are ideal for your content.
• Build a Power Social Profile. This involves participating actively in the specific website in order to build a respected social profile to promote specific content that are beneficial to your interests. This is a powerful method, although it is time consuming and requires much effort.

  Rand from SEOMoz on the influence of a prominent social profile:

  Once you’ve built up a profile that people recognize as a valuable source for information, you become more powerful in that community. Your bookmarks/articles/submissions/etc take on a greater value than the anonymous contributions of newbies.

  This mirrors the social structure of many web forums - big voices carry greater weight. The ultimate goal of this visibility is to have the power to influence - once you have a voice, marketing becomes a soft-sell, rather than a hard one.

• Social Optimize Your Webpages. This involves including voting, subscribing or bookmarking badges on your website, thereby allowing your users to take action on your content or support its ongoing presence on a social website.
• Create Targeted Content. The best way for your content to be well received in any social community is to know what sort of content the community likes. Spend time studying which type of content gets the most bookmarks, user comments or page views. Targeting one social website instead of many might be a good idea as well.
• Start Your Own Social Network. This method mainly pertains to larger sites that are able to leverage their strong audience base or reputation. Search Engine Land recently started Sphinn, a search marketing social news platform that successfully attracts new visitors while promoting their overall brand.

  Another example is Mashable, which has a social network that encourages readers to interact with each other or share photos and videos with the whole community.

Social Media Evangelism: Converting Visitors into Supporters

Not all of your readers know about these social websites so generating awareness of their existence or purpose should be a priority. While all the methods listed above do work, the best ways to encourage specific behavior is to evangelize or promote a specific social community on your site.

Singling out and writing about a social community adds value to your audience, particularly if the community in question focus on topics that are highly relevant to your site. Choose a social media channel that offers the greatest returns on investment, in terms of exposure generated for your website.

Here are the steps to take when encouraging greater usage or cohesion with a specific social website.

1. Pick one or two social media platforms that best fit your website.
2. Write about these social websites. This can be a long article or a short paragraph which introduces the purpose or theme of the social website. Focus on the benefits to your user and not the benefits for your website.
3. Place a link to the article prominently on your website. You can situate this on the sidebars of your blog. If you’re simply writing a brief introductory paragraph, you can locate this in the ‘About‘ section of your page.
4. Generate repeat awareness of the website by linking to your main article within other webpages. Optimize your site by encouraging/reminding users to use the website through buttons, badges or text links etc.

New visitors will arrive at your website and come across your specific article, which may convert them into new users of the social website. End result: A potential visitor that will act upon your content through the recommended social website.

It’s really that simple. Don’t assume that every new visitor to your site is aware of auxiliary social communities. By evangelizing a specific service, you are converting visitors into potential voters and bookmarkers who allow you to reach beyond your current demographic and audience base.

An Introduction to Defensible Traffic

What is Defensible Traffic? Simply put, defensible traffic is web traffic from sources other than search engines (or Google). These sources can come from offline marketing efforts, traditional media, an established audience base or other online websites.

The benefit of cultivating defensible traffic sources is that you will still receive visitors to your website even if changes in search engine or PayPerClick (PPC)algorithms make it increasingly difficult to get search traffic to your website.

JazzcatSEO has a nice definition of defensible traffic, one which contrasts PPC traffic with an established and well cultivated website.

Anybody with a basic knowledge of PPC and a bank account can buy traffic for their website. And if their account is big enough, they can steal your PPC traffic by paying more per click.

Therefore, the only way you can defend that traffic is to pay more per click and cut into your ROI.. On the other hand, a well-optimized site with carefully developed content, quality backlinks, good domain age, etc. that ranks well in the SERPs has a huge advantage over newer contenders in the same space.

It’s much easier to maintain traffic from such a site, because anybody who want to compete with you in that space will have to develop a site with more relevant backlinks or better content, which is a lot more difficult than simply upping the bid on their PPC dashboard.

Over relying in search engines means that your online revenue is in the hands of major search engines like Google or Yahoo. Matt McGee suggests that your online income and business shouldn’t be fueled by traffic sources you can’t control:

Google is constantly tweaking how it ranks pages, and if all your eggs are in Google’s basket, your business is operating at Google’s mercy. What if the next algorithm change isn’t friendly toward your site and the SEO tactics you use?

Whatever you do, don’t rely just on Google. A business plan that relies on free traffic from an outside source you don’t control is no business plan at all. Spread your eggs around. Changes will come — you can be sure of that.

