Four Unique Ways to Get Website Traffic

by Jim Daniels

Website traffic. It is the cornerstone of any successful business on the web. Sure, you need a professional website and a proven revenue model, but once you have those in place, becoming profitable is merely a numbers game...

Bring in lots of targeted traffic and you bring in lots of dollars.

But as any webmaster can tell you, getting website traffic can be tough. After all, there are millions of websites on the web. Getting customers to yours can be quite a task.

Sure, you can and should utilize all the proven traffic generators such as search engine promotion, email newsletter advertising and the like. But most webmasters with limited budgets usually end up coming to one conclusion.... they may have to think a bit out of the box if they want to grow serious traffic.

So today I'd like to share four unique ways to generate traffic to your website. I'm quite sure most websites have never even considered these possibilities, let alone tried. them.

1. Use "Expert Sites" to Promote Yourself... and Your Business

When you participate in "expert sites", you develop a reputation for being very knowledgeable about your chosen subject, and your answers are permanently posted where they can be seen by potential customers for years to come.

Furthermore, if you consistently provide quality answers, visitors will notice and start directing others' questions specifically to you as their expert of choice.

By using proper etiquette in your responses to questions, you can offer answers that include appropriate references to your site, and you can provide your URL in your signature.

A side-benefit of this method of creating traffic is that you get a chance to "pre-sell" your product or service through your answers to questions. It's better than just providing a blind link as they'll already have some impression of you and your site before they actually visit it. And some level of trust and credibility will have already been established.

These expert sites cover just about any topic imaginable -- consider joining at least one:

Yahoo Experts: http://experts.yahoo.com 
AskMe: http://www.askme.com
ABuzz - New York Times: http://www.abuzz.com
AllExperts: http://www.allexperts.com
AskJeeves - Ask Other People: http://www.ask.com

2. Exploiting Residual Traffic from Expired Domains

When domain registration fees come due, but aren't paid, the domain returns to the pool of available names. And at that point, anyone can register the name.

Very often, these "expired" domains were once thriving websites that were linked to from other websites, were listed in search engines, were bookmarked by previous users, etc. And even though the name is no longer used, those links and bookmarks probably still exist.

You can take advantage of this residual traffic by registering these domains again and redirecting these visitors to your "real" website.

There are plenty of sites with information about expired domains, like Whois.net or ValueNIC.com. Once you have a list of available names, you can determine how many inbound links each name has by using a link popularity lookup, such as the one at:

http://www.marketposition.com/linkpopularity.htm

The general rule of thumb for estimating the traffic these domains will receive is to take the total number of inbound links, divide it by 20, and that's how many unique visitors you should expect per day. In other words, if you register 10 expired domains that have a total of 1000 links (the total across all search engines), you should expect about 50 unique visitors per day.

3. Start an "Offline" Affiliate Program

I'm sure you realize that having your own affiliate program is an effective way of generating traffic. But the usual methods of monitoring and tracking affiliate sales don't lend themselves for use in the offline world. Until now...

You can give your top affiliates an actual section of geography (which can be denominated as a city, county, a zip code, a telephone area code, a state or even a country) to conquer, and you can credit them with all sales that come from that geographical area.

In other words, let's say I decide to "give" one of my good affiliates his home state of Tennessee. Now, any customers who come from Tennessee (and do not come from any other referral link) will be credited to him. He will get ALL commissions from orders originating out of Tennessee.

That incents your affiliates to do all kinds of direct, one-to-one marketing in their own neighborhoods to drive traffic to your site. As long as they know that they will be credited with every sale that comes from their city (or county or area code or zip code or however you want to set it up), they will promote in ways that would never be cost-effective if you were to try it yourself.

They can try doorknob-hangers, flyers under windshield wipers, press releases to their local newspapers, small signs on utility poles, local telemarketing, bumper stickers, and a thousand other things that you'd never be able to do otherwise.

4. Using Testimonials - With A New Twist!

Everyone knows that testimonials are nice to have on your own site, but did you ever think about the value of having YOUR testimonial on the site of others?

In the course of ordinary business, you undoubtedly use lots of products and services: ebooks, newsletters, webmaster services, marketing courses, webhosting, internet service providers, books, magazines, etc.

If any of these work especially well for you, you should consider writing intelligent, glowing testimonials and submitting them to the people who create these products and services.

Who can resist putting a great testimonial on their site...?

And don't forget to ask, as politely as possible, that your url also be published.

If the potential recipient doesn't have a testimonials page, you can still get him to publish your testimonial if you make the page for him. By copying the same theme and layout of his regular site, it's quite a simple matter to make a testimonials page (Where yours is first and at the top!) and just give it to him as a gift. This will save him time and earn you a couple of extra points if he's still doubtful about including your testimonial and/or your URL. And it only takes a minute.

In closing...

There is one more place I'd like you to visit today. It's the very site where these unique traffic generating ideas came from. A site dedicated to the "Science of Web Traffic", called appropriately, "Trafficology"...

Trafficology webmaster, Wayne Yeager, knows the importance of thinking "out of the box". As a matter of fact, his site is a great example of this very theory.

Every month, Wayne pays "cash bribes" totaling $1,350 for the BEST traffic ideas submitted at his site. And hundreds of them come in every month.

As Wayne's site states, "Some of the ideas are GREAT. Some of them are lousy. But invariably, a handful of cool traffic ideas you've never heard of will be submitted every month."

And the best part is you can read the ideas without paying a dime. That's because Wayne puts all the BEST ideas into his email newsletter which is 100% FREE! While there is certainly a glut of email newsletters on the web these days, this is one every web business should be reading faithfully. If you're not reading it, you are completely out of the loop!

So hop on over to Trafficology and get it. And while you're there, submit an idea or two of your own. Who knows, you may just earn up to $1,000.

Article by Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing. Jim's site has helped 1000's of regular folks profit online. Visit http://bizweb2000.com for FREE "how-to" cybermarketing assistance, software, manuals, web services and more. No time to visit the site? Subscribe to Jim's Free, weekly BizWeb E-Gazette: mailto:freegazette@bizweb2000.com