More Website Traffic

More Web Traffic!

How do you get more website traffic? That is a really good question! I wish I could say I am an expert at generating web traffic! I certainly know more about increasing traffic now than I did when I started my first website and I have learned a few things along the way. I wish I knew two years ago what I know now! In fact, I wish I knew two months ago what I know now! Getting traffic, especially targeted traffic, to your website is a lifelong learning project. I started this website so that small business owners would have an affordable resource to learn what I have learned, with the information presented in easy-to-understand terms. This is the second of several articles about increasing your website traffic.

Driving Website Traffic

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, and the more of them that you utilize the more traffic you will get. I actually have a spreadsheet that I print and refer to monthly so that I do not miss any opportunities to drive new traffic to my sites. There are so many ways to generate web visitors that I do not want to forget to do something for more than a month. My goal is to do each item every month but of course that doesn’t always happen. I do not have a whole department in my home business dedicated to my internet presence. I wish that I did!

Cheap Website Traffic

Many techniques of driving web traffic can be very expensive. One way to get traffic to your site that is specific to your niche and very cheap, effective, and fun is to submit to blog carnivals. The carnivals give you niche-specific traffic, and you get to meet other bloggers who have similar interests. The carnivals are organized in a multitude of categories. I have seen everything from diet programs, politics, home schooling, and science fiction comic books and everything in between.

Targeted Visitors = Blog Carnivals Bring Visitors

The blog carnival is hosted by a website or by a few websites that take turns. Other bloggers submit their article URL for inclusion in the carnival, and then the host puts up the post or article with references and links to the various related articles. Not only do you, the submitting blogger, get targeted visitors, you also build incoming links. Even without the traffic, the incoming link will help SEO in the long run, which means more traffic in the end.

Blog Carnival Submissions Can Be A Website Traffic Generator

Put a routine into your business and submit to blog carnivals on a monthly basis. Create a system of generating regular visitors to your website through your blog submissions. The blog carnival website allows you to create lists of favorite carnivals. Pick carnivals that are in your niche and that are ongoing, then add them to your carnival favorites. Each month you can submit the same relevant URL to every carnival. They all won’t pick you up, but many will if your article fits and is interesting or seasonally appropriate. For example, in late December I submitted an article to about 15 blog carnivals that focus on healthy living, food or holiday entertainment.  The article was on “how to eat right at a party”. It was included in at least five of the carnivals that came out around the holidays that I know of.

I recently started two blog carnivals. One is a carnival of healthy living and the other is for home business tips. At first I was worried that I would not have enough submissions, since they were new carnivals, but that fear was unfounded. I had so many submissions that I could be picky about what to include. It seemed as though many of the articles that I received were just spam. So make sure that you read each carnival’s theme and submission guidelines if they have any. A relevant and interesting article will have better chances and also generate more traffic if accepted.

More Website Traffic Techniques

I will continue to share more techniques to bring traffic to your website or blog in the future. For now if you are new to this, the best thing to do is to be consistent. Everything that you can do to bring more traffic to your site takes time and has a learning curve as well. Once you master one system of generating web traffic, it will take less time than at first but it still takes time. Put a system into place so that you can continue on an ongoing basis, then add something else. If you work on mastering a couple of techniques at one time, then add more after you get good at the first couple, it will only be a matter of time until you start working from a spreadsheet too.