100 ways to market your website and increase your traffic

I’ve just finished dissecting a post called “100 ways to increase your website traffic” and picking out ideas that I think will work here. If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed on how to marketing your website, implementing some of these practical ideas will give you a starting point and help you gain momentum. (Update: Unfortunately, the original post has now been taken down.) Here’s some of my favourites: Give your customers value:

• Give away an eBook with information that is valuable to your customers
• In a similar vein, you could create a cheatsheet or brief ‘how-to’ guide that helps your customers in an area that is important to them

These kinds of giveaways attract people to your site and also get linked to from other pages. Have some Fun:

• Create a quiz – people love quizzes and will come to your website  for them, especially if you make it easy for them to share it with others. You can use Proprofs.com to create them. (I haven’t tried this service so this is not a recommendation, just an option)
• Create an infographic – these are a fantastic way of representing information in graphical form. For an example, have a look here for one on entrepreneurs  and here for one on online communities. People will link to this too if they find it entertaining or useful.
• Run a competition – Examples are; a retweet contest where people retweet your URL for an entry into a random prize draw, a prize for the best comment on a post, etc.  Tim Ferris is a master at doing this. He runs all sorts of competitions that give his readers something but also help him promote his book/website or whatever else he currently has to sell. For instance, he has run competitions for graphic designers to design his book covers and for ordinary punters to upload a video to Youtube describing how his information has helped them, among others. You don’t have to copy his style, but we can all probably take some tips from his technique. Go to his blog and search for ‘competition’ for more information.

Obvious but effective:

• leave comments on other relevant blogs – make sure the comments are adding value to the conversation though and not just spam. You wouldn’t go up to two people having a chat and say “Visit my website at Blah Blah Blah.com,”  so don’t do it on the net either!
• Put your URL in your email signature
• Have a way for people to subscribe to your blog (if you have one) – this could be by email or RSS feed. Useful services to help you do this are Feedburner and Aweber
• Interlink the pages of your website, so people are directed where to go next rather than just closing the page
• Translate the content for people who don’t speak your language. If you use WordPress, you can use a plugin to do this.
• Put a link to your website in your signatures for relevant forums you contribute to.

What other ideas do you have? What have you tried that works – or doesn’t work? Join in the conversation in the comments. 🙂