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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It’s been a little over 2 months since my last progress report on the Cheap Electricity Options blog. The blog is now just over 4 months old. This is what it looks like now:

I’ve added a couple of more plugins to the site to help in getting more backlinks:

Indexing Tool Plugin: This is a commercial plugin ($47) that aids in getting backlinks by getting the articles you submit to article directories and blogs indexed. Rather than repeating information here, you can read my review of the Indexing Tool plugin here.

Pingback Optimizer Plugin: This is an alternative plugin to the Index Tool above but, since both plugins use different methods for getting the search engines to spider pages on external sites, I use both together. There’s more info on Pingback Optimizer here.

Web Traffic Genius Plugin: I was already using this plugin on the site but the developers released a new version a few weeks back that adds even more RSS aggregators so the RSS feeds it creates for each new post added to a blog can be sent out to those extra aggregators. This results in even more backlinks and visitors.
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I’ve previously written about a great plugin that will help boost the value of all the backlinks that you receive to your WordPress site.

And now there’s an additional fantastic new way to achieve the same goal and possibly with even better results!

This WordPress plugin is called Pingback Optimizer. In principle it does the same thing as Paul Forcey’s Indexing Tool plugin – that is, it reads the list of pingbacks that your blog receives and then it tells the search engines about those links. The search engines can then go visit the page on which those links reside, index them and find the backlinks to your site. Add that to your link popularity and link reputation and, hey presto! you have just enhanced your search engine positioning.
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If you do article marketing, your articles will be added to numerous blogs, especially if you use a service like Unique Article Wizard (UAW) or Article Marketing Automation (AMA). But, generally, once the articles are submitted, we all assume it’s job done and move on to something else.

Each article submitted will have a couple of links in it to your site and if there are several hundred versions of an article submitted to services like UAW or AMA, then that’s several hundred backlinks we’ll get as a result. Right? That’s what I thought but it’s not the case.

You only get the backlinks if the page on which your article is published is indexed by the search engines (i.e. the search engines know it exists). And not all your submissions will get indexed. This even happens with the likes of EzineArticles and GoArticles. They may be high PR sites and there’s an assumption that submitting articles there will get you guaranteed backlinks with high PR juice. Yes, that may happen but it’s not guaranteed.

So, in order to get the backlinks and the benefit provided by them, as many of your article submissions as possible need to be indexed. And that’s where the Indexing Tool comes in.
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If you read Progress Report 1, you’ll know that the blog I set up for this case study is Cheap Electricity Options.

To recap, Week 1 of the blog development involved keyword research and identifying if the niche wasn’t too competitive and that there were enough products for it to advertise. Week 1 closed with the installation of the blog, selecting a theme and adding a home page and article. The blog is set up to use a static home page.

Week 2 saw the preparation of some articles for the site that were scheduled to be posted over the next 2-3 weeks. I also created a report to entice visitors to sign up for the email series that is also being added, on an ongoing basis, to the site.

So now to week 3…:

Week 3:

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