How to generate traffic to your website or blog?

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Anyone who guarantees to make your site rank in position 1 at the search engines or who guarantees you income of $XXXX.XXX is full of crap. Don't fall for that.

The ways you drive traffic to a site is marketing. There are lots of ways to market a site online and offline.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): You can make your site rank for keyword phrases that people looking for your type of site will be searching for. This is more of a strategic, long-term approach. In general, it will take months, if not a year or more to rank well for even moderately competitive search phrases. But EVERY site who plans to be around for a while should be thinking strategically as well as tactically.

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can promote your site on social media sites. But this is tricky. It CAN drive significant traffic if done correctly. You have to build a community of followers by participating in the community... basically talking about everyday mundane things, being funny, whatever... but DON'T push your product often. Some say 1 of every 100 tweets for instance should promote your company... any more than that and people see through you hard sell and defriend or unfollow you. They begin to see you as a spammer instead of someone interesting to follow.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click): You can buy ads on search engines (like the Adwords ads down the right side at Google). You bid on keywords on a per-click-basis and based on those bids (and other things like quality score) the engines will display your ad when people search for those keywords (called an impression). And if someone clicks through to your site by clicking on your ad, then you are charged what you bid (unless you have a high quality score in which case Google will lower what they charge you).

CPM: You can buy banner or text ads from ad networks. They generally charge you a fixed fee for each thousand impressions. So if you buy 10,000 impressions they will display your ad 10000 times on random sites that participate in their Ad networks.

Custom Deals: You can work out deals to have your ad displayed on various sites like the home page of Yahoo! and MSN ($$$$$$$$) or related web sites that you've identified as being frequented by the type of visitors you are targeting. Typically, these are based on some timeframe like a day, a month, whatever... at a fixed fee.

Off-line advertising: TV, radio, newspaper, business cards.


What you do... which combination of marketing you select... depends on your business, your product, your industry, the types of visitors you want to target. But basically it all boils down to marketing.