by D. Hatcher

The number one thing most Internet marketers need is traffic. Without traffic how would you make any sales? It doesn’t matter how great your website is. You could have the best headline and ad copy in the world, but without a sufficient amount of traffic you will not do very well. This article is going to reveal simple strategies that can be put into effect immediately. These are proven methods for getting targeted traffic flowing to your site.

Write articles. This is a great technique that does more than just bring traffic to you. It puts you in the position to show your expertise and build trust in your prospects’ minds. This is very important. People have to trust you if they are going to order. Nobody will buy from you if they don’t first feel comfortable with you. Articles are a great way to “break the ice”.

Here is what to do. Write a series of articles relating to your particular market. Submit two articles per week to major article sites such as ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. At the bottom of the article is an area that is referred to as the “resource” area. You can have a signature (or bio) in that area. You can include information about your website and include a link to your webpage. If people value the information you offer, they will click the link and be taken to your website. This is why it is extremely important to provide useful, high quality information. People will only want to visit your website if you give them something of value first.

Exchange links with popular sites. This method is effective in several ways. First, you will get traffic and increase search engine ranking through the links that are posted on other sites. Also, as additional websites link to your site, your search engine rankings begin to rise. This can be a significant source of traffic. Showing up on the first few page in major search engines for your keywords can bring you hundreds or thousands of visitors per month.

Here is how to get links to your site. Look up sites that relate to the theme of your website. Ask them to do a link exchange with you. In the email provide a link to the page that you are displaying their link on. Now the ball is in their court. They will either accept your offer or not. If they refuse to do an exchange with you take their link off of your site.

Use Pay Per Click advertising. Pay Per Click costs money but it can be a dynamic way to coral highly targeted traffic to your site. If you are careful to choose the right keywords and make intelligent bidding choices it can prove to be a very cost effective and useful tool. Google Adwords and Overture are the two most popular Pay Per Click companies. However, Yahoo and MSN offer pay per click advertising as well, and often for less cost per click. To get the most out of Pay Per Click you need to be armed with at least a fundamental amount of knowledge. I suggest buying a book or ebook on the subject before starting a campaign.

Submit videos to video sites such as Youtube. Videos are one of the best ways to “get the word out” about your website. They can also be made with no more equipment than a small digital camera with a “movie mode” or an inexpensive webcam. Processing your short movie (adding titles, music and basic editing) can be done using a free video editing program that is part of your Windows operating system.

Here is what to do. Make a short and to the point video and do whatever editing you wish to do to it. Upload it to Youtube and give it a title and description based on it’s content. There are things you can do to make sure that it is seen by many people. For example make sure you use keywords or “tags” that target the audience that you are going after. Probably the best way to learn about how to do good video is to watch some of the most viewed videos that relate to your topic or business. Note the decriptions and tags that these videos use.

The traffic generation strategies mentioned above can make a huge difference in getting you traffic. I suggest using them all. This will give you the most traffic possible in the shortest amount of time. Of course there are many other things that can be done, but these methods mentioned are very easy to impliment and are very effective. Remember one thing, the more effort you put into the methods provided in this article the better they will work for you. Period!

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