All webmasters know that the key to their website and business success is more traffic. There are tons of ways to generate that traffic, some give you a better return on your time and money than others. What you really need to do brainstorm and list all of the methods of promoting your site that you can think of. Next, focus FIRST on those methods that give you the most success.

Use the 19 ideas below to begin your brainstorming session. Building your business takes passion, hard work and a steady application of proven methods. Determine what will be the most cost effective way for YOU to spend your resources and get busy.

1) Search Engines

- Get listed at all of the top search engines and then as many of the minor search engines as possible.

- Getting a top listing is worthless unless your title grabs them and your description makes them want to click through to your site.

- The best way to control the title and description, that appears in the engines is to use meta tags.

- Resubmit regularly. The spiders will revisit but the best way to make sure a particular page is listed is to submit that page. If the page drops in the listings, modify it slightly and resubmit. If your server is not up when the spiders revisit they may drop your pages entirely and not revisit your site.

- Use keyword rich doorway pages to get listed high for those keyword phrases. For more on writing good doorway pages get my autoresponder article at: mailto:doorway@williecrawford.com

- Use hallway pages to help search engines find all of your other pages. Hallway pages are pages with links to your doorway pages and maybe to your main pages. These pages are submitted to the search engines for indexing too.

2) Pay Per Visitor Services

- Services such as GoTo.com can often be your cheapest way to get highly targeted visitors.

3) Quality Content

- Put a lot of quality content on your site and the search engines will consistently list your site higher. Have keyword rich pages. Well written articles make keyword rich pages.

- Give your visitors a reason to keep coming back and they will.

4) A Site Mailing List

- Reminds visitors to come back to your site.

- Asks readers to tell others about your site.

- Gives you permission to stay in touch with site visitors via email -- a proven highly effective tool!

- Builds a sense of community.

5) Tell A Friend Boxes On Your Webpages

- Your site visitor sends a cgi generated email from your site to friends telling them about your site.

- They only work if your site offers genuine value.

6) Links Exchanges

- Visitors from sites with similar interest come to your site and you send your departing visitors to other similar sites.

- You gain pre-qualified, highly targeted visitors.

7) Ezine Ads

- Telling HOW your great site benefits the visitor. Personal recommendations from publishers work best.

- Often more cost effective if you can swap with other ezine publishers.

8) Discussion Forums

- The type that tells the visitors when someone has responded to his comments work great. They basically invite repeat visitors back.

- Builds a sense of community.

- This is the central draw at many sites and many site operators spend tons of time keeping the discussion going. They would not do this if it wasn't paying off.

- Builds name recognition and trust.

- Excellent for networking with those of similar interests.

9) Chat Sessions

- Similar benefits to discussion forums.

10) Ads At Free Ads Sites

- Concentrate on the top ones that you KNOW get lots of traffic such as Yahoo! and AOL.

- Since an ad only stays near the top on one of the busy sites for a short while visit frequently to repost ads.

- Modify your ads to see if this makes a difference in response rates. Good ad copy is the key. Download an excellent free ebook on writing effective ad copy at: http://williecrawford.com/puremagic.exe

11) FFA Pages

- Can increase links popularity with the search engines.

- Generate a lot of thank you notes and some operators subscribe you to their list when you post.

- You need to post to ten or even hundreds of thousands to get significant traffic. This makes automatic posting absolutely essential.

- On the heavily used sites your posting stays such a short time that you need to repost often.

- FFA pages are usually more valuable to operators since they lets them send out tons of emails - thank you notes. These notes naturally include their sales pitches.

12) Spam

- Blasting your website url and a thinly disguised invitation to visit your website to millions.

- It primarily irritates a lot of people and can cost you your ISP and web hosting accounts.

- Works only if you don't care about your reputation. Reputation is key to building a growing business in many online industries.

- Is used extensively and indiscriminately in the adult industry where it does generate traffic.

13) Getting Featured As the Site of The Week at large sites such as Yahoo!

- Submit your site.

- Encourage your visitors to submit your site.

14) Participating in Discussion Lists

- A Posting to a list with over 100,000 members such as Links Exchange Digest WILL generate traffic.

- Have a signature file that tells readers WHY they should visit your site - how will they benefit.

- It's even worth the effort to research the answer to a difficult question so that you can respond.

15) Posting to Discussion Boards

- Only post if it's helpful.

- Always post a link to your site when permitted.

- If links are not permitted, use your signature file or just your website url.

- Sometimes posting a picture or banner draws more response.

- This is a Proven, Major source of traffic for many sites. It's time well spent.

16) Create An Ebook

- Loaded with lots of useful information.

- Give permission for other webmasters to give these away from their websites.

- Encourage webmasters and marketers to offer these as a bonus to purchasers or new subscribers.

- Have links in articles or in banners leading back to your site. Get a great article on how to quickly create an ebook via autoresponder at: mailto:ebook@williecrawford.com

17) Write Useful Ezine Articles

- If they are not hardsell they have a better chance of being published.

- Have a link back to your site in your resource box at the end of the article.

- Send these articles to ezine publishers who have specifically said they accept ezine articles.

- Make sure they are well-written, contains lots of hard facts, and are proof read several times.

- Get an excellent article on using ezine articles effectively via autoresponder at: mailto:fortune@williecrawford.com

18) Novelties such as greeting card generators, games, calendars, calculators.

- These all draw repeat visitors.

19) Freebies such as cgi scripts, free email accounts, autoresponders, free site submission, meta tag generators, classifieds on your site.

- All excellent ways to get your website url out and keep regulars coming back.

Use these 19 ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Building a steady flow of repeat traffic to your website takes lots of hard work but it can be done.

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Willie Crawford is a marketing consultant, promotion specialist and popular writer. His website contains over 160 articles on internet marketing as well as a very active discussion forum. Visit today and begin learning what really DOES work in building your business.
http://www.williecrawford.com