When it comes to promoting a product or business online, the one thing that web marketers are concerned with the most is how to drive traffic to their websites. There are tons of information written on this very topic, but relatively fewer people are able to drive huge amounts of traffic to their commercial websites in the most cost efficient way possible.
The most popular and acceptable methods of driving traffic are pay-per-click advertising and traditional search engine optimization. But although both methods are effective and highly doable, they also have innate disadvantages for the small business owner on the internet. The reason for this is both pay-per-click and traditional search engine optimization could cost a considerable amount of both money and time.
For example, running an effective PPC campaign would require hundreds of advertising dollars on a monthly basis. Opting to implement an SEO campaign could mean spending money on outsourcing activities such as content creation, web services, and professional fees for SEO experts. Plus, traditional SEO is more of a long term method to driving traffic, and it could take months before a web marketer experiences any noticeable results.
The solution is to employ a simple strategy that generates more traffic in less time, using the less budget as possible. In fact, this traffic tactic you are about to see can be done with no cost, and if you decide to accelerate it further you can spend a bit of money on the tools and services that make it work. This would involve some basic SEO knowledge but the application of the principles need not be applied in the traditional setting. Here are the steps that you should rinse and repeat at least once or twice a week:
1. Write your SEO content. Every traffic generating tactic online that doesn’t implement any form of paid advertising needs to start with creating SEO content. In this step, just create a short 500 word article which is optimized for the keywords you are targeting. Make sure the topic is of remarkable interest to your target audience.
2. Post your content on your own website or blog first. This is where most marketers get lost. Many make the mistake of submitting to article directories first. This invalidates their own website in search engine placements. There is a long explanation for this, but for now, you have to understand that you should post on your own site first before anything else.
3. Submit your article link to social bookmarking sites. Now that your SEO content is posted on your site or blog, submit the article link on bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg and other similar sites. You might get additional direct traffic from these sites, but the main intention for bookmarking is to get the search engines to quickly notice your content and “index” it (include in search engine results). Without bookmarking, it could take days or weeks before the search engines index your page.
4. Once your content is indexed, submit your article to top article directories. Now is the time to submit to article directories so you can benefit from the direct traffic from those sites. Ezine publishers subscribed to these article directories might find your article and republish it on their own sites, creating a chain reaction effect. Not only that, you don’t need to worry anymore about the “duplicate content” violation because your content is already posted on your own site.