Climb My Way Out

A website without traffic is just lame and a waste of effort. When you have finished your masterpiece you need an audience. Getting the desired amount of audience can be tricky and can take a bit of time. If you already have several websites with large amounts of traffic, then this task is piece of cake for you but for the rest of us it can be a frustrating thing. Paid advertisement is always an option, however that is not an option suitable at all times. Lets say you started a website, you don’t have much content yet and you go out and spend a crap load of money advertising. You see traffic coming in and you’re happy about it but you noticed that it’s steadily declining. This is probably because you don’t have enough content or your content just suck. I for one think it’s best to not pay for advertisement until your content is sufficient and you know users will be returning. So, I decided to put together a list of ways you can jump start your website free of charge.

Website Directories

You can add your website to DMOZ.org it’s a directory much like Yahoo’s, but it’s free of charge. The site runs itself because it’s much like a Wiki where the users are the ones moderating each other. Submitting your website to a directory like this will help your website get crawled easier. Since all these links are moderated and must be accepted before they are listed it generates a quality list of links with very few bogus websites. The down side is, it can take forever for your website to get reviewed and if you have a crappy website, it can be denied. In the case of denial, you fail at life! No just kidding, it’s a sign that your content/design is not up to par and should be better. Take it as a lesson and work harder instead of getting angry that you didn’t make it.

Search Engine Submission

You can go to Google and search up ‘free search engine submission’ and use one of the free websites to submit your site.  Back in the olden days this is how you get your site on a search engine. Nowadays, it seems the big boys like Google, Yahoo, and Bing indexes your website whether you submit it or not. I guess this technique still helps you get into the smaller search engines. This is probably not going to give you a gigantic increase in traffic but it is free.

Social Bookmarking

This is what you want to take advantage of fully to get a boost to your website. You should submit your articles/websites to Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, Delicious.com, and Reddit.com. There are many more but I’m just naming a few big ones. It’s totally free to submit your article/website to these social bookmarks and there are so much traffic to these websites. A nifty trick to get your website more views is to get your friends and family to add them too so you get more votes and more noticed. If you have no friends, then get in touch with me and I’ll be your friend. For a website like a blog, you should submit every article you write. If it’s really good maybe you’ll end up front page on these sites.

Social Networking

If you have a Facebook, MySpace or Twitter account, you’re going to get some traffic from those networking sites for sure. Post a simple status update and let people know about your new article/website and I’m sure they’ll visit it. You can also start a Facebook group to get all your friends to join and tell them to tell their friends to join. Gathering Twitter followers can be a tricky thing, but slowly and steadily you’ll get some. There are actually a lot of articles that go in depth about social networking and a simple Google search will do you wonders. To be honest, I’m still learning about these strategies, so I’ll update on this further when I learn more.

Link Exchange

Link exchange with another website that is similar to yours is an excellent opportunity to bring in users of the same interest. Link exchanging with an established website is preferred but a rare opportunity and may not be free. You should look for relatively new websites that you think has potential for growth.

Forums

Seek out large forums with similar content as your website and subtly post some shameless advertisement. Your posts should contribute some value to the forums, don’t go around spamming your URL everywhere. Your posts will most likely be deleted or worst case scenario you’ll get banned. Offer something informative, humorous, entertaining, etc and subtly include your website into the content. Sometimes it’s hard to find a relevant topic to post in, which isn’t a big deal, you just have to make a relevant topic. For example, the forums is about cats, but your website is about dogs. You can create a topic about how cats are better than dogs to capture your audience and subtly lead them to your website.

Comments

A lot of times a website allows for comments and within the comments there’s an opportunity for you to put your website. You should give some valuable feedback to the website and include your URL. If you just start spamming your URL you’re probably just going to get your comments deleted. Posting comments is also a good way to get to know the webmaster of the other website, this is a great way to network and get to know some people in the same industry.

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