Here is a checklist of traffic generation techniques. Obviously no-one should try to do all these techniques. It's best to pick 2-3 and to REALLY get good at one of them. This list of techniques came from the organizational structure of the IM Index Mind Map.
Advertising
Find an advertising network and get your banners displayed on sites across the world. You need to know what you are doing here and have deep pockets, but the volumes of traffic available are astronomical.
Affiliate Marketing for Merchants
if you have your own product, this is probably THE most powerful technique.
Article Marketing
Posting articles to article directories. You get some traffic direct from people the articles, but this also helps with SEO. The term "BUM Marketing" is used for article marketing combined with being an affililate
Blogs & Blogging
Create your blog and post there regularly - and refer to your sales site from the blog. The reason for using a blog is that the search engines list pages in blogs very quickly - if you post regularly.
Email Marketing
To do this, you need to build an email list, of coure. But whatever other technique you use, you MUST do this as well or you are leaving 65% or more of the available money on the table.
Co-Registration
This is a way of building up your list: people agree to register on your list whilst registering on another list. There are many variants of this approach. If done correctly, this is a very powerful for building a list very quickly. If done wrong, you end up with a list of people complaining about Spam.
Expired Domains
Buy domains which have expired, but which still attract traffic. You then need to figure out how to monetize that traffic.
Forums
Make posts in forums. Include a link to your site in your forum signature.
Joint Ventures
Find people with large lists and/or sites attracting large amounts of traffic and make it worth their while to promote your product. Usually the relationship is closed than a simple affiliate.
Linking Strategies
Get links to your site on other web pages. This helps your site rank higher in the search engines. There are endless varieties of ways of doing this. Qassia is one method!
Offline Promotion
Advertise your site offline - such as in classified ads in newspapers and magazines.
Online Auctions
There are established techniques of using eBay to generate traffic to your site.
Page Generation
This is a black-hat technique of automatically creating key-word rich pages of content for your site to fool the search engines into thinking you have a big site full of good content, and so get you ranked higher for those keywords.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Google Adwords is the place to start here. You need patience and some cash to experiment with in order to make money here. But if you cac get it right, you can make a substantial income from this technique alone.
Press Releases
Press releases provide a means of gaining additional links to your site, as well as generating traffic directly from people reading the releases. Normally you would use a submission agency to distribute your release to relevant people/sites.
Product Launch
Experts claim that a properly crafted product launch can create so much momentum and exposer that you continue to benefit for years afterwards.
Refer-A-Friend
When people visit your site, give them an incentive to forward your URL to their friends. There are scripts avaible help automate this process.
Social Networking
Creating accounts on social networking sites helps with your linking strategy, as well as generating traffic direct from people reading your posts on those sites.
Search Engine & Directory Submission
There are tools to help you submit your site to search engines and directories. Again, this helps with your linking strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
This is a general heading for all the techniques concerned with getting higher rankingins in the search engines.
Teleseminars & Webcasts
The trick here is to invite people to listen to a conversation or interview about a topic related to your product or service. Give them valuable information and ask questions, and then offer a special deal of they purchase within a short period after the end of the event. Conversion rates can be very high from these events.
Traffic Exchanges
You view other peoples' sites, and they view yours in return.
Viral Marketing
Any technique where there is a reason for someone to "pass it on" - where "it" could be an eBook, your URL, a script etc.
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Contributor's Note
This list of techniques came from the organizational structure of the IM Index Mind Map.
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