In past posts I have discussed conventional ways of driving traffic to your site, like article marketing and pure content. today I am going to list some of the ways I have found that are somewhat unconventional – the guerrilla marketing of the web, if you will. All are legal, some cost, and some are free. I will be writing on each one in more detail, but today, my goal is to just introduce you to a handful.
1. Link exchanges: These can be good for getting your site exposed with little or no cost. Do they work? The short answer is: maybe.
2. Traffic exchanges: Same as with link exchanges – your site is exposed to lots of people, if it is a busy exchange…I am involved in one that is really pretty nice – linkreferral.com that can and has provided me with quite a lot of traffic, and it has been very good traffic to boot. Sometimes the traffic you get from these is not so great. I have gotten some great reviews on several sites from this simple method. It is free for basic membership or $50 for a lifetime membership.
3. Forum posting: This can take time, but can result in some great returns. It is generally free to join a forum, but it takes time to establish some sort of credibility there. Once you have posted a few times you generally can put a link to your site or several sites in your posting signature to direct people to your information or sales page. The traffic you get is pretty targeted if you join a forum that pertains to your sites subject.
4. Start a blog: I usually lose my clients at this suggestion, but if you have information that you can diligently write about, this absolutely works. This one comes back to content. Also, you can go post comments on other peoples blogs to direct traffic back to yours. It takes time and patience to get traffic this way.
5. Social Networking/Facebook/Squidoo/Digg/Stumble: All of these have their merits, and as with forum or blog posting, while these are free, it takes time to work these to make them effective.
I will have a whole post on Social networking in a while.