There are enormous numbers of websites out there that all looking to do the same thing and that is to drive more traffic to their websites. Let’s face it the more traffic that you get to your website the more the possibility is that too will get more sales from potential clients so does how do you drive more traffic to your website?

One of the first and easiest things that you can do in order to drive more traffic to your website is to get involved with article marketing. And one of the best things about article marketing is you can do it for free. All you need to do is create quality content related to the niche that you are promoting and submit them to article submission directories. Most all directories that allow you to submit articles will give you an author biography box that will allow you to include a link back to your website. Just remember that you want to create quality content that people are going to want to read and are going to want to keep reading so they will be compelled to visit your web site.

Another thing that you can do in order to promote your website and drive more traffic to your website is to do forum marketing. You want to start by joining forms that are related to the particular niche that you’re promoting and become our regular member contributing to the different discussions. You’ll be able to help promote your website by including a link to your website in your signature line.

You’ll find that this is just the tip of iceberg as to the things you can do in order to drive more traffic to your website. Whatever methods you choose you need to stick with it in order to see results.

Although increasing the SERPs for a website is probably the best way of getting laser targeted visitors in need to buy the services/products you are selling, there are many other places from where you could grab a good piece of traffic. This blog post should be about forums.

Although community forums are mainly used by SEOs for link building, these are some great places to grab attention and to drive more customers for your business. There are probably tens of forums for each and any niche and thousands for more popular ones such as SEO, web design, weight loss and so on.

However, not just any post added on a forum could bring visitors to your website. Here are some great tips when replying/creating new threads on an industry related forum:

1.      Always use a signature – most important

Many forums allow adding a signature with a link back to your website after 1, 10 or 100 posts. Do not start spamming the boards with posts such as “great writing” etc only for getting a signature. Always try to add some value to what you reply.

Moreover, use a great call to action when composing it. Probably the best way for doing this is to use this pattern: text url+anchor text.

2.      Create threads

Open threads containing tips related to your niche. Do not try to copy/paste from other places, people will notice that and you will not get the desired results.

3.      Be interesting

Always add some spice to a post. Search most viewed posts and try to add a little from your experience. Those posts are the most visited ones and your expertise in a certain niche will be rewarded with traffic.

4.      Check grammar/spelling

Always do that! We all make mistakes but adding a post with many grammatical errors will raise some flags here and there.

Although increasing the SERPs for a certain website is probably the best way of getting laser targeted visitors in need to buy the services/products you are selling, there are many other places from where you could grab a good piece of traffic.

Although community forums are mainly used by SEOs for link building, these are a great place to grab attention and to drive more customers for your business. There are probably tons of forums for each and any niche and thousands for more popular ones such as SEO, web design, weight loss and so on.

However, not just any post added on a forum could bring visitors to your website. Here are some great tips when replying/creating new threads on an industry related forum:

1.      Always use a signature – most important

Many forums allow adding a signature with a link back to your website after 1, 10 or 100 posts. Do not start spamming the boards with posts such as “great writing” etc only for getting a signature. Always try to add some value to what you reply.

However, use a great call to action when composing it. Probably the best way for doing this is to use this pattern: text url+anchor text.

2.      Create threads

Open threads containing tips related to your niche. Do not try to copy/paste from other places, people will notice that and you will not get the desired results.

3.      Be interesting

Always add some spice to a post. Search most viewed posts and try to add a little from your experience. Those posts are the most visited ones and your expertise in a certain niche will be rewarded with traffic.

4.      Check grammar/spelling

Always do that! We all make mistake but adding a post with many grammatical error will raise some flags here and there.

Building a website and leaving it online without any future work on it is probably the worst choice an online business owner can do. Unfortunately, there are still many folks that believe just by having an online presence they will get visitors/sales from their websites, fact that is totally wrong.

Indeed, there are thousands of very specific niches with only a highly optimised website one can hold the first positions in search engines, thus getting the traffic needed for sales, but most of the times this does not happen. Traffic comes only with hard work and passion, so here are probably the most popular ways webmasters are getting targeted traffic to their websites.

1.      Search engine optimisation

Probably the most popular way for getting traffic to a website. From building a highly optimised website to building backlinks to it, search engine optimisation is a sure way for getting a real successful online business. Depending on the industry you want your website to rank higher, SEO can be extremely difficult without a huge budget but also extremely easy to be implemented with the proper keywords, links and website structure.

2.      Video Marketing

Not many folks are going with this method but as video sharing websites like YouTube are more and more popular, it is a great way for getting the right traffic to your products/services. Furthermore, applying this method along with article marketing can be a sure way for success.

3.      Pay Per Click

The most popular PPC program is without a doubt Google’s Adwords. You do not need SEO expertise, you do not need hundreds of hours of content creation (whether we are talking about videos or articles), but one thing is sure: you need quite a big advertising budget for getting the exposure you need and also a very convincing landing page. PPC can bring massive numbers of new customers that actually buy your product but also can become a huge loss in the budget if not carefully planned.

Compete, a web traffic analysis site from the large family of Kantar Media, recently revealed the top 50 websites’ ranking for April 2011. Many popular website suffered major declines, following a constant trend in the last months and many others gain more visitors, but let’s see below more about each of them.

One of the biggest surprises was the NYTimes website, which suffered a 20.4% dropped in terms of unique visitors for April and a total of 24.9% drop when compared to April 2010. On the other hand, when it comes to sport subdomains such as baseball, basketball and football ones, the traffic for those pages increased with over 57.8% – readers seem to be more interested in these sports rather than general news or politics.

The popularity of Groupon seems to have went up through the roof with a 5.4% increase in terms of unique visitors (that is around 24 million unique visitors per month) while when it comes to year-to-year traffic the numbers are fantastic: 655.8% increase in visitors when compared to April 2010. Following closely, LivingSocial.com reached around 11.5 million visitors per month but when it comes to percentage growth they have grown with around 32.7% in April and seems to have an upward popularity scale.

Top 10 of this report does not come with spectacular changes (at least in terms of traffic increase), furthermore, it seems that all top 10 occupants suffered some losses in terms of unique visitors, when compared to last month.

You can check the entire top 50 on Compete’s blog here.

Web design. Check. Content. Check. SEO. Check. But how often do you check the traffic on your website? And how effective is this traffic at converting visitors to sales?

Do you examine your traffic reports regularly? Many people use Google Analytics to find out more about the visitors to their sites. The programme offers a huge amount of information in report form.

It’s a good idea to find out more about what this information can tell you about your website.  For example, do you have a high “bounce rate”? This is the rate at which visitors come to your site and then leave. Where have visitors come from? How long they spend on the site? Which pages do they look at? How long do they spend on your site?

Many website visitor tracking programmes reveal the path that visitors take through your website, from entry page to exit page. This information obviously tells you something about your website, its pages and the way people browse.

If you owned a high street store you could actually see what people were looking at most on the shop floor and you could map the route they took through the shop. With a traffic analytics programme you can find out even more about your e-commerce site.

This is the kind of information that could boost your sales if you use it effectively.

The WebCreationUK Advanced SEO Programme will help maximise your website’s performance within search engines, come speak to us for more!