The 7 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website (Part 2)

Alrighty, last week I shared with you the first three major ways you can drive traffic to your website. Let’s carry on with the remaining four methods:

Video Marketing

Video marketing is also relatively new on the Internet. Remember it wasn’t too long ago that most people will still hooked up to the Internet using dial-up modems.

At those snail-crawling speeds, streaming video over the web wasn’t feasible. But with more and more people signing up to broadband and the runaway success of YouTube, video marketing is fast becoming another great way to drive traffic to your websites.

What you need to do is to create videos based on your market niche and then submit them to as many video sites as possible.

We’ve all heard of www.YouTube.com. Other major video sites include www.spike.com, www.metacafe.com, videos.google.com, etc.

These video sites, especially the big ones, receive HUGE amounts of traffic every single day (it seems like people have nothing better to do with their lives than watch video), and submitting your videos to these sites will net you some eyeballs to your website. You even can use a service like TrafficGeyser.com to help submit your videos for you.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a strategy where you encourage people to pass on your marketing message. They pass it on to their friends, who in turn pass it on to theirs, creating exponential growth for the exposure of your website.

A great real-life example I can share with you is this website which generated over a million dollars in just over two years – purely by viral marketing.

Have a look – www.TheInterviewWithGod.com

When you land on the website, you are treated to a short inspirational video. The message in that video touched so many people that they automatically wanted to share that video with all their friends and family.

And they in turn also passed the video on, and on, and on. The website just grew and they monetized all that traffic by selling products based on that one simple video that started it all.

You can do the same for your website by giving away free reports, books, videos, and CDs all pointing back to your website. You can even make this a near zero-cost exercise if you do it entirely digitally.

What you must ensure is that what you are giving away must be of sheer quality or it could hurt you! No one is going to pass on anything which doesn’t add value to their lives. So make sure you do this part right.

Viral is a great way for driving traffic, especially when it hits that ‘tipping point’ and the whole thing just snowballs your way.

It could be a bit tricky getting there but if you do it, it’s well worth it.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing a system where you pay people a commission in return for recommeding a customer for you.

A fine example of a system like this Amazon.com’s associate program. This program allows you to display Amazon’s books on your website. And if someone clicks through from your website and purchases from Amazon, you get a commission.

Th advantage for Amazon is that they gain an army of affiliates to promote their products for them and they only pay when a sale is made.

The benefit for the affiliates is that they don’t need to create their own products to sell, but they can still enjoy hefty paydays if they promote successfully.

You too can implement an affiliate program for your own website and it is a tremendous way to drive traffic to your website for free. Clickbank.com is a great and very easy way to start your own affiliate program if you’re dealing with digital products.

Just make sure that your offer CONVERTS. Because if your website is not performing, affiliates will drop your program and move on to a better converting product.

Social Marketing

Social marketing is a relatively new form of driving traffic. It is basically driving traffic to your websites from online forums, blogs and from also social networking websites like Facebook.com, MySpace.com, and also from social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, etc.

These are places where thousands of people of a particular interest meet virtually online.

The idea is to join these social networks and participate in the discussion online. As you contribute more and more to the community, you build yourself up into an expert in that social network.

And when that happens you automatically become an authority in that field and naturally people want to see what you have to offer.

It is a relationship that is based on trust.

Remember if you are not contributing and your focus is only on selling to these people but not giving, the community can see through it and you will not get any results this way.

A great way you can start is to join an online forum related to your market niche and start participating in it. As you find network with friends and peers, your social influence will start to grow and in turn help to direct people to your website.

So there you have it!

Seven methods which you can use to drive online traffic to your website. If you feel overwhelmed with the information, remember that you don’t need to employ all the methods for to drive traffic to your business website. Doing one or two methods EFFECTIVELY is much better than doing all seven in a half-baked manner.

For example, when I first launched Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires, I only employed TWO methods of driving traffic to the website. I simply did article marketing and affiliate marketing.

The reason why I chose these two methods was pretty simple. Firstly I had a ton of articles at my disposal and naturally the smart thing to do was to submit them to all the article directories out there directing traffic back to my salespage.

And since I was using Clickbank to market the product, it only made sense to have an affiliate program set up. The thing about having your own affiliate program is that you want to make it as EASY as possible for your affiliates to promote for you.

So I did just that. I provided as many tools as I could for my affiliates so that promoting my product was as simple as cut-and-paste. I provided articles, solo ads, graphics, banners, a rebrandable report, etc. If you provide all these sort of tools for your affiliates, it greatly lessens the work they need to do to promote your stuff, which makes it more attractive to them (because let’s face it, everyone doesn’t want to do work!).

If you want to have a look at the tools I created, you can have a look at the affiliate page I set up. You can model it for your own affiliate program if you want to.

I didn’t do any SEO because I knew jack about it (even though I read ebooks and articles about it). Right now, if I want to get SEO done, I’ll look for an expert to do it. Because he’s going to execute a better job then I’ll ever do in a million years. Ditto for PPC.

I didn’t have videos, so I couldn’t submit any back then. I didn’t have the time (or enjoyed it anyway) to partake in social marketing. But I know of a friend who did VERY well simply by hanging around forums and making for a name for himself there. And viral marketing was something that I didn’t want to bet my traffic on.

So I just started off with article marketing and affiliate marketing. And till now Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires has made more than seventy-grand in revenue (guesstimate). Not too shabby, eh?

Like I said, you don’t need to do EVERYTHING just so your website starts rolling. In fact, if you can only do, for example, article marketing, right now, the just do that one method right and consistently. And then you can move on to other traffic methods as you get more familiar and proficient with other methods of driving traffic.