Everyone knows the number one thing you need to be successful online is traffic to your website. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. So, the critical step is to generate a steady flow of visitors.

Here are some tips for generating website visitors:

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Articles Directories
• Video

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the name given to websites that get their content from their users. What this means for you is that you can join into the community and add your own content. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. Which means the content on them gets “indexed” faster and with more weight. By placing links to your websites in this content you’ve created, you get traffic from the site and search engine ranking for the keywords you choose. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. Getting free web 2.0 traffic is a big topic that we’ll discuss more later. This is good overview of the reason to get into it, though.

Articles Sites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. Just like web 2.0 sites, article websites allow you to upload your own content – as articles. Just as with the other web 2.0 sites, having your content included gives you immediate traffic and search engine ranking. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And in return for getting to use your content, these other users include links back to your website that gives you further search engine ranking and more free traffic. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Here to we’re really looking at a web 2.0 sub-category. And just as article directories give you great SEO benefits and allow others to redistribute your content on their sites. video sharing sites give you all these same benefits. And if all that wasn’t enough, you also stand a much stronger chance of getting a high search engine ranking for the keywords you want with video than you do with text-based content.

OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?

• Set up your YouTube account
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Put relevant “tags” in your profile
• Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
• Upload at least 1 video
• For each video use your keywords in the tags, the descriptions and the title

In closing…

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.