Forum marketing is a great way to make your online business stand out from the crowd. Forum users are generally net savvy and open to making online purchases. Many forum users are also respected experts and bloggers in the specific topics covered by the forum.

Forum marketing is a high ROI strategy because making a good impression in front of this savvy and influential audience can help your marketing message spread far and wide.

Follow this step-by-step guide to effectively use forum marketing as a part of your overall online marketing strategy and avoid some common mistakes.

1. Find the Right Forums for Your Market Niche

Not all forums are worth your time. Successful forum marketing means finding the right community for your business.

Look for popular forums that cover your niche topic. Start by asking your employees, suppliers, and customers which online communities they hang out in. Also, try doing a simple Google search for a keyword related to your niche plus “forum”. For example, if you in the Golf marketing you could search Google for “Golf forum”.

While you’ll probably come across hundreds, and possibly thousands of forums, you’ll want to narrow your list to 5-10 forums that will be worth your time using the following criteria:

• Look for forums that have at least 1,000 members and 10,000 posts.
• Make sure the forum gets at least ten to fifteen new posts on a daily basis.
• Ignore forums that are overrun by spam.
• Avoid forums hosted by your direct competitors.

2. Create Your Online Forum Account

Once you find the forums you’d like to consider for online marketing, you’ll want to setup your forum accounts right away.

Seniority is important in forum communities. Users with older registration dates are given more deference than newer users. Some forums even prevent new users from posting for the first few days after their initial registration. Given the tremendous advantage of early registration, you should create your forum accounts as soon as possible.

Effective forum marketing means that it is part of your long-term strategy. Think of forums as a permanent marketing channel for your business, instead of just one of many targets to blast your hot new advertising campaign.

Don’t let the idea of being new to an online forum discourage you. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to build relationships, establish credibility, and authority in the forum community.

3. Check the Community Guidelines Before Posting

During the registration process you will be asked to agree to the forum’s user agreement and posting guidelines. Read these rules and guidelines carefully. There is a lot of boilerplate legal language in these documents, so it is tempting to just skip over them and click yes without reading. However, many forums have unique guidelines that you need to pay attention to. Some of the most important issues to look for include:

• Are users allowed to place links in their posts?
• Are users allowed to promote their own businesses?
• Are users allowed to post commercial messages in their signatures?
• Are users allowed to contact other members for commercial purposes?
• What restrictions are placed on new users?
• What special privileges are given to veteran users?

Violating any of these rules can quickly get you on the wrong side of the community members and completely invalidate your efforts of building good relationships, trust, and credibility with the forum community.

4. Pick a Good Username and Avatar (or Photo)

Your username and avatar are the first things other users will notice about you. Pick a username that is easy to remember and pronounce. Using your real name might be appropriate, especially if your name is closely identified with your brand. Stay away from bizarre number combination or weird misspellings. Do not pick usernames that only have meaning for you but would otherwise be nonsensical to everyone else (e.g. your favorite grade school teacher’s initials).

Avatars are small pictures attached to all your posts. A good headshot of yourself or cute pictures of your kids or pets make the best avatars. Avoid using any pictures that might be considered offensive or controversial.

The best advice is to go with an actual picture of yourself as people prefer interacting and doing business with real people.

5. Create a Compelling User Profile

A good profile can help you establish credibility on the forum. Provide a solid description of your expertise and experience. Feel free to add in a couple of personal tidbits to humanize your profile. Information like your hometown, your pet’s name, or your favorite sports team are good ways to break the ice. Stay away from sharing potentially polarizing information such as political or religious affiliation.

Provide contact information so other users can get in touch with you if they are interested in learning more about your business. A lot of spammers and identity thieves search through forums for personal information. Therefore, you should only share information you wouldn’t mind being made public, such as a throwaway webmail address.

Most forums today will allow you to post links to your Facebook page, LinkedIn Profile, Twitter account along with other social media account such as Pinterest and Instagram– be sure to utilize these platforms and link to them!