In order to make your website into a reliable cashcow in the long run, you definitely need to consider establishing forward income stability, which requires you to plan ahead for contingencies while initiating strategies which expand your income sources beyond search traffic alone.

Sources of Defensible Traffic to Cultivate

While optimizing your website for search engines is important, it’s important to understand that the following sources of defensible traffic are important for long term growth and sustainability.

• Partnerships/advertising with websites in your niche.
• Off-line marketing in traditional ad media, word of mouth promotion etc.
• Bloggers and Webmasters within and outside of your niche
• Online communities like forums, bullentin boards (e.g. Craigslist)
• Social media, bookmarking and voting websites (e.g. Digg, Reddit, YouTube )
• RSS or newsletter subscribers
• Type-in traffic and Effective site branding

10 Ways to Build Defensible Traffic for Your Website, Business or Blog

Characteristics of an Ideal Defensible Traffic Source

Let’s start first with a general idea of the type of defensible traffic you should be building. While the following points are ideal conceptualizations, they may help you to assess the value of your referral traffic sources.

The traffic source you are developing should:

• Promote your brand.
• Reinforce or build the existing community around your site
• Send targeted traffic (interested visitors)
• Work on both a long and short term basis.
• Connect your website with a broad audience
• Sustain itself over time, without requiring consistent active effort.
• Complement your overall site monetization strategy

10 Ways to Build Defensible Traffic

1. Build a Community Around your Website.

The fastest way to grow a website is to amass a large regular audience who are likely to recommend and support your site building efforts. Not only can they offer valuable feedback to your website, this community can send you links, referral traffic and future subscribers.

It’s important to follow a clear community development strategy from the onset and one which involves active interacting/networking with your audience or target market.

2. Practice Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization involves educating your audience on social websites, occasionally developing content targeted at a specific social audience and facilitating interaction between your site audience and the social website in question.

This also includes promoting the usage of a particular social voting/networking website (e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon), which can then be gradually developed as a referral traffic source.

This process may involve personal use of the social website and active networking within the social community in order to set it up as a source of visitors for your website.

3. Focus on Growing Your Subscriber Base

Syndication of your content away from your website should be encouraged because it promotes viral dissemination of your content and brand. One of the ways to build a regular audience is to focus on the growth of RSS feed or email newsletter subscribers.

The benefits of building feed subscribers are many and one should primarily view them as people who are able to generate buzz or support for your website or brand.

Most of the time, subscribers are the also the easiest to convert when it comes to recommending new affiliate programs or income-generating schemes for your website.

4. Develop Linkbait and Remarkable Content

Linkbait is content that is created to pull in links and referral traffic from a targeted audience and is a very fast and effective way to create awareness of your website.

However, the only way your website can continue to attract recommendations and traffic over the long run is to develop several webpages or articles that are comprehensive, timeless and reference-able.

Linkbait is the hook that reels in the crowd and flagship or cornerstone content is the carrot that converts them into recommend-ers or future promoters of your website.

5. Industry and Niche Networking

Getting links and traffic from another website doesn’t only depend on the quality of your content, although it is a very important factor. Networking with the right people in your industry can not only get you links, traffic or sales but also one very important element: recommendations.

These recommendations vouch for the quality of your business and the integrity of your personal brand. There are many ways of networking within your industry and an visible online example of this is the creation of industry-specific ranking lists or awards.

6. Start an Affiliate Program

Creating an affiliate program for your website/business is an effective way for you to consistently drive more targeted traffic towards your websites. Affiliate programs create lateral traffic sources which develop simultaneously across a wide body of websites.

They allow you to expand your reach into demographics that are not targeted and is an effective way to consistently receive visitor traffic.

A large number of websites are active members of TLA’s affiliate program and each of them send a great deal of visitors to their website. This traffic is cumulative and consistent because publishers have an incentive (commissions) to continue doing so. A good affiliate program will only do your website or business good and never harm.

7. Buy Advertising on Relevant Websites

Purchasing advertising for traffic is an old strategy used by almost all webmasters or online business. An ad on a high traffic and relevant website can send you a fairly large and regular amount of web traffic.

Paid advertisements can come in many forms: sponsored blog reviews, RSS feed advertisements, text links or image-based banner ads. They can be purchased according to a time-based, CPM or CPC arrangement and is a viable option to consider if you need to brand your new website.

