To earn cash online you have to bring traffic to your site. This is often a struggle for the new person who’s trying to get people to visit a new site that they’ve just launched. In this article, I’ll take a look at three popular methods you can use to generate traffic to your site.

Generate Traffic with Article Marketing

This method of traffic generation involves writing articles and submitting them to various article directories. The objective is to have the your resource box link to your site appear on both the article site itself and on sites where webmasters use your article on their site and preserve the link.

There are two basic reasons for article marketing. The first is to get backlinks to your site. By having quality anchored backlinks this will improve the off-site SEO of your site and hopefully improve your search engine placement. The other reason is having the link go to a landing page where you’re selling an item or have an affiliate marketing landing page.

This method is highly regarded by some people while others find the chore of writing articles or outsourcing the writing of articles to be more trouble than it’s worth. My own take on it is that it requires a lot of work to get results. The top article directories won’t take junk articles, such as those created by a blog content spinner or PLR articles, while the value of links from lesser directories who do take them aren’t worth much. If you’re willing to put in the effort or money to do this, then it will be worthwhile. For me, I’ve only made this a minor part of my link building efforts.

Generate Traffic with Forum Marketing

This idea is like article marketing but it involves posting on forums in the niche you’re targeting and linking to your site from both posts and signature area. The value in these links is in both traffic from the forum and targeting, but usually low value, links for SEO purposes. I’ve used this method a lot and here’s what I’ve found.

First, you have to be a real participant in the forum. Most forums are a tight community and while they’ll often welcome new people who’re interested in the topic they’re also quick to ban obvious spammers and marketers. Many have rules that may disallow links to marketing sites and even personal blogs that have ads on them. Know the rules going in and select forums that have rules you can live with. The problem of real participation is that it can be quite a time sink so make sure that you budget your time wisely.

Secondly, your target site’s content has to be good. If your site looks spammy, like a ‘Made For Adsense’ blog, you’re likely to get the ban hammer. Only use this for sites where your content can withstand repeated visual inspection by forum members.

The downside of this method is that if you let your participation in the forum wane the effect of these links will wane too. This is because the pages that contain your links will be spidered less and less by the search engines and viewed fewer times by forum participants. Some forums even archive off old posts so that they don’t even show up anymore in the regular forum. The advantage of this method is that it will often provide you with good contextual anchored links to your site for SEO and the traffic from the forum itself converts better than average as well.

Generate Traffic with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is useful in two forms. The bigger social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and so forth are good at bringing in traffic, often considerable traffic, all by themselves. Unfortunately, this traffic is generally low quality, non-buying, traffic. The other is using secondary bookmarking sites, such as those using open-source bookmarking scripts like Pligg and Scuttle, as a source of links for SEO purposes.

If you have a flagship blog where you don’t mind getting lower quality social bookmarking traffic then learn how to effectively leverage the big social media sites to your advantage. While it’s not a big moneymaker, having traffic in general is better than having none at all to your flagship site. However, you should avoid using these big traffic sites for your niche blogs and other marketing sites, especially those showing Adsense ads.

For the minor league bookmarking sites, you’re unlikely to see a lot of direct traffic from them except for other webmasters and marketers checking out your site. For these sites you’ll want to use an automated tool like Bookmarking Demon to rapidly distribute your link. While this isn’t useful for direct traffic it is helpful for off-site SEO, especially in getting a new site or new content indexed quickly.

These are three methods that you can use to generate traffic to your site and all will work quite well. Of course, there are other methods and I’ll be covering them in upcoming articles. Just remember that whatever traffic generation method you use the best way to earn online cash is to get targeted buying traffic to your site.

Frank Carr January 24th, 2009 SEO

SEO
article marketing, Forum Marketing, social bookmarking, traffic generation