6. Introduce Yourself to the Community

Many forums encourage new users to introduce themselves to the community by making an introductory post. This is usually done in threads especially designated for welcoming new members. These threads are usually called some variation of “Say Hi Here,” “How Did You Find Us,” or ” New Members Check In Here.”

Your introductory post should include a brief description of your expertise and an explanation of why you joined the forum. Let the other users know that your main goal is to contribute to and learn from the community. Do not make any marketing pitches in your first post. If you try to sell anything in your first post you will very likely get banned.

Remember it’s all about joining the community, being helpful, and adding value.

7. Spend Some Time “Lurking” on the Forum

Resist the urge to start posting right away. Forums are tight-knit communities that tend to shun and haze newcomers. Spend some time reading the forum to get a sense of the community’s special quirks and cultural norms. Figure out who the influential users are and note which topics are perennial favorites. Learning this information will help you fit in more quickly.

You’ll also get a lot of valuable insight into what the most common questions are in your market, what problems people have, and what are the most common types of solutions. Invaluable data!

8. Make Valuable and Useful Contributions to the Community

This is the key to successful forum marketing. Whenever anyone asks a question related to your products or services, dazzle them with incredibly useful answers. These situations are opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and to generate good will. Backup your advice with links to trusted sources, and respond to follow up questions quickly.

Leave out your sales pitch in the beginning. Any hint of bias in your initial posts will erase all your hard work. By keeping your answers objective, the entire community will start thinking of you as a trusted expert. They will soon start asking you for your recommendations. When you get direct inquiries for recommendations you may then safely mention your business without appearing biased.

9. Put Your Website URL in Your Signature File

Forum signatures are blocks of text or graphic that are attached to the end of all your posts. Most people use signatures to display their favorite quotes or links to their favorite websites. Some forums also allow users to use signatures to promote their own websites. If you are in a forum that allows self-promotional signatures, make sure you take full advantage of this opportunity and create a forum marketing signature that works.

Do not abuse this opportunity by putting flashy images or long advertising messages in your signature. An accurate, short description of your business and a link to your website is the best way to go.

Over time as you make more posts and answer more questions in the forum you’ll have more and more chances for people to see your signature find and drive traffic back to your website.

10. Avoid Controversy and Drama in Online Forums

Do not get drawn into heated arguments. It would be a shame to get banned just because you started arguing over emotional and controversial arguments involving politics, religion, and other heated topics. Keep these things in mind before posting or responding to posts in online forums:

• Constantly remind yourself that your mission here is to build good will for your business.
• Stay away from charged topics like politics or religion.
• Resist the urge to respond to criticism. If you have to answer, at least give yourself a couple of hours to cool off before responding.
• Use emoticons to indicate when you are being sarcastic.
• End discussions the moment you sense that it is getting contentious. Just say you agree to disagree and that you want to move on to other more pleasant topics.

11. Create Win-Win Marketing Campaigns

Once you have the respect of the users you can start more aggressive marketing campaigns. Focus on marketing techniques that provide a benefit for the forum community. For example, offer the forum members special discounts, free samples, or fun contests. Be sure to get the permission of the forum’s moderators before you start these campaigns.

A great method is to offer something for free as a way to drive traffic to build your email list.

12. Use Caution if Outsourcing Forum Marketing

Many marketing firms use bots or low-skilled foreign workers to spam forums. This is not the type of marketing you want. Forum spam may bring in a little temporary traffic to your website, but in the long run, these campaigns can seriously damage your online reputation. When you hire a social media marketing manager, make sure they understand that you will only accept ethical marketing practices that will enhance your image.

Search engine ranking factors are some of the most closely guarded secrets in online business. Google and other search engines don’t publish exactly how they rank webpages in search results, because that would lead to massive gaming of the system and produce non-useful results.

Fortunately, you don’t have to figure out how Google determines search engine rankings all by yourself. There’s an entire industry of professionals who have a good handle on how search engine placement works based on their cumulative experiences.

Better still, their collective wisdom has been collected and published by SEOmoz, a SEO consultancy and website. The top 37 search engine optimization (SEO) professionals were asked to sort the 50+ factors that affect a website’s search engine placement.

