Nowadays, almost everyone is trying to do everything on a budget – grocery shopping, traveling, major purchases and even internet marketing. Putting up a website is easy – it doesn’t take a whole lot of money and with Web 2.0 platforms, you could do it yourself, even if you are not that technical. Promoting your website takes a little more work, but follow some website promotion ideas, and you will see that it can be done successfully on a budget. Unless you have a nice nest egg, saving money is important and reaching your target audience with minimal out of pocket costs is just what most internet marketers are looking for in today’s economy.

Some people have a knack for internet marketing, and others need a little help along the way. Patience and persistence are the key factors to success with internet marketing. It is not a business that blows up overnight, instead it builds gradually until one day you realize that you have a steady stream of income, and you have made it. Knowing how to advertise and reach your audience should be your main focus once you have your website up and running. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, and you can always make changes.

You just have to get out there and get your feet wet – stay in shallow waters until you are ready to dive in with the big fish, and believe me, there are plenty of them. You will have a lot of time to compete, but for now, let’s just focus on some website promotion ideas.

Search engine submissions and rankings are two critical parts of promoting your website. If the search engines don’t find your websites valuable, the search engine spiders won’t crawl them and if your sites don’t get crawled, you won’t get ranked. So first you must focus on your website submissions.

There are literally hundreds of search engines where you can submit your website. It is recommended that you stick with the most popular ones – Google, Yahoo, MSN/bing, but don’t forget about the others. There are two ways you can submit your website: manually and automatically. Naturally, manual submission takes more time since you have to submit to each of the search engines individually. If you are really serious about getting started, investing in software that will automatically submit your website to a number of search engines is a wise move. This will save you a significant amount of time and for less than 50 bucks, you can get your site submitted to over 640 directories just by filling out one form. You can do the math on that one.

Getting Your Website Ranked

No one really understands the algorithm of the search engines. They have a special formula that they use to determine the position in which websites are ranked. Some of the things that they use to determine this positioning are the number of links your website has (other websites, which are linked to your website), the quality of content, and the overall appearance of your website. The number of links seems to hold a lot of weight with the search engines as well as the quality of the content. This content can be in the form of articles, audio or video, so why not get that camcorder out and start filming some quality content.

Banner, classified ads and text links are inexpensive ways to increase your traffic and get your website noticed. Press releases are another way in addition to article marketing with a resource box linking back to your website.

As you can see, there are a number of ideas that you can promote your website, even if you don’t have a lot of money. There are many effective low-budget marketing strategies that have proven to work so try one or two – or try them all. In time, you will start to see increased traffic and hopefully increased sales.

Once you have conducted your research and have formulated your competitive intelligence, you are ready to take the first step forward to a successful niche marketing. Dominating your niche market is a process, and the worst thing you can do is get “comfortable” with your marketing. It must be consistent to be effective.

There are seven important steps in the process of dominating your niche and your marketing efforts. Follow these steps, and you will increase your chances of prospering. Ignore or skip a step, and it could affect your total niche marketing plan.

1. Create your celebrity.

Reputation means everything in Internet marketing. Establish yourself as an authority, offer free advice and brand your name. Take advantage of Web 2.0 to create brand recognition. Blog, post videos to YouTube and do interviews to enhance your reputation. Web 2.0 is your key to creating visibility.

2. Build a community with your target market.

Blog, create a forum or use a social network like MySpace or Facebook to reach out to your niche market. Use these avenues to increase your visibility and to connect with individual customers. Give back freely and keep your customers informed about upcoming products or services.

3. Focus on increasing the perceived value of your product.

Improve your existing product or add bonus features that make your product appear more attractive. Ironically, increasing the price of your product can often result in more sales. People assume that expensive products are more valuable than cheaper alternatives.

4. Create loyalty incentives.

It is cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to gain a new one, so develop incentive programs that keep customers coming back for more. You can offer discounted prices for repeat customers or give rewards for customers who refer other buyers to your program.

5. Perform continual competitive analysis.

Competitive analysis must be an ongoing process. Don’t abandon it after you start getting a little success. Study your competition. Know what part of your niche marketing is working. Keep on top of what your competitors are doing so you can modify your marketing strategy as needed.

6. Profit with product launches.

You will want to build anticipation for your product or service by blogging about it, announcing it in niche-related forums and keeping your social network informed about it. Get prospects excited about what is to come and offer buyers a reduced price for a limited time. Scarcity is an effective motivator in buyer behavior.

7. Capitalize on joint ventures.

Form partnerships with your competitors – particularly the ones at the top of your target market – to add steam to your marketing campaign. By combining brand recognition, you will increase your customer base and reach out to prospects who may never have considered buying your product before. Combine your strengths and resources, and you can increase brand recognition and take your business to the next level.

If you want to dominate your niche, niche marketing is a combination of competitive analysis, focus and a winning strategy. You will need a multi-step approach to make it to the top. Once you have discovered how to get to the top of your niche market, you can build upon the same strategies to stay there.