8. Partnership and Joint Ventures

One facet of online marketing partnerships is banner exchanges, which are widely used by various types of websites. There are also many other types of partnerships available which can drive visitors to your website: some of these include collaborations on a new online project and co-advertising/branding for a popular product.

9. Offline or Traditional Media Marketing

Promoting your website offline is not an option that is often explored by many webmasters or bloggers but small business owners understand the value of offline marketing.

Selling your website in traditional media allows your audiences to connect with what you want them to see. When you list your site URL in a magazine ad, you are inviting them to explore your website further.

Entering your url, a visitor arrives at your website or sell page, which can be designed to evoke a specific response from the visitor in question. It is important to note that offline marketing also involves pitching your website to journalists and traditional media such as newspapers or industry journals.

While they may not send a great deal of traffic, offline initiatives are great for branding and complements your online marketing efforts.

10. Set up a Defensible Traffic Plan

Last by not least, it is very important to create a well structured defensible traffic development plan. Setting goals, to-do items and monitoring your website’s performance allows you to determine progress and discover what traffic-generating schemes work or not.

If you want to make money from your website, you need a clear idea of how to build traffic sources that will grow your website and brand over the long run.

7 Easy Ways to Get More Weekend Traffic for Your Website

Seven Easy Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Site on the Weekend

Your goal is to target websites with regular traffic flows and large numbers of users and make them referral sources which will send visitors to your website. Naturally, you should try to focus on getting targeted traffic whenever possible.

These short-term strategies will allow you to get traffic very soon after you implement them. They will not only reduce your weekend traffic dip but may get you even more traffic to your website than the weekdays.

I have omitted other long term traffic building methods like building a community, product development, joint ventures or affiliate programs because they are not something you can easily implement for immediate results.

1. Network within Social Communities. This includes posting and interacting with other people on relevant forums, social networks like Facebook, news sites like Digg/Reddit as well as blog sites like Blogcatalog or MyBloglog. There will always been people on crowded online communities and you will always get some visitors if you plug your site discreetly in the right places.
2. Create a Weekend Link Bait. Establish the habit of creating and promoting a weekend Link Bait on popular social websites like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. This is by the far the easiest and most powerful way to get traffic to your site during the weekends.

   Social news sites usually get less news during the weekend, and it is likely that your bait will be more successful during this time.

3. Comment on Blogs. While many blogs don’t update during the weekend, you can still comment on the ones that do. Focus on those with more traffic and try to be the first few to leave a comment. Make your comment relevant and you’re likely to receive some visitors from others who visit the same blog.
4. Email Pitch Your Website. Write an email to bloggers within your niche to promote your website, business or best article for last week. Give away a product or offer premium access for selected publishers in return for a mention.

   Some blogs like Daily Blog Tips have a habit of doing weekend speed-linking. Pitch your site to these blogs and you’ll get some traffic if you get a link.

5. Try Blog Traffic Exchanges. Blog traffic exchanges are tools which allow you to get traffic by visiting other blogs. They are more useful for newer blogs and as they require more time and effort on your part.
6. Use Paid Advertising. This involves spending money on paid advertising in order to get traffic to your website. Pay per click advertising and social media advertising on sites like StumbleUpon can bring in traffic on the weekends. The benefit of this method is that you don’t have to do any work whatsoever.
7. Publish During the Weekend. Publishing during the weekend will get you some traffic, especially if you have many feed subscribers as some of them will visit your site to read the full article or comments. Smaller sites can also benefit as new content will bring in a small amount of long tail search traffic.

   Future publish your post during the weekend so you don’t have to sit down in front of the computer to write. Asking a question is sometimes the quickest way to put out an extra blog post.

The downside of all of these methods (with the exception of paid advertising) is the time-investment. Do you really want to spend time in front of the computer on the weekend? The amount of time needed for these tasks will vary and perhaps it would be better to alternate them each weekend to lessen the workload.

Another way to deal with this would be to get someone to help promote your site for the weekend instead of doing it yourself. Learning how to oursource marketing is important, even for amateur webmasters or bloggers because they can really help your website to grow much faster.

The Fastest Way to Build Traffic and an Audience for Your New Website

3 Step Traffic Building Tactic for New Websites

Step One: Set up a Bait.

Think of a bait as an attractive value proposition. One that that appeals to your target audience and is unique enough to stand out. A bait can also take the form of some incentive for the new visitor and should be concurrently intriguing or tempting. The bait should also represent your site in the best possible light.