Here are the top 10 factors that positively affect your search engine rankings: (We go over each one in detail below.)

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Here’s each of the top 10 search engine ranking factors, with easy-to-understand explanations and actionable tasks you can apply today.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag

In Laymen’s Terms: Include the search keywords you are targeting in your webpage’s title tag.

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titles.
– Christine Churchill

The title tag (or “meta title”) is the text that appears at the top of your browser window. Think of it as the title for the webpage. The meta title is also what is displayed as a link in search results.

In the HTML code, the meta title is the text between the <title> tags. For example, the meta title of this article looks like this in the HTML code:

<title>Improve Search Engine Rankings – Top 10 Tips to Improve Search Engine Rankings</title>

Your Action: Use the search keywords you’re targeting in every webpage’s title tag. Have a customized title for each page; don’t be lazy and use the same title for every page on your site.

If you have a brochureware website designed by a Web designer, when you give the designer your text copy for each page, you should also provide a custom title for each page.

For WordPress users, you can install the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin. It lets you modify the title tag of each blog posts.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links

In Laymen’s Terms: When other sites link to your webpages, how do they describe the link?

Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is ‘about’.
– Mike McDonald

The anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. (In the last sentence, the words “anchor text” is the anchor text of the link.)

Looking at how other websites link to you (ie., what they use for the anchor text) tells Google how people are describing your content.

Your Action: When you email other websites to promote your content, mention your preferred anchor text if they choose to link to your site. You won’t always get what you ask for, but it never hurts to ask. And there’s a big payoff if you can get other sites to use the search keywords you’re targeting when they link to you.

Choose anchor text that helps your website/page rank better for your targeted keywords. For example, if I were to ask for a link to this article, I would ask for anchor text that says something like “Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors”. That anchor text tells search engines that the link goes to a page about “search engine ranking” — the search keywords that I would love to have this article rank prominently.

That anchor text is better than “the most awesome article ever written”.

While it would be interesting to see which anchor text generates more clicks from human surfers, there is no doubt that the keyword-rich version of the anchor text would help this article’s ranking in search results much more than the keyword-less version.

3. Global Link Popularity of Site

In Laymen’s Terms: How many other websites are linking to your site?

I am a strong believer that a sites overall link popularity drastically effect rankings.
– Neil Patel

In general, the more inbound links to your website, the better it is for you. Every inbound link is a “vote” for your site. If lots of other websites link to you, search engines conclude that lots of people find your content useful or interesting. That makes your webpage rank higher than a similar page with fewer inbound links.

But remember that quantity is not the whole game. As we continue to look at the top 10 search ranking factors, note that the quality and relevance of those inbound links matter greatly.

Your Action: Make link building — the practice of getting more inbound links to your site — a central part of your online marketing strategy.

4. Age of Site

In Laymen’s Terms: The older your website, the better.

I believe it’s always had some importance and within the past two years, aging has taken on more significance in the ranking factors.
– Scottie Claiborne

Older sites have more weight than newer sites. The age of a website is hard to fake. Plus, search engines figure that if your site has been around for so long, it’s probably better than a brand new site.

Your Action: Start today. Be patient. The hard work you put in now to optimize your website may not payoff until next year. The good news is that after next year, you’ll have a leg up on new competition.

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure

In Laymen’s Terms: How prominent is the webpage within your own site?

Without the proper linking structure, certain pages may not get enough emphasis. For example, … links directly from the homepage usually do really well.
– Neil Patel

The more prominently you feature a particular page on your site, the more weight search engines will give it.

Your Action: Showcase your best content or the webpage you most want to highlight. Put it in your main navigation menu or link to it from your homepage.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site

In Laymen’s Terms: Are the sites linking to you related to your topic (and targeted keywords)? The more relevant, the more weight those links are given.

