Use Linking to Increase Traffic - Affiliate Programs and Others

Offering others a chance to make money if they join your web site's affiliate program (if you are offering a product for sale online) will also ensure a large number of websites provide a link to your site, all of them doing the initial pre-selling that is so essential to the sales process. Other linking strategies include submitting your website to directories and advertising on sites through link buying on their sites or on web journals. Press releases are also excellent ways of getting news sites to link to your website (it's like getting the model to agree to a one off date).


Analyzing Your Traffic

After your linking strategies are in place, you must now use link analysis to see what works for your site and what does not. You can either use your server's activity logs to track where most of your traffic is coming from, or you can use the search engines to track down referral links. And hence you know how popular your link is considered on line.

From your activity logs, you can tell which kind of sites are referring a large volume of traffic to you; hence you can focus on them (ergo Pareto's Principle) and from this analysis you can update your linking strategies. Link analysis can be tricky and should be carefully studied before drastic changes are made. The demographics of your audience should also be investigated via forms placed on your site and posted to members of your opt-in database. This will ensure that you know the demographics of the searchers that make up the bulk of your traffic.

Content, Content, Content

All your efforts are moot if your content cannot keep the searchers referred to your site by your linking strategies and your new rankings. Content is king, so hail him in the morning and hail him in the evening. Good content will ensure the survival of your site, interactivity and value will also give you the biggest single piece of free PR you can ever dream of: word of mouth endorsement on forums, articles and newspapers, or cyber buzz.