Targeted traffic building techniques

Introduction

The key to a successful website is getting lots of targeted traffic to it. Without visitors, your site is just sitting there on the world wide web, doing nothing. Targeted traffic is essential for making sales and growing your mailing list. This article will explain the basic techniques for building a steady flow of targeted traffic to your site.

Basic traffic building techniques

Reciprocal link exchanges - Link exchanges have been around since the dawn of the web. The concept is simple: You contact the owners of other websites and offer to place their links on your site in exchange for your link on theirs.

Try to exchange links with other websites that are similar to yours. A good place to start is Google. Do a search on linkexchange + keyword, replacing keyword with a term related to your site. For instance, if you have a gardening website, you would search for linkexchange + gardening.

Send a personalized email to each webmaster explaining why a link exchange would benefit both parties, and be specific. If they agree to your proposal, do the deal. If not, move on the next webmaster.
Give away free ebooks - Write an ebook and fill it with valuable information related to the theme of your website, with a link to your home page on every page. Compile your ebook with a good ebook creator software program and put up a download page.

Your visitors will download the ebook and read it, and maybe pass it on to a friend. Giving away these free ebooks is a very powerful viral traffic building method!
Search engines - Get your site well-ranked in the major search engines, especially Google and Yahoo. Spend some time getting familiar with the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). Just do a Google search on SEO and you'll find lots of free guides and information. Several highly ranked pages will bring in tons of search engine traffic!
Use Pay-Per-Click search engines - PPC is a great way to start getting targeted traffic quickly. For as little as $0.01 per click, you can start bringing in the visitors (customers) today!

Google Adwords and Overture are the two biggies in PPC, but there are hundreds of smaller (and less expensive) PPC search engines on the web to choose from.
Traditional banner ads and paid text links - Don't forget about plain old advertising! If your products are profitable enough, you can do very well purchasing advertising space on other websites and in off-line media, such as magazines and newspapers.