I think, in a perfect algorythm, relevance matters. Whether Google has figured out how to pull it off yet or not, I don’t know but I do believe that is the ultimate goal. Whether they get more “weight” or not, relevant links are good business and help with rankings as well.
– Scottie Claiborne

All of your neighbours have a wide variety of thematic inbound link text from a wide variety of topical sites. You have the same anchor text from your unrelated porn/pills/casino link farm. Chances are a search engine can instantly spot you as a ‘deviant’ from the norm and flag you as having an unnatural inbound linking pattern.
– Lucas Ng (aka shor)

This factor is similar to #2 (anchor text of inbound links). How other sites link to you matter. For example, if you have a site about chess

Your Action: Relevance matters. Focus your link building efforts on sites within your topical niche.

7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community

In Laymen’s Terms: How popular is the site that is linking to you?

Especially withing your niche.

A niche site may not have a high quantity of links but a few links from the ‘authorities’ in the neighbourhood is often enough to rank the site above the authorities for niche-related keywords. The authoritative sites are telling the search engines “Hey, we’re voting for this site for these niche (anchor text) keywords”.
– Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Your Action: Relevance and authority matter. For #6, we said you should focus your link building efforts on sites within your topical niche. This factor says you should prioritize your link building on getting links from the biggest of the relevant sites.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text

In Laymen’s Terms: Within the webpage/article, how often and what keywords being used? How relevant is your article to target keywords?

It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense. As engines get more sophisticated, it’s not just the targeted keyword phrase that counts, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.
– Scottie Claiborne

Your Action: Use the search keywords and phrases you’re targeting throughout your page or article…. when it makes sense. Don’t cram so many keywords in the article that Google penalizes you for keyword stuffing.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site

In Laymen’s Terms: Links from big websites (ie., sites that have lots of inbound links) are worth more than links from smaller sites.

I like links that are linked to by many sites. I think there’s a big difference between a PR 6 site with 20,000 links and a PR 6 with 500 inbounds.
– Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Your Action: Focus your marketing efforts on the biggest, most authoritative sites. Think of it this way — it’s better to get one link from a big site (like About.com) than to get 10 links from 10 small sites (like personal blogs).

10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

In Laymen’s Terms: Relevance matters. Links from a webpage that is related to your page’s content are worth more than links from random, unrelated sites.

All links help – on topic helps a lot more overall.
– Todd Malicoat

Your Action: Relevance matters (again). Focus your link building efforts on sites within your niche. And if you can help it somehow, try to get links on specific webpages within a site that’s even more relevant.

Analyze the Full Survey

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey – SEOMoz

The results of the full survey are very interesting. We’ve only scratched the surface with our discussion of the top 10 most influential search ranking factors. This survey represents the most authoritative and comprehensive collection of knowledge about Google’s search algorithm. (Outside the company, of course.)

Are Twitter Cards really the next best way to get more traffic to your website?
Twitter Cards allow entrepreneurs and marketers to expand upon basic one-hundred forty (140) character tweets to drive more traffic to their websites for increased attention. By letting you use images, video, and rich media in your messages, Twitter becomes the ideal intermediary between your followers and the primary business web content that leads to sales.Why are Twitter Cards raising the bar for online entrepreneurship and specifically traffic generation via social media? Here are some reasons why Twitter Cards are such a powerful tool:

1. Twitter Cards Create the Essential Multiplier Effect

Being ‘Liked’ and retweeted without thought is OK, but Twitter Cards can give you so much more! Using Cards not only makes your initial message more attractive to direct followers, but they give you opportunities to impress their followers, too!
All it takes are a few lines of HTML code onto your web pages, and people who tweet links to your content will have a “visible” card added to the tweet – visible to all of their followers, too.
See Also: How to Increase Sales and Leads with Twitter

2. Twitter Cards Support and Enhance Your Text Messages

On their own, text messages may do enough to bring followers and casual folks to your websites.  After all, they do a good job of highlighting your current offers.

However, ignoring the power of Twitter Cards denies your campaign of some great leveraging tactics.  For example:

• Adding brief descriptions of your campaign's theme and the website URL.
• Images to make your tweets stand out in a crowd. This is especially effective for travel, food, sports and recreation-oriented niches.