There are many ways to increase web  traffic, both free and paid strategies and some are more effective than others according to how much work you put into it. Some marketers spend thousands of dollars on SEO and PPC tactics, video and joint venture attempts and still have mediocre results. This doesn’t include the money wasted on DVD’s, E-Books and Training Programs all claiming to teach you how to do this effectively. The answer is simple. Using free software to increase web traffic is a highly effective, yet fairly inexpensive way to generate tons of traffic your website.

If you have spent any amount of time seeking ways to get people to your website, you have undoubtedly come across article marketing, which requires submitting a number of articles to hundreds of websites. There is video marketing, pay per click campaigns and Tweeting on Twitter as well. Many of these strategies take either a significant amount of time and/or money. If you do it yourself, you have to spend time and if you outsource the tasks you have to spend money.

Why Should I Consider Free Software

Software creation and distribution could be the answer to your traffic problem. Don’t worry if you have no experience, there are several programs that show you how to create your own software, or you can hire someone to create it for a decent rate, or join one of the software membership sites.

Now you are probably wondering, what is so great about software? Well, it is not the creation of the software, it is the distribution. By distributing your software for free to the shareware websites, you have a chance to link to your website. Visitors will be redirected to your website for the download, you offer them a free newsletter in exchange for your free product and then give them the product as well as an introduction to all of your other offers.

Let’s face it; everyone appreciates something for nothing, although the opportunities are few and far between. Not only will you increase your web traffic, you are also building a valuable mailing list to market your products in the future.

While other marketers are submitting articles and conversing with potential venture partners, you are working on your next product while your one free piece of software is making money for you. It is a simple one shot deal and a golden opportunity.

There are a few important things to remember. You must provide something of value to your potential customers. In other words, it has to be software that in fact does something or people will just uninstall your product and opt out of your list. Your free software should have some relevance to your niche. People don’t just download anything anymore due to viruses and spy ware, so it has to be worthwhile and something they can use.

Finally, to give an answer to my question posed at the beginning of this article: Yes, free software distribution will surely help you to increase  web traffic and on the other hand, will improve your income as well. However, this does only work, if you deliver what you promise and provide compelling content when people reach your website.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be a priceless tool for your online business, but before you can get the most benefit of this tool, you must understand how to interpret the web traffic analysis data.

Many web hosting companies only provide you with the basics when it comes to web traffic analysis data. It is then up to you to utilize this information to the best of your ability. This web traffic analysis that you do receive from your web hosting company can be a bit overwhelming if you do not understand how to apply it to your online business, so let’s go over some of the information you may receive, so that you will understand how to use it. The basic data that you will receive will be visits to your site. These visits can be tracked daily, weekly and/or monthly.

The purpose of these figures is to measure your website’s activity accurately. At first glance, it may appear that the more traffic you see the better. In fact, most people assume that their website is doing well from viewing these figures, however, this perception is inaccurate. By seeing what your visitors are searching for, you can accurately measure your website’s activity, but disregard the first glance since it is not accurate if we speak about analising your web traffic.

“Hits” Don’t Matter

There is a myth or a misconception about what is known as “hits” and what is quality web traffic to your site. Hits are simply the number of information received by your server. If you think about it, a hit is simply a number of graphics per page. This is to give you an idea of how inaccurate the “hits” concept can be. One good example is if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server notes this as 15 hits when in fact it is really only one visitor checking out one page. It is for this reason that “hits” are not very useful when you do a web traffic analysis of your website.

The goal is using a web traffic analysis to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working. One way to figure this out is to see how long visitors are spending on your site. If the time spent is relatively short, there is a problem. It could be your website appearance or your content. It is up to you to figure out and fix those problems.

Importance of Keywords

In addition, web traffic analysis stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, now take a look at your keywords and keyword phrases. If certain keywords are sending visitors to your site; the more targeted the visitor, i.e. they find what they are looking for on your site, or even better, if they  fill out your contact form or make a purchase, then you know that the particular keyword(s) is valuable.

Keywords are crucial to attracting quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Careful analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you an understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

If you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, that is great news, and it means you have achieved an important level of brand recognition, which is a promising sign. As a result, always look at your web traffic analysis stats the right way and your site will be on track for success.

If you want to become number one in your niche market, it is paramount to increase web traffic to your site, to create brand recognition and to build authority. If you want to brand yourself in specific markets, there are five steps you can take to be the go-to person in your niche market.

1. Create content for the search engines

By creating good content laden with SEO keywords, you can brand yourself as an authority in your target market. You can start by searching for other businesses in your niche. Pay close attention to the keywords that they are using over and over again. If you see the same keywords on the first page, you know that these words are working. Use the same keywords in your website content to optimize your website, what will in return increase your web traffic and establish yourself as an authority.

