How to increase your website traffic on a budget.

A site without traffic is like a store without customers. What’s the point if no one comes by? It’s like producing a show with no crowd.

You may have started with the idea of creating a website or blog based on hobby and not looking at long-term results. However, if you are starting to look for ways to make money off your hobby, make sure you pay attention!

I am sure that most of you reading decided to create your blog or open a website with making money in mind. This is commendable, the internet is a great canvass to allow people to create their own real estate and make money off of it.

In today’s online world, a strong factor in valuing your virtual real estate is your ‘impressions’, number of visitors that come to your site. The impressions you gain by improving the incoming traffic to your site is later translated into live advertising spaces among other goals you may have for your site

At Qadabra, our mission is to offer an alternative to every publisher out there looking to make revenue off his site traffic. We want to help our publishers make the most money they can out of their site. Here are a few tips on how to increase your impressions.

Do some social networking

Have you ever visited a site just because a friend recommended it? So have other millions of people. A proven way to virally spice up your online presence is through word-of-mouth!

Technology has made sharing a whole lot easier-take advantage of it! Here are the big brothers that should be regular “Share” buttons on every one of your posts

• Facebook: Share every new post on your site’s Facebook page the second after you publish it! Make sure it has a thumbnail of the main article image to make it more colorful. See what your readers comment, ask for suggestions, feedback, get the ball rolling! This is just another great way for new readers to redirect back to your site.
• Twitter: Always tweet your posts on twitter! Think of a gist or a cool slogan that gets the post’s main message across, add the link and tweet away.  It is always better to include a catchy phrase with your post link, instead of just the link.
• Google+: More and more people are joining Google+ every day. Make this another regular “share” network for your posts.
• Pinterest: This is a great way to use your website and post images as a traffic generator. Pin up post images, interesting pics related to your site’s theme, anything related to what your site is about. Try different pic styles, text, captions, and see what readers like best.
• CommentLuv: This is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically place a link to a commenter’s last blog post at the end of their comment. This not only offers them a way to promote themselves, but also encourages them to comment in the future, and creates a nice win-win community of readers.

Don’t forget SEO!

Without a doubt, they say that one of the most important things about having a blog is keeping the content updated. And indeed, when it comes to keeping quality standard and creating a loyal community of visitors and readers, this is the only way to do so.

However, when it comes to traffic, SEO is a crucial factor that should be taken into consideration in every little bit of your site’s content.

• Scout out the competition: By competition, I mean high-ranking sites within your niche. Google your site and see where it appears. Then Google the niche that your site pertains to. For example, let’s say you have a site on vintage music records; go to Google, type in “vintage music record reviews”, “old records review”, and any other related combination of keywords you can think of. See what the first 5-6 results are and check out these websites to every last detail! See what they write about, how they structure their content, what words are constantly repeated in their posts, other than the words you looked for in Google to start with (which are obviously very important).
• Build a sitemap: Create a page that lists and links to all the major webpages within your site and make sure you put a link to the Sitemap page throughout every page on your site. This will make it easier for old and new visitors to browse through your site and will simultaneously help you build link for important categories within your site.
• Add links and appropriate titles to your images: Add an “ALT” tag to your images that will enable you to include a description containing important keywords.
  Also, make sure to add keyword-rich captions and title texts under all of your images.
• Monitor your site analytics: Create an account on Google Analytics and monitor your site visitor statistics on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. This will help you immensely in knowing where to invest your SEO efforts- write more posts on topics that brought good traffic, include more images that generated clicks, etc.

Linking

• Internal links: within your website is the oldest SEO trick in the book- and a great one at that!  It is very important to include links to your own articles within your site. Internal linking is crucial for SEO and it also gives you an opportunity to easily expose your readers to all the content your site has to offer and make sure they don’t miss anything.

• Archive: general “Archive” page for old articles is a great way to add internal links as well. Plus, this way you can make sure every bit of content you have published doesn’t get lost within the site after a few months.  Be careful, however, not to clutter your site with links because this can be very annoying for readers and ultimate backfire. Add links wherever relevant or when you feel it will actually give an added value to the content.

Don’t be afraid to ask… or tell!

• Look for blogging partners: In today’s internet age, there is a blog and post for every imaginable topic you can think of. Start thinking of certain posts you’ve written that could interest other blogs with related topics.
• Create a Newsletter: This is another great way to promote your posts and update your readers on every new post! Start collecting emails or contact information from your commenters and start sending monthly newsletters with catchy slogans and titles. Make it something your readers will be interested in, something they can benefit from.
• Ask a favor from a blogger friend or colleague: When you start posting, you meet many fellow site owners and bloggers that are as interested in getting more traffic as you are- So take the first step! Offer them to write relevant content for them with do-follow links to your posts or site once in a while. This will maybe motivate them to do the same and before you know it, you built a nice external linking community.

Increasing site traffic is not as complicated as most people might think; it’s all a matter of patience, having the know-how and using the right tools. Undoubtedly, it is the first step towards successful site monetization.

Source: Qadabra.com