• An associated call-to-action (CTA) that is strong and further highlights your ad campaign's direction. Perhaps in conjunction with a CTA button.

3. Twitter Card Versatility is the Word

Whatever your campaign goals are, Twitter has a card to suit your needs. Check out what the microblogging site offers to both web-based and mobile clients: Summary Card: Enter a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution. Summary Cards with Large Images: Similar to ordinary summary cards, but with prominently featured images. Player Cards: Cards that offer rich audiovisual and multimedia experiences. App Cards: A card that details mobile applications with direct downloads. See Also: Using YouTube Cards to Enhance Your Video Marketing Strategy

4. Monitoring of Twitter Card Performance through Twitter Analytics

As with conventional Twitter advertising, you can monitor card performance with its analytics facilities. From your Card dashboard, use Twitter Card Analytics to improve different metrics, including retweets, URL clicks, and your followers' app install attempts.
There are various card analytics features to explore, like:

• Your Snapshot: Offers a visual (holistic) view of your content performance, including the number of Tweets containing a link to your website or application (specifically your tweets, global tweets).

• Change Over Time: Linear graph that shows how your overall data (tweets, clicks, impressions) has changed over time.
• Card Types: Allows cross comparison of click rates from your different card types.  It also includes average click-through rates (CTR) for other sites, allowing you to compare your results with those of other sites.
• Sources: Segments your impressions and URL clicks according to the widgets (e.g. TweetDeck), apps, and websites that your influencers tweet from.

5.  Twitter Cards is Quick to Implement

You can get up and running with Twitter Cards in less than thirty (30) minutes with minimal code additions to your web pages, and simple validation of your card (N.B. Player Cards require a request approval for whitelisting.).

Final Thoughts on Using Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards help turn your feed into a lead-producing and traffic generating juggernaut.

Whether you own an e-commerce shopping mall, a political blog, or a basic landing page, they help you attract the right audiences to your website with a mere click from their timeline.

Generating traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Without sufficient traffic, your site and blog will never accomplish their purpose. And while there are numerous pay options to generate traffic, there are an equal number of effective and free tools and approaches. Here are some great traffic generators:

1. Free Traffic Source: Forum Marketing

Forum Marketing: Share your expertise with people asking questions about your industry.In return, you’ll get a steady flow of traffic to your site. You will be the expert, after all. To ensure that you get traffic from all the time you spend answering questions, be sure to spend time on your forum marketing signature. Your signature tells other forum members who you are and how to read more about you. As you begin in forum marketing, you will want to watch out for (and completely avoid) these 8 Common Forum Marketing Mistakes.

2. Free Traffic Source: Blog Commenting

Blog Commenting: Very similar to forum marketing, blog commenting only differs in the platform it uses. Instead of being in a public forum, the commenting takes place within an individual blog. The linkback works very simply. In almost all blog platforms (Word Press, Blogger, etc) there is a field to enter your URL (your site address). If your comment catches a readers attention, they’ll click on the link and visit your site.

Be careful not to post comment spam. There is a need for caution when sharing links in the comment itself. Many bloggers don’t take well to this, as it comes across as a blatant attempt to siphon their traffic to your site. Unless the link you are posting directly answers a question, it's best not to do it.The other benefit to blog commenting, even if you don’t get many direct visitors, is that the search engines see the link and your site gets a small boost. If you post enough comments on enough unique blogs (different domains) then you’ll see a significant boost in traffic.

3. Free Traffic Source: Twitter Traffic

Twitter Traffic: When most users first sign up and start using Twitter it can be hard to see how it could ever bring significant traffic. Over time and with regularity Twitter quickly becomes a principal source of traffic. Many blogs use automation tools to feed links and past posts to their Twitter account. A favorite of mine is called Tweet Old Post. It takes past blog posts and tweets the title and URL to your account. Many blogs generate hundreds, even thousands of new visitors every month using this simple WordPress plug-in.

