The Three Best Website Traffic Sources

Not a day goes by that serious website owners don’t wonder how to get more traffic to their sites.

This intense desire to generate more clicks makes virtually any online entrepreneur easy prey for many of the traffic schemes and scams that pervade the Internet, like con men on a carnival midway.

Promises of fast traffic and big bucks often separate even the most savvy businesspeople from their money because they want to believe what these traffic hucksters promise.

However, rather than thinking “complicated equals better” in the traffic game, the best website traffic sources are extremely easy to separate from the useless garbage traffic.

Fact: “good traffic” equals “targeted traffic!”

That means the visitors come because they want to learn more about a specific niche topic, not as a result of “exit” traffic or membership in a “safe” list where members pitch each other in an incestuous spam fest.

Good traffic comes from people clicking links on topics that match their interests and being directed to a website with the information they want and expect.

Bottom line, when you get right down to it, the best, most dependable sources of targeted traffic come from links that people click. So, next time you’re considering spending money on a traffic source, understand that unless it involves a targeted link that a targeted visitor can click to get to your website, think twice before opening up your wallet.

To my knowledge, there are only three ways to get a link to your site: buy it, “voodoo” it, or grow it.

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Buy Links

Buying links actually rates the fastest way to get traffic to your website.

Sign up for Google AdWords at Google.com or open an account with Overture.com.

You then run ads with a link on those sites, and any time someone clicks the link, you pay for the click through a relatively straightforward bidding process based on the popularity of the keyword.

You can also buy links in ezines, newsletters, and on other people’s websites, either on a per-click basis, for a set period (a week or month), or by paying them a commission if a sale results from a click on the link.

Linking ‘VooDoo’

Linking “voodoo” refers to attempting to manipulate the search engines into displaying links to your website. You can find a large number of automated software programs online at any given time that will claim to help you get more search engine traffic.

Depending on the intensity of competition in a specific market and the fact that search engines frequently change their rules, pursuing search engine links this way can quickly turn into the online equivalent of Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole.

Grow Links

I prefer this method to get links to my websites: growing them.

The best type of link is one in which one person tells another, either explicitly or implicitly, to click it and visit the site.

One way to do this is to exchange links with another site which targets the same audience as your site. You can manage this process manually or use one of the many software packages that handle it for you. A search on Google.com for “reciprocal link manager software” is a good start.

The easiest way to grow a link is through using articles other people post on their websites which link back to your website. The reason articles work so well for “growing” links involves the numerous ways in which articles get distributed online, each of which can create dozens, hundreds, even thousands of different links back to your website by publishing a single article.

In fact, the following represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the places you can grow links by publishing articles online.

• Blogs. Your articles can not only appear on your own blog, but get posted by others on their blogs with surprising ease. The links in these articles can point directly back to your website.

• Article directories such as IdeaMarketers.com abound online. They not only provide an easy way to display your articles to allow others to pick them up for posting on their websites, but also in and of themselves attract readers searching for content.

• OPS (other people’s sites). Popular websites like WebProNews.com attract repeat visitors by offering targeted content to their readers. Since they can’t produce all the content themselves, they publish articles created by others. Links from these sites can bring a steady stream of targeted visitors by giving you targeted exposure.

• Ezines. By getting your articles published in other people’s ezines, you can get a link on the most valuable real estate online, a targeted prospect’s email “inbox.”

Many ezine publishers run articles written by others to their targeted readers, and your link in the resource box can bring you a veritable avalanche of targeted site visitors when hundreds, even thousands of people receive your article at the same time.

Whether you choose to buy them, “voodoo” them, or grow them, getting targeted links to your site is the absolute best way to get steady traffic.

Though not as fast as buying them or as exciting as trying to manipulate the search engines, growing links with articles gives you a long-term, dependable presence online.