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Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Website

Posted By Darren Rowse 20th of July 2006 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

SEOmoz Blog has a worthwhile read titled 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic which explores the following methods of traffic generation:

#10 – Targeting Unmonetized Searches
#9 – Creating Controversy
#8 – Maps & Mashups
#7 – Event Coverage
#6 – Top Ten Lists
#5 – Online Tools
#4- Graphic & Web Design
#3 – Leveraging Social Networks
#2 – Blogging & Blog Comments
#1 – Reporting Remarkable News
#0 – Offering Something Incredible

All good common sense tips. randfish gives the ingredients, process, results and examples of each in his article.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. They cheated. They gave us 11.
    Thanks for the heads up Darren.

  2. I gotta say here that the top 10 list did it for me. A month ago I made a Top 10 ways to motivate geeks list and it got a little attention from reddit and digg. I didn’t think much of it until lifehacker got ahold of it and posted on it. The last 3 days I’ve been getting 100 times my normal traffic after reaching del.ico.us popular and a few dozen additional link-ups. It’s not really slowing down that much either.

    I just created it on a whim. It wasn’t really something I figured would do much, but the top 10 list did far more than I ever expected it to do.

  3. Sorry, I may be stupid, but would you expand on “target unmonetized searches”. What exactly does this mean? Unpopular keywords?

  4. There is definately something to be said for creating controversy. I have puposely argued unpopular points of view lately and these posts seem to be the ones that get the most page views and comments.

  5. Excellent suggestions. Of course, most aren’t very easy to acheive and require a good deal of time and effort.

  6. “Offering Something Incredible”

    Yeah, this works quite well. 3 days ago, I offered to my readers to do 1 free logo design for one of them, and the day after, my blog was advertised on blogger’s front page as the blog of note for july 18th, driving around 20000 uniques to me.

    The traffic was of exceptional quality. They visited everything I had to offer, clicked on ads, and a lot of them are comming back, even 2 days later.

  7. Yeah, you know….when it comes to this business it takes a TON of work, so you better like punching away at keyboard for many hours of the day.

    For my wife and I it’s worth it. The freedom, no boss and all that, but the first year was a ton of work.

    All ten of those ideas require serious committment.

    A positive attitude the FIRST step. Then all the work will get done.

    -Terry

  8. Hi, I think you’re missing 1 more thing. “Giving something for Free”, people love free stuffs.

  9. Hi Darren,

    I have to say that I find much of this list pretty unhelpful for a blogger, and even bordering on gimmicky.

    #10 Targeting Unmonetized Searches – may be useful for a web-based business, trying to angle in on search traffic, but for us regular bloggers, who wants to go to the trouble of all that? I find that if you just write for your blog long enough, this effect will happen on its own.

    #9 Creating controversy – I call this “link baiting”, being purposefully annoying just so people pay attention to you.

    #8 Maps and Mashups – wrangling with an API just to create something that hopefully gets noticed by the mashup reporting blogs? And, what percentage of the thousands of people who come by actually stick around? This may be quite a useful tool if it makes sense given the content and community of your site, if not, seems to me to be a waste of time.

    #7 Event Coverage – most events I know that have lots of bloggers interested in them, have lots of bloggers covering them too. I would say for this tip to work you would need to pick a wildly popular event that few tech-savy people attend. This year. By next year, 4 times as many people will be blogging and those events will be harder to find.

    #6 Top Ten Lists – an effective communication device, no news there.

    #5 Online tools – If you create your blog with the intention of being “useful” for your audience, whether it’s a tool or your text content, it doesn’t matter. People are attracted to content that help them with their work and life. Tools are helpful, but most of us bloggers don’t have the necessary programming skills to create them.

    #4 Graphic and web design – there is something to be said for a beautifully designed site. Something even more to be said for a site that is easy to load, easy to read, and easy to navigate.

    #3 Leveraging social networks – this is a good idea, especially with del.icio.us and digg. Mostly because attention on those networks goes to people who usually have their own blogs, and they just may end up linking to you.

    #2 Blogging and blog comments – sort of redundant for a blogger, but highly useful recommendation for anyone with a website who is not yet blogging.

    #1 Reporting remarkable news – yep, if you want to be chained to your computer 24 hours a day. Some people do. Most don’t. TechCrunch deserves all the traffic they get. It’s hard work.

    #0 Offering something incredible – great idea if you are trying to create a multi-million dollar business. The advice for a blogger might be a little scaled down to – create something that makes you, your parents, your kids, your friends and colleagues proud.

    ~Elise
    elise.com, Simply Recipes, Learning Movable Type

  10. […] Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Website Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Website. […]

  11. […] In this problogger article the author gives us a list of ways to attract more readers to your blog, even though creating controversy is labeled number 9 on his list I think it deserves a much higher position. (updated: I found the original list that does a much better job of explaining what are important parts of a controversy buzz campaign) […]

  12. Some of these we’ve heard before, but still, just like advertising, once is not enough . . .

    Thanks just the same.

  13. I was searching for website traffic blogs and read some of your posts. They are good. Your blog is informative. keep up the good work!

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