4. Free Traffic Source: eBay

eBay: The concept of using eBay as a sales platform is quite simple. Post a product (often at a loss or at cost) to generate attention and post your URL in the description as a source for more information about the product or the subject. Because of the size and traffic on eBay, you’ll reach thousands of new prospects. Other sales platforms to consider: CraigsList and Amazon.

5. Free Traffic Source: Contest Marketing

Contest Marketing: One of the fastest ways to generate non-purchased traffic is to have a contest. It is a great way to generate hundreds of inbound links, as bloggers love to share relevant contests with their readers, being the one to break the news. Many site owners have found it most effective to give away one very large prize, rather than numerous smaller ones. Everyone loves to dream about that huge trip to Europe, rather than the free song download. Big prizes create big results. In addition to the boost of traffic, be sure to require something of the visitors to enter. Consider requiring a simple newsletter subscription. That way you have their contact information should they win, and you also can keep them informed about new content as you publish.

An example of effective contest marketing was a Galapagos Trip for Two given away by Red Mangrove Galapagos Lodges. Contest period was open for a few months, more than 4500 people entered and the winner was drawn on video.

6. Free Traffic Source: Blog Design Adjustments

Blog Design Adjustments: Tweaking your site just a little can make huge differences to your traffic over time. Effective cross-linking, for example, will help Google to index your content, and help your human readers to see what other relevant content you have. These changes will also make for a better visitor experience and keep your readers on your site longer - which is never a bad thing.

7. Free Traffic Source: Content Aggregators

Content Aggregators: Getting your site (and posts) listed with a top content aggregator can send a flood of traffic. Consider Alltop.com. The benefit of an aggregator (a site that aggregates, or collects blog posts) is that they have a larger and broader readership than you do. By placing links to your content on these popular platforms, you can count on more traffic. But there’s a catch: they don’t accept just any site. While this is great for you when you are accepted, it can be hard to get accepted when your site is still new.

8. Free Traffic Source: Content Syndication

Content Syndication: This is most simply done via an RSS feed. This not only makes it easy for readers to follow your site but also notifies readers immediately upon publishing new content. It's a great way to bring readers back to your site every time you publish a new piece of content. A popular tool to manage RSS feeds is FeedBurner (by Google).

9. Free Traffic Source: Write Great Content

Write Great Content: Nothing will build your traffic better than great content. Regardless of if it is blog posts, video or audio (or a combination of all three) you need to consistently produce great content. Great content encourages visitors to share your posts - via social media and links on their own sites and blogs. This social sharing by your readers has more weight than any purchased ad could ever carry.

10. Free Traffic Source: Build Your Blog Community

Build Your Blog Community: By taking the time to engage individual readers your site will benefit by increased traffic. An engaged community will happily share your content and refer new visitors to your site.

11. Free Traffic Source: Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging: This is a popular one. But how should you do it? First of all, a guest post should only be done on a popular site (more popular than yours). And it should be your best stuff. A mediocre post will bring mediocre results. Post a compelling piece that adds real value to the site you are contributing to. This will help you get another opportunity to post. And give a lot of thought to your bio line. A well-written bio will help motivate readers to click through to your site.
In addition to publishing great guest posts, it’s also important to accept guest posts. This helps widen your base of content and takes some writing pressure off of you. Be sure to publish a clear set of blogging guidelines - this will help reduce the number of low-quality posts that you will receive.

12. Free Traffic Source: Trackbacks

Trackbacks: WordPress (along with many other blogging platforms) has a great feature called trackbacks. What are Trackbacks? When you mention another blog on your site, their blog (if it is also on a supporting platform) will get a notification that they have been mentioned. It creates a linkback for readers to follow. It is an easy and effective way to both share great content and get contextual linkbacks.

13. Free Traffic Source: Video Syndication

Video Syndication: Creating video takes time but is worth the effort. Once the video is created, don’t stop with YouTube. Syndicate your video content with a service like OneLoad (owned by TubeMogul). OneLoad will take your video and share it across numerous platforms. Non-commercial use is free and the next level is $75 per month. Works flawlessly and exposes your message and content to millions more people.

