All the information in the world will not take the place of determination and persistence. A web business is just like an offline business. It takes hard work and resolve to succeed. However, working smart is heads and tails better than plain old working.  

Here are several ways to increase traffic. Some are paid advertising options and others are totally free. 

1.          Write articles and submit them to several niche websites. Manually submitting articles to many websites can take a long time. Use a submission service to do all your hard work. 

2.          Post in forums. Many forums will not allow you to market your product or services. That’s totally understandable. What I recommend doing is finding a great forum that you can participant in. When people have questions, provide top notch and comprehensive answers. No selling. Almost all forums allow you to post your website in your sig file. Take advantage of that. 

3.          Submit each page of your website to all major search engines. Also submit each page to all major search engines whenever you make a change on that page. Be careful with this one. Each engine has very specific directions and rules about submission rules. Be sure you do not spam. Submit pages according to each engine’s guidelines. 

4.          Create joint ventures with non-competing websites. Work with a company that compliments your product or service. Also be sure the joint venture is a win-win-win for you, the other company, and your customers. Joint ventures can be a pain to set up and complete, but well worth it if done correctly. 

5.          Look into ezine advertising, web advertising and/or PPC. Each method takes an initial investment and some time to learn, but can bring back traffic. Personally, I do not prefer this method to increase traffic because it’s “iffy” at best. 

6.          Print your website name on all business correspondences. This is a simple task, but one that is simple to do. Add it to your email sig line, forum sig lines, letterhead, and business cards. 

7.          Create an atmosphere of amazing customer service. This always leads to referrals from current clients. The more referrals the more traffic! 

The bottom line is without traffic your site is floating in a sea of doom.  No one is seeing your content or services. Traffic is the lifeline of any business, and the rule of thumb is more traffic means more income. 

Once you develop a nice flow of visitors you need to know specifics. Where did those visitors come from? How did they find you? What pages are the most popular on your site? What page did they enter into your site? What page did they leave your site? What keywords did they use to find you? You must know your visitor inside and out. 

It is best to work smarter and not harder. Traffic analysis and search engine submissions can be very time consuming, but your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge. There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.