The Five Free Methods of Driving Traffic to Your Website

In internet marketing, traffic is the most important thing webmasters must remember in order for them to be successful with the websites they build. Without traffic, you cannot generate any clicks on your ads, acquire sales for your products, attain e-mail subscribers or any other thing that you would like to accomplish with your websites help. It shall always be the amount of traffic and a continuance of a stable flow of traffic that decides the success of your website. Driving traffic to your website does not necessarily mean you have to spend a dime. There are a lot of free methods you can use to drive traffic to your website.

The five free methods

The five methods listed here are really excellent and proven to achieve the closest results you wish and can always be applied directly. Unlike purchasing your own advertising, these methods are free but of course, they require the most of your attention and hard work.

1. Make sure your website is optimized for search engines as far as possible. Any traffic you achieve from search engines is always free. To have your website optimized, ensure that the website contains articles with a lot of keywords. When you write articles for your website, about 400-900 words, you can generate a lot of visits more often. Be sure to include catchy titles to entice visitors to read them.

However, this may not likely generate the traffic you have always wanted, this could be your first step in making your website successful. In addition, you could always submit all your articles to article directories and contact publishers if they wish to use your articles on either their mailing list or website. Have your articles contain heavy keywords so that they may also appear on top of most search engine results.

2. Join link exchange programs. Nowadays, there are a lot of webmasters who invite other webmasters to take part in link exchange programs. When someone's website is linked to yours, you'll have the chance of being visited by people who visit those websites. To do this, you can look out for websites that are similarly related to yours and allow the owners of these websites to exchange links. Make use of an anchor text for the link as it will aid your search engine rankings.

3. Allow joint ventures. Joint ventures could be very powerful if done in the right way. Give your partners some really good reasons why they should promote your site. By providing them with the right promotional tools such as e-mails, signatures, articles, etc., he/she would no doubt accept your request. To ensure that your website gets better results, look for website owners that have the capability of sending a lot of traffic to you.

4. Join online groups, forums, etc. that could help you with promoting your website. For example, you may post your sites URL in your signature file for the users to see. So you can be a known member by the discussion groups you join, simply participate in discussions that interest you and contribute your knowledge and expertise to the rest of the members.

5. Get a free blog. Blogging is another free method that generates traffic to your website. Post some high-quality information regularly and don't forget to ping all your posts as it can help in driving traffic to your website.

How to Choose a Domain Name that will Drive MORE Traffic to a Website

Creating a website can be tricky, but choosing the right domain name is even trickier. A good domain name can drive more traffic to your website, and a not so good domain name may cause a stagnant website. The concept of having your own website is that it should effectively represent your purpose, whether it will be for personal or business use. Once you create your website, it follows that you should and must register your own domain name.

So what is a domain name? It is a unique alphanumeric name that gives identity to a website on the World Wide Web. A domain name has a maximum length of 67 characters, this includes the 0 to 9 numbers, English alphabet composed of 26 letters, and the hyphens. Hyphens in a domain name can only be used within and not at the beginning or the ending of the name.

Domain names have suffixes, and they are called Top Level Domain (TLD). Domain name TLD's are based on the category of organization that they are related to. The following are several of the most popular TLD's:

1. .gov for government agency
2. .edu for educational institution
3. .org for nonprofit organizations
4. .net for commercial network
5. .com for commercial business domain

Since domain names gives identity to a website, it follows that choosing the right one can be a bit complicated. Your objective is to opt for a name that is easy to remember, search engine optimization friendly, and more importantly a domain name that mirrors the content, and/or products and services that your website provides. At the end of the day your chosen domain name can make or break you.

Do's and Don'ts in choosing a Domain Name

Obviously, a domain name should be related to your websites content. If you're selling shirts then do not choose a name such as pants.com. Choosing unrelated names will confuse site visitors and frankly it doesn't make any sense at all.

A domain name as discussed earlier should be easy to remember. So choosing too long of a name is a No-No. Which is better yourshirts.com or your-shirts-in-different-styles-and-colors.com?

However, a short name is also not advisable, because a short name will not have much impact in driving traffic to your website. Try to purchase a domain name with few keywords with relevance to the content of your website. Which is better yourshirts.com or shirt.com?
Integrating keywords in choosing a domain name will help, because it will result in a higher ranking on search engines. Which is better yourshirts.com or yoursite.com? With yourshirts.com you can immediately identify that the website is about shirts as opposed to yoursite.com wherein you are at lost as to what the website is all about, you will loose potential website traffic if you do it that way.

How to Generate Social Traffic

Nowadays, getting your website included in the top search engine results is not the only way to drive more traffic to your website. Search engine optimization still helps, yes, but it's not the only alternative to focus on. Now, with the escalating growth and popularity of social websites, it's important that your website gets a piece of the social cake, too!

Understanding What Makes Up Social Traffic

A lot of people are still confused with what exactly makes up social traffic. While there are many varied definitions you can obtain online, most, if not all, will agree that social traffic generally includes those coming from social media, such as blogs and forums, social news and bookmarking websites like Del.Icio.Us, Digg, Reddit, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, and lastly any other product of Web 2.0 such as Amazon Review or Yahoo Local.

