A few days ago I asked my email list what topics they’d like me to write about. One of the top requests was on how to drive traffic to their websites. So with that in mind…

Getting Website Traffic

There are both free and paid ways of driving traffic to your sites. Of the paid ways, expenditure runs from a very modest couple of bucks to $100+ per month for subscription based services.

While free methods are fine, their big drawback is the amount of time it takes. The more sites you have, the more time you have to spend building backlinks. For the normal Joe with just a couple of hours free in the evenings to dedicate to websites, that time can be quickly eaten up by all the manual backlinking that has to be done.

That’s where the paid tools start to come in. If you want to save time , or spend less of it building backlinks, you’re going to have to put your hand in your pocket. Time is money as they say.

However, various people have various budgets and while one might be able to afford $100+ per month on a subscription service, another may only have a couple of spare dollars to play with.
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I’ve previously written about ways to get backlinks to your sites and pages in these posts:

Using Article Marketing To Get Traffic
Unique Article Wizard Review
Getting Traffic To Your Websites – Free Options
Getting Traffic To Your Sites – Paid Options

…as well as in my free Blog Linking Tactics report.

A couple of days ago I was contacted about a new bit of software available through the Warrior Forum that would find high-PR pages on blogs on which comments could be left to garner high-PR backlinks to my sites. At $9, Backlink Loophole was a steal.

While the software will identify and list high pagerank pages, you still need to manually write and post comments on the pages it finds. So it’s a semi-automated solution. However, finding high-pagerank pages has never been an easy task and Backlink Loophole takes care of that onerous task. You don’t need to go backlink mad. Writing about 5 comments a day should be possible for anyone and won’t take long. The value of the backlinks you get in return will be worth that small investment in time.

You may have read my two previous posts about methods of getting traffic to your sites using free and paid methods. If you haven’t, take a look at them now:

Getting Traffic To Your Websites – Free Options
Getting Traffic To Your Websites – Paid Options

Since I wrote those posts, I’ve been investigating a few other paid methods for getting traffic. Let’s face it, if you want top results in getting traffic, you are going to have to pay for them. And one of those methods, even more popular (because it gets results) than in recent years, is article marketing.

So I’ve looked at three such paid services. All have been around for a while, and all have excellent reputations for achieving results.

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Every website stands or falls on the traffic it receives, regardless of the tool you use to build the site.

A first step is to submit your site’s sitemap to the search engines (SiteBuilder Elite does this for you) but it is only a first step. You can also submit sitemaps through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The search engines love active sites (especially Google); that doesn’t just mean the number of new pages added to a site on a regular basis, but the number of inbound links to the site. If a site keeps getting new inbound links (links from other sites pointing to it), then it must be popular, and that’s reflected in the page rankings in the search engines. Higher page ranks mean higher positions in the search engines and more traffic coming to your sites through natural searches.

However, getting traffic isn’t enough. You need the right kind of traffic and you need to give that traffic some useful information. Basically, you should think of yourself and your sites as being in a service industry that provides information to people. The better the information, the more likely people will revisit and the greater the chance that they’ll buy products or click ads listed on your site.

So if submitting a sitemap is just a first step, what other methods are available for getting traffic?

In this post, I’ll look at the free options (the next post will look at paid options):

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