How to Get Traffic to Your Site Without Paying Through the Nose!

Happy holidays! Can you believe I went to the store at 5:00 am to try and get the kids a Wii on Saturday? Well, I didn’t get one – I guess they’ll just have to play with the boxes their clothes came in!

We’re gearing up for some much needed time off coming up next week, and I for one am excited! We are closing for the week, but I imagine we’ll end up working some – we always do.

I know, I know… you clicked on this because you want to learn how to get traffic, not read about me and my holiday plans!

When we started our business, we had a tiny marketing budget and really couldn’t afford traditional advertising. How did we gain clients? We got them through website visitors. When we started out, we knew we needed to attract people to our website. More importantly, we needed to keep them on the site once they were there.

Here are the main ingredients we cooked up for our plan:

1. Keyword research. We decided which keywords we needed for our online business success and then we wrote keyword rich content for the site.
2. We named specific pages/url’s for those keywords
3. We wrote meta tag descriptions for those pages
4. We submitted our site to major search engines and directories
5. We installed Google analytics and signed up for a webmasters account
6. We added a sitemap to our website and one to the webmaster account
7. We wrote articles with subjects that included our keywords and updated our sitemap with each new article
8. We began passing out business cards and posting them whenever we could.
9. We printed bookmarks with our company information and placed them in libraries and bookstores in books relevant to “Starting Your Own Business”
10. We posted ads on free classified sites
11. We wrote press releases and distributed them to online wire services (hoping to get picked up, which they were)
12. Once we verified that Google had crawled and indexed our content, we began submitting our articles to article syndication sites.
13. We sent out emails to friends, family, and past business colleagues to let them know about our new business. We asked them to refer us to anyone in need of our services.
14. We created a MySpace page and began social networking (albeit slowly, as we were busy running our new business)
15. We joined the local chamber of commerce (well this wasn’t free, but it didn’t cost but a drop in the bucket)
16. We started a blog (again, we were really busy in the beginning and our blog posts were few and far between – we ended up trashing the first blog and starting over and have great hopes for our new blog)

I know that there are many other things we have done that were absolutely free, and I’m sure I’ll remember them tonight at 3:30 in the morning! If I do, I promise I’ll comment.

One of the greatest joys we have had is to watch our analytics and see where our traffic has been coming from. Nothing gives us a greater thrill than to see that an article we wrote about search engine marketing or TV and radio advertising has brought us visitors.

If you’re a steady blogger, you know that it takes time to cultivate relationships and read all there is out there to read. Sometimes you can get so caught up in it all that you look up and can’t believe the day is half over. It’s so much fun that it’s almost sinful that you’re getting paid to do it.

Sometimes there are days when you’re tired and don’t feel much like writing anything or commenting, but you fear if you don’t write something you’ll lose subscribers/visitors/fans. It’s best not to post if your heart isn’t in it. When we have those days, we’ve learned not to post anything. It keeps the blog fresh, informative and entertaining.

I hope the information I shared can help you if you’re just starting out and struggling to get things going. We’re here for support, if you want to comment – we’ll write you back. We’ve been there, and we “get it”.

Have a great night!

Joanne