Don’t Click This

I know I haven’t posted for a while - been working hard on my websites - but here are a few things that I’m currently trying/will be trying in terms of website promotion, besides the normal link exchanges:

Forums: Great way to get traffic to your website, not just via a sig link (which I normally wait until I’ve made 10-20 posts before adding - don’t want to be banned for spamming) but also in response to other peoples requests. For example I often deep link to specific articles on my MTB site in response to peoples questions on bike forums.

Give Away Free Stuff/Competitions: Obviously, this has the potential to become quite costly but it can also bring a ton of backlinks too - for example if you’re giving away a novelty pen when someone subscribes to your feed/newsletter or whatever, you can submit the offer to freebie sites which will probably list it, then you get lots of one way links to your site.

Myspace: Bit of a grey area this, but depending on your website it can be good for targetting specific demographics eg for my student site I can find students at specific universities, add them as a friend, they check out my profile and see a link to my site. It is a good idea to create a profile of a person though as opposed to a site, more likely to get a response that way. It’s preferable to make the profile with a picture of an attractive female too, dunno why that works so well…ahem!

Stumble Upon: I’ve yet to test this out but I’ve heard it can get a lot of traffic to your site. Basically you just add your website to Stumble Upon and people, um, stumble upon it and can rate it, discuss it etc.

Blogroll: I’ve found this one to be particularly good; creating a blogroll on your website for your specific niche and then finding related blogs and adding them. Once you’ve done that, send a bit of traffic thier way and then tell them how good their blog is - usually can get a link back. I’ve actually managed to get a couple of blog posts dedicated to sites this way - bonus!

So there you have it. If anyone has any other interesting, non-conventional traffic methods, leave a comment and if they’re good I’ll add em to the list.