Your bait should not be a one-off deal as you don’t want visitors disappearing and not coming back. At the very least, you should promote some recurring behavior on their end. This can take the form of a feed or email subscription or an introduction to other products/content/webpages of your website.

Here are some examples of bait you can set up for your website:

• Well written and original article
• Contests or Awards
• On-site web tool or application
• An interview with a notable personality
• An industry-specific ranking list
• Free items and resources
• Free gifts, discount bundles or deals
• Widgets for a community

Step Two: Send traffic towards the bait.

After you’ve set up the bait, you’ll need to promote it extensively. The aim here is to get as many people to view your bait as possible through a variety of marketing methods. The ultimate purpose of this is to spread awareness of your website and achieve your specific goals.

Before you start to generate any traffic to your bait, you’ll need to first decide what you want to gain from the traffic. Do you want to build your email or subscriber list? Or are you primarily looking to build links above everything else? You’ll need to optimize your website so that the traffic you receive will help you achieve your goals.

Here are some ways and sources you can use to send traffic towards your bait:

• Social media websites (networking/voting/news community sites)
• Niche forums and bulletin boards
• Emails to bloggers or webmasters in your niche.
• Payperclick advertising for your website
• Purchasing ads on well-trafficked and relevant websites
• Submission of articles to article directories and industry journals/other blogs

Step Three: Build a Community and Repeat.

After you’ve sufficiently promoted your bait, allocate some time to interact with your audience and produce follow-up content that fits their expectations and needs.

Write specific articles or produce content that is similar to your bait. The goal here is to immediately build a community around your website. It doesn’t matter how small your community is at this initial stage.

Analyze how your audience interacts with your site and responds to your bait. After a period of time, create a new piece of bait and try to target new audiences through the two steps above.

In my opinion, the development ratio for a new blog should be a 30% focus on content with a 70% focus on marketing and traffic growth. You can write your heart out and create a stunning masterpiece but if no one is going to see it, it is virtually impotent. You’re not making money nor building an readership.

Understanding the Value of Traffic for New Websites

Most sites have slow growth rates and some of them end up languishing in the sewers of the internet, abandoned by their exasperated owners. Know very clearly that a regular audience and web traffic not only allows you to make money from your website/business but motivates you to keep it alive.

Don’t underestimate the tangible pressure you feel when hundreds or thousands of visitors expect to read a new blog post or see a new website update. It makes it so very much harder to go bust and much easier to succeed.

The Smart Way to Get Traffic and Links

Introduction: Creating Your Own Prospect List

Image Credit: corner

Marketers define prospects as potential customers, clients, or purchasers. A valuable prospect is sometimes characterized by their loyalty, spending power or potential level of interest, as it relates to specific products or services.

When you are trying to promote your site to bloggers, you should be looking for prospects with the ability to build your brand while sending you targeted traffic. Because prospect development can be a tedious process, I suggest marketing to a core group of individuals, each with established circles of influence.

Instead of targeting a large number of bloggers, focus on the few that matter. You can’t please every single person (impossible endeavor) but you can easily win the favor of a few bloggers. Let them recommend you to their audience.

This is a lot easier, especially if you’re completely new to the industry or niche.

How to Build Up Your List of Prospects

Pick some keywords related to your website or niche and run a search on Technorati, which will give you results ordered according to Technorati authority and favorites.

This gives you a very rough indication of the popularity of a specific blog, which is determined according to the number of links it receives from other blogs. For example, here are search results for marketing and web design.

Another alternative would be to use niche specific ranking lists which rank sites according to specific factors such as the Technorati or Alexa Rank. You can also visit and browse around blog communities like Mybloglog, Bumpzee or BlogCatalog. Look for the active bloggers with a strong reputation on these sites.

After you’ve got a list of relevant blogs, subscribe to their RSS feeds. I would recommend putting them in a separate folder in your feed reader or using a start page to organize your prospects. More on this later.

Why You Should Maintain a Bloggers Prospect List

Image Credit: endless summer

The primary reason for having a bloggers prospect list is to gradually get the blogger in question to send you qualified traffic or recommend you to his or her audience, thereby improving your business or personal brand.

A prospect list is an intentional system developed to help you enhance the ability to get a favorable response from specific bloggers on the list. You can determine the amount of time or energy to be spent on each prospect, according to its value as well as its relationship to you.