14. Free Traffic Source: Video Tagging

Video Tagging: When you upload your videos, it’s important to take a few minutes to research the best tags for your post. One great way is to check out similar and popular video posts. You can mirror theirs and thus increase the odds of showing up as a related video on theirs. This simple approach can increase video views and site traffic many times over.

15. Free Traffic Source: Cool Site of the Day

Cool Site of the Day: This extremely popular site has the power to send a huge amount of traffic to your site, should it be chosen as the Cool Site of the Day. They accept submissions, so if you have a unique site it’s worth the time to submit. If you are accepted you will see thousands of new vistors in a matter of hours.
You may also consider: Video Responses, Video Embedding, Writing Tutorials and using bookmarking sites as effective ways to generate more traffic. Getting traffic is a critical part of starting your online business.

As an internet entrepreneur, you have to learn to love traffic. In fact, the more traffic the better. I’m not talking about a highway chock-full of cars at rush hour after work… or being stuck trying to get out of parking lot after a concert in a big stadium.

I’m talking about traffic to your website, your landing pages, eBay or Amazon store, your blog, or whatever other online real estate that you have put in place.Think of it this way. Your website is like a store in a mall. Hundreds to thousands of people walk through the mall every day. Each of those shops is vying for their attention. They’re counting on shoppers to see their store and make the decision to walk in and check out they have to offer.

So how do they make that happen? A variety of ways. They might have a big colorful sign, with window stickers talking about a sale. An employee could be out front handing out flyers or free samples… or personally inviting people in. The store could have sent out direct mail postcards about a special discount or special event on a certain day. Maybe they have an email list of customers that they communicate with regularly or are active social media and often promote special deals or sales.
You're going to the same thing, in a manner of speaking, with your online storefront. You’re going to deploy a wide range of strategies and methods for attracting the attention of your target market and compelling them to visit your site so that they sign up to be part of your email list (so you can market to them further) or browse your online shop and buy something.

Traffic Driving Tools

Driving traffic is an essential part any online venture. In fact, it’s the very first thing you must do for creating a profitable and productive marketing funnel for your online business.

Of course, not every “traffic driver” listed below is a fit for what you do. Some will work like gangbusters; some will be so-so.You never know until you try. And it’s also important to always avoid putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak.

You see, even though one traffic driving tool might be bringing in thousands of qualified prospects one day, you never know what could happen the next. So it’s important to have other sources of traffic, so you have a “backup” and your business doesn’t go under.
A quick example of this is when Google changes their search engine algorithm. This algorithm determines where pages online appear in the search engine results page.
In past major changes, businesses have failed because their whole model was based on getting traffic from Google searches, and when the algorithm changed they were no longer on page one - overnight. Don’t let that be you. And it won’t be, because you are going to use a variety of traffic drivers with your online business.

Search Engine Optimization

Speaking of Google, why don’t we start there. Search engine optimization, SEO for short, can be a key way to drive valuable, qualified traffic to your website. Here’s what I mean. When somebody

searches for a topic related to your niche (say you sell videos that help people improve their golf swing and they search for “improve my golf swing”), you want your website or landing page to show up as high in the search results as possible.Why? Well, the top three results make up 61% of clicks. Anyway, when somebody clicks on the link to your site on Google (or another search engine), they are more likely to sign up for your email list or buy a product.
This “organic” traffic is so valuable because people these people are actively searching for information or solutions to a problem they have. And when they see something that can help them, they are more likely to take action.
You make your site search friendly by including high-quality content and keywords and key phrases in your website copy that relates to your niche. You should also put those keywords in your site title, domain name, description, tagline, blog categories, page titles, and page content (this is “back office” work your web designer can do, or you can do yourself if run your own site).

Content Marketing

This is part of search engine optimization in a way because search engines these days value good content when determining results. Meaning, you can’t just stuff a page with keywords and expect to have a good ranking. You have to create informative articles for your website or blog that search engines find useful. But you can’t stop there. You should have compelling titles and include attention-grabbing descriptions, so that they are enticing when they appear in the search engine results. This is what will get the prospect to click and read your full article.
Then you have to follow through and provide a great experience to your reader so that the prospect is ready to take action or find out more about your business once they make it to your site.
The article could highlight best practices in your industry, or offer how-to tips, or discuss certain strategies that fit your niche. Whatever it is it should provide your prospect with valuable free information.

