How to get traffic for your site/blog

We all want more web traffic, right? There's a lot of "advice" out there on how to get it, and we've tested most of the ideas. We've summed up our results below into the three best ways to get traffic, and three other ways that are also popular, but don't really produce much.

1) Search Engines

You can't get away from the fact that around 80% of people first find a web site by using a search engine, and that over 1 billion searches are conducted on the Internet every day. That all adds up to massive amounts of potential traffic that you are able to tap into.

But it means that you need to be seen in the search engines, which means making sure your site appears on the first page of a search engine's results when someone searches for your product or service. Any of you who have tried to do this will know it's not easy, but investing resources into doing it properly can reward you many times over.

Our research has shown that search engine optimisation brings in very high amounts of quality traffic to your site. The majority of our search engine ranking customers see their web site traffic double or even triple within months of starting, and continue to see similar increases over the following months.

2) Blind Submission

See those ads offering to submit your site to 100,000 search engines and advertisement pages? We saw one the other day that said it would submit you to 1 billion sites!

Even if these claims are true, you will in fact get NO REAL TRAFFIC from these sites. How can that be you ask? Believe me, we have tested it over and over again. Our test pages received no increase in traffic from these services on all the occasions we tested them.

The main reason for this is because if your site isn't optimised to suit the engines, you may get submitted to them all but your site could be rejected by many, or ranked number 3982 (for example). Either way you will never be seen.

3)Purchasing Email Lists

A more and more common query we receive from local businesses is how to purchase an email list so that they can advertise via email. There are many offers around where you can purchase supposedly "opt in" email lists that you can then use to advertise to.

Purchasing these email lists is never a good idea. Apart from a large percentage of the addresses being out of date by the time you get the list, the remaining recipients are likely to either be uninterested in your product, or angry that they receive unsolicited mail from you.

Emailing people is often a good marketing strategy, but only to people who have willingly provided you with their email in the first place.

4)Promote them with Social Media

Bloggers regularly check their sources of traffic and submitting their website to social media sites like StumbleUpon and Digg is a great way to get on their radar. StumbleUpon in particular, can send hundreds of visitors to any site and its a really easy way to get noticed.

Just remember to tie the social media account you are using with your own website by inserting your URL or site name in the profile. Alternatively, forums are also a great way to share the blogger’s content.