by Sheri Fink

Created on: March 01, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Getting traffic to your website is a priority for your business. The more qualified traffic you drive to your site, the more conversions you'll have, and the better your bottom line will ultimately be. Optimally, you'll use a variety of free viral marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing strategies to increase your traffic. These techniques target people with interest in your products/services/content in order to optimize the probability of their conversion.

If your goal is to efficiently and inexpensively increase traffic to your website, here are a few ideas to test:

1. Employ strategic search engine optimization techniques to increase the site's ranking in organic search engine results.

2. Feature content from and banners for your site in other related email newsletters (with links to the site). These can be your email newsletters or those of a non-competing newsletter with relevant subject.

3. Add "Send to a Friend" or "Recommend this Site" links to every page of your website. When clicked, a new email window will open up with pre-populated information advertising (soft-sell of your product/service/content) your site for the user to send to a friend or colleague.

4. Add "Link to this Site" link with code to make it simple to link to your site. If other subject-relevant sites link to yours, it can help increase your Google PageRank, which positively impacts your ranking in organic search engine results.

5. Enable users to sign-up for email updates so they'll be notified when fresh content is added to your site. These email updates can include marketing copy and targeted opportunities to buy your products or services. You can also sell advertising space within your email updates for extra revenue. Just make sure that the offers make sense for your customer base.

6. Add interactive surveys to your site that will simultaneously provide you with information on consumer opinions and serve as entertainment for users (to see the results of how other site visitors feel about particular issues). The surveys could help make your site more "sticky," encouraging repeat visits to the site.

7. Post information about your site's innovative features and informative articles on relevant blogs. Find blogs that make sense for your industry by searching with relevant keywords on Google Blog Search. Make sure the information you post is interesting and related to the topic of the blog.

Using any of these techniques can help increase the amount of traffic your site receives. Using a combination of several of these ideas can be a powerful way to introduce your site and products to a new audience.

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