The second reason for maintaining a prospect list is reciprocation. A lot of the cross-promotion you see online is the result of intentional reciprocation; doing something for someone because he or she did something for you.

Reciprocation is a basic aspect of culture and society. It pervades all human relationships and influences it tremendously. We may do something for someone with the hope (conscious or not) that someone may repay the favor in the future.

Cialdini’s rule of reciprocity explains:

This rule requires that one person try to repay what another person has provided. By obligating the recipient to an act of repayment in the future–the rule for reciprocation allows one individual to give something to another with the confidence that it is not being lost.

The decision to comply with someone’s request is frequently based upon the Rule of Reciprocity. Again, a possible and profitable tactic to gain probable compliance would be to give something to someone before asking for a favor in return.

Keeping a prospect list helps you to systematically record and reciprocate favors done for you, which dramatically improves the quality of the relationship you have.

This will help you to gradually turn bloggers into friends and future assets you can leverage for your business/website.

Adopting the Right Mindset is Important

The prospect list is actionable. You should track your prospects with the attitude of wanting to act upon their content, along with the aim of building a personal and meaningful relationship.

The trick here is not to think of yourself as a yet another reader but as an avid supporter and evangelist. How are these mindsets different?

The first is passive, absorbing information and not fully acting on it. One fades into the crowd and does not stand out from the other readers. In this case, one seeks knowledge or entertainment from the blog and goes no further.

The latter is active, absorbing content, voicing opinions and then sharing or promoting it to everyone else whom one thinks might benefit from it. You react to the blogger’s content while using it as a platform to connect on a personal level.

The more visible you are, the better for your brand and the easier it is to build an advantageous connection.

Seven Microblogging Tips to Get Traffic for Your Websites

Unlike popular social news websites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit, micro-blog platforms will not send as much traffic even if you have many users tracking your updates. They can however, get interested users to visit your website and may increase your audience size over time.

Here are seven micro-blogging tips

1. Build a Strong Network of Friends

People will only receive your updates when they add you as a friend. Your main goal is to get as many people to befriend you as possible. The more friends you have, the bigger your network and the increased potential for secondary links or traffic.

One common way to get more friends is to go around adding everyone you come across. This brute force method is practiced by some and it will work because some users will befriend you, even if they don’t know who you are.

Bear in mind that this practice can be fairly irritating to most regular users of the micro-blogging service.

2. Synchronize Updates with your Website

Most microblogging services allow you to put badges or widgets on your site to show your latest updates and they might be useful for getting more followers. They can be particularly useful for first time visitors who reach your site through a search engine.

You can also set up your blog to send new blog posts as updates into your microblog. I personally don’t think syncing is really necessary in order to build up your microblogging network but it does have some benefit.

3. Develop a Natural User Profile

Some of the people I follow have links pointing to their website in every update and I do think that can be a turn-off for some users. My own Twitter account is a bad example because I’ve only used it to insert links to blog posts on Dosh Dosh.

Try to update with interesting stuff and make your account look like its actually written by a human instead of a auto-linking bot.

4. One Account Vs. Multiple Accounts

I would recommend focusing on building one strong account because it requires too much work to establish several accounts. You can however, create an individual automated account/micro-blog for each website you own.

Sync your website with each specific micro-blog so that your new articles will show up as updates. This allows you to get traffic from a handful of users over time.

Maintain one strong profile for your personal brand or flagship site and use it occasionally to direct traffic to your other websites.

5. Cross Post Your Updates

If you have accounts in different micro-blogging platforms, you can choose to post to most of them simultaneously in order to save time. This can be done via a simple hack as outlined in this article.

6. Network with Other Users

Services like Twitter and Pownce allow you to send private messages to friends. Sending them a simple message about their updates only takes less than a minute and it’s a fast way to say hi and start a relationship.

There are a fair number of authority bloggers on these services and this is a great way to communicate with them directly.

7. Ask Questions for Information

If you already have a substantial number of friends following your updates, you can start posting questions to acquire information and recommendations on specific topics of interest.

Questions can also be asked to acquire feedback on your websites or a possible course of action.They are also a great way to generate interaction and responses from your network of friends and fans.

List of Micro Blogging Networks

Here is a collection of micro blogging networks you can use for your website. All of them generally have the same features and I’ve also included several non-English micro blogging networks as well.

There are other micro blogging services but I’ve not listed them because they don’t have a large enough user base. Pownce is currently invite only so drop a comment if you need an invite