Thus, any traffic you obtain from such sites can be immediately classified as social traffic. Furthermore, if we're to base things on that principle, it is also safe to derive that social traffic is generated more or less by the preferences of other people since it is the users of such websites like Digg and MySpace that had made the choice to link to your website.

How to Generate Social Traffic

Now that you know where you'll be able to get social traffic from, here's how to generate it for your website.

Know What Makes People Come Back

It doesn't matter if the people who have just visited your website didn't get any of the products or services offered in your website. What matters is ensuring that they've left with the intention to come back. Social traffic will continue to pour in and don't worry, those hits will eventually be converted to online profit, if you also continue giving them what they want. Ask yourself then: what made those people bookmark or link to your website? If you know what that is, can you give them some more of it?

Know Who You're Talking to

It is easier to generate social traffic if you know what particular market segment they represent. Knowing who they are will consequently help you learn what they may or may not like in your website and take the necessary steps to ensure that your website is as pleasing as possible to them.

Look for the Catch-All Bait

Yes, it's okay to create several variations of a particular topic to ensure that the different sectors of your target market will easily understand what you're talking about but it's just as important to create content that's universally attractive. Don't spend all of your time thinking up the many different ways you can sell glass doors when you need to concentrate first on selling doors.

Use Eye-catching Headlines

Yes, using a huge font size and a glaring font color can make your headlines eye-catching but we mean it figuratively. Use words that instantly grab your readers attention. Use words that are powerful and have great impact. Why use nice, for instance, when you can go as far as beautiful? Why use increase when you can use the term soar? This tip works for all kinds of sources of social traffic. With eye-catching headlines, you succeed in making a person stop whatever he's doing just long enough to read more of what you have to say.

Make an Impressive Profile

This will work with all kinds of social traffic as well. Blogs, forums, and social networking websites all let you create a profile. Take advantage of this to let readers know more about you and most importantly of all, use your profile page to convince people to read more of your content.

Be the First!

This tip works best with social news websites like Digg and Reddit. It's very important to be the first to write about the latest topics concerning your websites industry. If you are selling pet supplies, for instance, then news like purported toxic contents in a popular dog food brand would be something you can certainly write about. If you're the first to write about it, more people will be able to link to your work since it's the first thing they've seen and able to use as reference in their own writings.

And if you're not the first to write about a particular topic, try at least to be the first to use a different perspective on the topic. That can certainly work as well!

9 Effective way to Convert Traffic to paying Clients

If you have a website that markets your business, to achieve an online business that generate income from affiliates or ad programs such as Google AdSense, or, to sell products and services on an online store. You probably know that there are certain search engine marketing techniques, like Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click such as Google AdWords, and, other promotional techniques to drive that much needed traffic to your site.

Now that you have achieved that, what happens when traffic builds up on your website? Are you able to convert them to paying clients? Building traffic to your web site is just one thing, but if nobody is buying your products or services, your online business is doomed to fail.

Conversion Optimization - A Success Factor

What is conversion optimization? It is the process in which you maximize the percentage of site visitors to complete a preferred action. This percentage is called conversion rate.

If you are not doing it yet, conversion rates should be tracked. Percentage for pay-per-click ads, it's the percentage of visitors who clicked on your ad, and, is directed to your website, and, made some actions - like completing and submitting a contract form, request for an estimate, and other actions. This can be measured, for you to know if you have successful ads.

How Conversion Rates are Calculated?

Pay-per-click ads conversion rates, are calculated as follows:

Number of site visitors making an action - divided by - number of site visitors that clicks your ad - multiplied by - 100 - is equivalent to - Conversion Rate Percentage

Online stores conversion rates, are calculated simply as follows:

Number of orders made - divided by - number of site visitors - multiplied by - 100 - is equivalent to - Conversion Rate Percentage

The importance of improving the conversion rate is so crucial, because it can escalate your sales transactions with the same quantity of website traffic by just increasing your conversion rate.

As the website traffic increases - and it should increase as expected over a period of time, granting you are properly managing your website - your profit will proliferate. You could amplify your conversion rate and amplify your website traffic, your profit will escalate four times, with all the other things being equal.

Here is the much awaited 9 effective ways

You can use the following 9 effective ways to improve your conversion rates and to convert site visitors to paying clients. This is perfect for online stores, but, it is also quite effective for most types of websites that need to improve their conversion rate.

Most of them are reasonably priced ideas, especially when compared to the price of driving additional website traffic or to pay for advertising. Bear in mind, too, that boosting your conversion rate will consequence a better return on investment for your website's promotional expenditures that you use to amplify your website traffic.

1. Use the return policy of your site to convert visitors to paying customers.
2. Give a variety of payment options to attract a lot more paying customers.
3. Offer an easy accessible customer service.
4. Provide a toll-free contact number that is visible to site visitors.
5. Be a mystery shopper to your site.
6. Make your website secure and make sure that everybody knows it.
7. It is best to peek on your competitor's site to see what they are up to.
8. You should welcome feedback, because it will help you improve your services.
9. Offer promos and special discounts and make sure that they are advertised heavily.

It is not enough for your website to be just noticed. You have to aim for sales too!