Get Social 

It’s unavoidable. If you do business online these days you have to get involved in social media. A huge amount of traffic goes to social sites and services like Twitter, ​YouTube, and Facebook. Millions of people log on every day. Why not take advantage of that and leverage that traffic for your own purposes? Your target market is definitely on social media… and in great numbers.
To do that you should maintain a robust social media presence. Put up a Facebook page for your business. Create a Twitter account. Post videos related to your business on YouTube (for example, if you had that golf swing business, you could post some videos where you show one or two tips).
Here are some best practices for when you use social media.

1. Post Often and Regularly

If you have a Facebook business page or Twitter account, you should be active. Post every other day or at least three times a week, if not daily. You’ll have to find what works best for your business. But the idea is to make sure your customers know you are alive, so to speak. They want to hear from you often, so indulge them. And be regular, set a schedule of sorts and follow it. Don’t post one day, then a second, and then not for a week - you’ll lose potential customers. That helps build the relationship between you and your prospects.

2. Be Consistent

It’s simple; you must be consistent as far as what you post. Stay on brand and on message and make sure anything you post supports your marketing goals. For example, if you have a site about radio control car racing, you don’t want to post something about your thoughts on politics.

3. Show Value

With your social media efforts, you want to make sure your prospects find something useful in what you post. Post how-to tips, valuable information, fun stuff… This will speed up the process of the prospect coming to know, like, and trust you. They come to view you as a source they can turn to when they need solutions.

4. Include Calls to Action

This might be the most important part as this is where you drive traffic! Whenever you post something to social media (or at least most of the time), you should include some sort of call to action; an offer or incentive for clicking over to your landing page, blog, or e-commerce site. It might be a sale… or the full text of an article… a free ebook. Whatever it is, this will ensure that your social media audience can actually become a customer.

5. Paid Ads

Although search engine optimization and the “organic” traffic it brings can be very valuable and you get it free… paid advertising can also be a good source of traffic. And the advantage is that you will get results much quicker. SEO, content marketing, and similar methods take a while to implement… consistent work over time.
With paid ads, you can expect instant traffic to your site. Here’s how it works. You buy a pay per click ad on Google AdWords for example. It will appear at the top of the Google results page for search related to your niche. When people click, they go to your website or landing page - and you pay per click. And it’s not as expensive as you might think. The key part here is to make sure you’re getting a return on your investment in paid ads, that what you spend comes back to you - and then some - in sales.
Quick tip: be sure you include strong attention grabbing copy and some sort of incentive to click - a free report, discount, or similar.
Other ads include banner and / or text ads on ad networks that post to a variety of blogs and websites and Facebook sponsored posts. The technology behind these services ensures that your ad only appears on sites or near content that is of interest to your target market. That means your ads get in front of the right eyeballs and those people are very likely to click and go to your site.

6. Forum Marketing

Online forums related to your business’s niche can be a great free way to drive traffic to your site. This is qualified traffic although the numbers will be relatively small. But there’s a right way to go about posting to a forum.
Number one rule is not to spam. You can’t just join a forum related to your niche and starting posting links to your website or offering products for sale. In fact, that’ll probably get you banned. Instead, you become a valuable member of the forum.
Answer questions, participate in discussions, post useful information, comment on industry trends… Depending on how the forum works, you can include a URL to your website in your signature or make your business name part of your username.
Those are subtle ways to drive traffic. Eventually, once you’ve become a trusted part of that forum, you can also be a bit more overt in posting links to your site. Don’t overdo it though.

Next Steps to Driving More Traffic

Now you have five solid ways to drive traffic to your online business. Remember, not all of them will be right for your particular business, and you'll always want to be researching more ways to drive free traffic to your website. So it’s important to test them out and see which ones bring in the most leads and/or sales. You’re sure to find the marketing mix that works for you.