Multiple streams of traffic: General Traffic

Not only do you want to get more traffic, you want to get moreunique traffic! In order to achieve this, you need to create multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for onesource of traffic is simply not enough for most small to mid-size sites, or home-based business sites. This is the firstof four parts in a mini-series about generating multiple streamsof traffic for your website. The remainder will be published here on newbie-guides over the next few days.Considering the competition most people experience with Search engines, not to mention the ever increasing trend towards 'pay for inclusion' with the major search engines, it can be a real challenge to get decent traffic from SE's alone (not impossible,just challenging). Likewise, most net advertising and promotion has become much less effective, in particular bannerstyle advertisements are now not really much more use than creating brand awareness, and unless you get massive coverage with your banners, you won't create much awareness.This does not mean that you should skip these forms of traffic. That would be foolish. However, what it does mean is that youneed to look for other, alternative, sources of traffic that can fill in the gaps, and provide additional traffic to your site. Two very good additional ways of increasing your traffic are 1) to make use of a variety of 'viral' marketing techniques, and 2) to promote your online presence in offline media (print, radio, TV, etc.).1) Search Engines Search engines are still a fantastic source of traffic - probablythe most important - because they will simply keep on producingtraffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords (ones that are relevant to your site and get lots of searches). This is notalways easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get some traffic, however, a poor placement will result in very poor traffic flow. I won't go into the details of meta tags and search engine optimization here - there are literally dozens of sites that tryto teach you how to do that. Check a few of them out. A word of warning however, be very careful with what you choose to believe when you read those sites. Unless they can prove they have produced many top 10 search engine placements on many different keywords, generally what they are telling/selling is rubbish. Remember what you are looking for is HIGHLY TARGETED traffic coming to your site because your site gives them what they need and want. *** side note ***I know from personal experience that the techniques taught by Stephan Peirceproduce top results every time. After putting the information touse, the next time my sites were 'spidered', all of the results were top 10 for the keywords I had focused on! They were not all #1, although a few were, but it didn't matter, my traffic from search engines jumped significantly thanks to the information in his book. I also know that he himself uses these techniques to get hundreds of top 10 search engine placements for his own business and is approaching $1,000,000 in profits annually.**** There are two additional things to think about when you considersearch engines. Well actually, there are many more things to talk about when it comes to search engines, but I'm only going totalk about two more: mis-spellings, and smaller search engines. Taking advantage of mis-spellings can be a great way to boost your search engine traffic. People frequently type too fast, andsubmit their search before they realize that they have mis-typedthe word that they were searching for. As a webmaster, this can be quite good, as far fewer sites actually try to focus on the incorrect keywords. Of course the total number of searches madeon mis-spelled keywords is much fewer than on correctly spelled keywords, but they can still generate a large amount of traffic with FAR less competition. Just as a quick example, as I writethis, "web hosting" produces nearly 3.9 MILLION results, while "wbe hosting" produces 10,000!GoodKeywords from http://www.softnik.com/ is a great tool that allows you to quickly and easily find out how many searches are done on any keywords you like (including mis-spellings). It's free, and an invaluable resource! Lastly on search engines, is the importance of the smaller search engines. There are many benefits to the smaller search engines, but the most significant are that you get indexed morequickly, have fewer competitors, and can generate a solid amountof traffic for you. The huge engines (google, lycos, inktomi) and indices (yahoo, DMOZ) can take weeks to add your site, if ever, and always put your site against 1000's of others. While there is no guarantee that you will be included in a smaller search engine, you will be 'spidered' much more quickly.And while they may not have millions of searches a day, there isno difference between 1000 visitors coming from 1 source (saygoogle) and 1000 visitors coming from 5 sources (200 from each ofseveral smaller engines). An additional benefit of the smaller search engines is that some (not all) have agreements with the main engines so that their content is spidered by the main engines - in essence giving the webmaster a 'backdoor' into the mainengines. I hope that this gives you a bit of direction and hope as far assearch engines are concerned. As I mentioned earlier, based on my own experience using the information, I highly recommend Stephan Peirce's bookon traffic generation. He WILL make a difference in your website's success.Look for the remaining 3 parts in this series on Multiple Streamsof Traffic over the next few days.