5 Traffic generation tactics you probably have not thought about...

[Slowdive]

I love the internet I just did a search for alternative traffic sources, alternative ways to drive traffic, traffic generation methods you have not thought of and a few others and I kept coming across the same old tried and trust methods. Methods THAT shockingly we have all thought about using.

1. Get people to do your advertising for you using methods like pay with a tweet, if you have some great content and find the right blog or website and hand it over to them just make sure your content is designed to steer users back to your site. If its a hot enough offering you should be able to sneak your url into the tweet.

2. Place videos onto services like social cam that has a easy to type in link at start and end. Even better cut up a video of a news announcement about a 20 ft shark that ate another shark, seen again attacking a boat. Then title it great white shark attacks boat, then create a page some place Great white shark attacks boat video is a hoax. Your not going to get viral without some serious effort but there are more and more groups on FB and other places with humans working tirelessly to make crap go viral as far as I can tell.

3. Offer a really good service for free. Some place in my bookmarks I have a site that checks where a site ranks on google for a keyword. Its nothing revolutionary but it is useful to me when I am talking to clients, posting on forums or just want to compare my sites positions without having to sign in any place. As a result this tool gets probably about 10 visits a month from me. So it does not even have to be a great service at all, just easy to use and useful. A lot of smaller websites forget or neglect offering of services due to I suspect the initial cost of setting one up or the assumption its been done. People are lazy, as in my instance above I could download a rank checker tool, I could use one of the top sites. However ultimately if it remains accurate, told me to bookmark it (so I did! Call to action people ). I will keep returning as its easier to click on my faves than search through G

4. Stop looking for links start looking for synergies I run a locally aimed blog, Clinton runs an internationally recognised forum. I contribute here and in exchange have endless material new to my market and a quality link by my local markets standards. It's ultimately about economy of time and the means to generate content that will be link worthy as much as just traffic. BentAnat runs a property portal, I run a property mailing list and websites we are both local, its not rocket science. If one spent more time looking for collaborations instead of do-follow blogs to throw keywords at, rate of return will sky rocket.

5. Do it properly! I know reading five it sounds like I just ran out of things to say. However I see so much done in a half hearted or amateur manner on the internet and its basically fact if you take windows media editor and hack up a video your end result is not going to be the same as using a professional, shocker I know. So either develop the skills or pay for a service, quality has a higher rate of return. This is where a proper monetization scheme comes in, spending $500 on your blog about dogs is scary, its scary because your hoping to drag in $20 a month in ad-sense. Setting a realistic and obtainable goal for the site and investing time in it will make it memorable and viable, instead of just some adds finding products, articles and contacts of real value will make it a better site. That's going to make it more traffic hungry but more traffic worthy at the same time, the internet at some levels is caught in this web of free and most people take a while to break out of that. When they do they usually sit back and reap larger rewards, despite paying their web designer, employing complex solutions and spending money on their front of house. It really is a question of being a corner store or a specialist boutique and where as content is king, your persona can will attract attention as well. It will also enable you to enlist other people to grow your business by offering you preferential prices, content and opportunities.

[BentAnat]

The bottom line is (and this was mentioned in another thread): If you find yourself reading the same advice on all sites, you've likely run out of things to learn without doing something.
Do things.
You can't SEO by reading things online, so start somewhere. It doesn't really matter what you do or where. But start.
i always have little projects running where I try different things in terms of SEO. Be it a way I found to store pictures that brings them up fast and url'ed as well as ALT tagged with high relevance, or be it just trying to change the navigation around.

To give a practical example, Slowdive always said that newsletters work a charm in Namibia. I never believed in newsletters.
Until recently. I (3 weeks ago) sent out the first edition of a weekly newsletter for a job portal. To that newsletter, I added the last 4 properties on the mentioned property portal. The nett impact?
I am now monetising that newsletter, something which I struggeld to do with the site.
Job site traffic is up by 50% since last month
Property portal traffic is up by 50%
Application rate on the job site is up by close-on 80%.

I never thought of using newsletters like that, simpl because I didn't believe in them. But once I tried it, I realised that it's something that my competitors aren't doing, and it's paying dividents.

Once you start doing things that you read about, you generally come up with new ways, ideas, etc.

[bwelford]

... and perhaps it doesn't need to be said here, but the best source of ideas for traffic is where your current traffic comes from. You should routinely check your analytics data to see what is working for you. Which web pages get the traffic and why? Are there particular referrers that send you a lot of traffic? Which keywords are driving the traffic to your web pages? Any of these may be factors that you can work on to leverage the traffic.

If you do go for the alternatives that Slowdive mentions, make sure that you can quantify the traffic generated. That may influence how you set up your landing pages. None of this is rocket science, but these should be routine activities.

[Chabrenas]

@BentAnat. Neat. You didn't just start a newsletter, you started a newsletter that cross-promoted another site as well. I've never seen that in any of the stream of tips I've read.

[BentAnat]

Well, they do run on the same brand... It's my push to "control the traffic" in Namibia. The market beign what it is, I can build a brand now and control large portions of Traffic in the country in the longer term. Monetizing traffic is something that can be done.

[cash ninja]

I was thinking about this today (actually I have been thinking about it for a while) and it reminded me of a more innocent time when I didn't even know the phrase internet marketing existed.

I was running my first website and business, importing VWs. This was back in the days when Google wasn't the number one search engine, in fact it was back when it was still in its infancy.

I got flyers and car window stickers made up. The flyers had information about my business as well as the phone number and website address and the window stickers just had the company logo and website address on them. I used to go the VW shows and put flyers on people's windscreens and I used to send the window stickers out (foc) to anyone who wanted them.
Whilst I appreciate that something like that is not going to be relevant to every niche, it was a damn good way of getting my website publicised to my target audience. At one time I also had a sign-written beetle that I used to drive around in.