2. Write feature articles

Feature articles are great for establishing authority in your target market. Write short articles that give value to your prospects. For instance, you can give tips to succeed in the marketplace, or you simply define certain procedures and processes that your prospects need to know. Short, focused articles can be posted on your blog, submitted to online article directories or submitted to AboutUs.org. It is important to give away free information in your niche market in order to establish yourself as an authority. People follow authorities, and the more exposure you can get, the better, resulting in an increase of your web traffic.

3. Send your content to as many sites as possible

Write to webmasters and ask if you can be a guest author on their website. Include a bio box after your article with a link to your website. If people like what you have to say, they will click on your link to get more information about who you are and your business. Focus on branding your name so it becomes widely recognizable.

4. Do interviews

If you can get an interview with an expert in your niche market, it is gold, especially if it’s a high profile interview. Post the interview on your site or use it as a giveaway in one of your promotions. Don’t forget to post it on YouTube to increase your visibility. You should also grant interviews to other marketers to position yourself as an authority. Be sure to get rights to use the interview on your website, social networking sites and on YouTube.

5. Participate in social networking sites

Social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace have a worldwide audience, and this is a great opportunity to blog about your business, your products or the services you offer. Because social networking sites post updates to your friends or followers, they will have immediate access to the latest information you have to offer. Twitter is another great resource to keep your followers up-to-date about the latest developments in your business. The updates are short and to the point, and you can post your website URLs for immediate exposure and brand recognition. This all will clearly help you increase web traffic.

To increase web traffic to your website is a matter of establishing yourself as an authority in your target market. Follow market trends, take note of what the heavy hitters are doing and above all, do what they are doing but do it better.

Have you ever experienced this scenario? You spend hours, days, and weeks (maybe months) working on your website and product creation. You might be starting simple with a blog, or you may have a product package to sell. You just know that what you have to offer is so great that the question how to get traffic to your  blog or site will be no problem, right? Not necessarily. Creating a website is only part of the equation. Getting noticed takes a little work.

The first step to getting noticed is to create fresh, original content on your site regularly. For most websites, this could be once or week or several times a week depending on your market. You’ll want to keep the information useful to your target market, so make it helpful. It is also wise to close blog entries with a teaser about the next blog to keep readers coming back for more.

While the best copy is conversation and speaks directly to the reader, don’t underestimate the value of hiring a proofreader. Too many websites and blogs these days are riddled with spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. If you don’t care enough to produce quality content, what does that say to your readers? Your website is the face of your business and if the world sees a sloppy site, visitors won’t see you as a professional. While you don’t have to have an English-teacher-ready copy, the conversational tone and style should reflect a tone of professionalism.

Next, you’ll want to optimize your copy. Use keywords in your copy that are related to your topic. Google’s free Keyword Tool can help you determine a list of relevant keywords. Search engines like original, quality copy surrounding the keywords. Don’t be tempted to use keywords in a list or to haphazardly place the words in the copy. It should read smoothly. For best results, add the keyword or keyword phrase to the title, to the first paragraph, and to the last paragraph. You should also add a few keywords in the body of the copy, preferable in the first third of it.

You can link to other high-quality websites. Consider exchanging links with other webmasters. These are called backlinks. Backlinks are, essentially, your hyperlinks on other websites. When clicked, these links point back to you site. The more backlinks that you have, the higher you’ll rank in the search engines. Sources like Digg.com and EzineArticles.com are great resources you can use to create backlinks.

If you choose to post on Digg or EzineArticles, you’ll want to create quality content that you can post on those sites. This is called article marketing. You can either write the articles yourself, or you can outsource the work. The more articles you post, the more traffic you can drive to your blog or website. Articles on these sites – and others -always include a bio box about the author as well as links that point to the author’s websites.

Even though your blog or website may be new, you can still get noticed if you follow some of the strategies above. Fresh, keyword-rich content is paramount to getting noticed by the search engines. If you work on your website consistently, post your links on other high-ranking websites and create keyword-rich, high quality articles, your website will climb in rank in the search engines, hence it solves the question “how to get traffic to your blog or new website”.

So you have got some old content that you never used and half a dozen PLR packages that you never even opened, just laying around taking up space on your hard drive. Maybe you are frustrated you bought the content and never used it, or feeling silly that you even bought that 27-niche super-discount pack of PLR articles. Well, it’s time to increase traffic to your blog by turning this random content into targeted content.

And it’s time to quit feeling bad. Because you can put this content to work and turn it into targeted content – and you don’t even have to buy hosting or a domain name!

How?

First, go to the Google external keyword tool. Google it if you don’t have it bookmarked already. Under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” click “Website Content”.

If you do not have your content up on a website just yet, don’t fret. Just click the sentence that says “Or, enter your own text in the box below.”  Then, copy and paste your text.

Now, just click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button. Instant keyword research!

(After you see your results, you might want to go back and click the “filter my results” text. It’s very possible you will get some results that you don’t have any use for. Even with the filter, some of your results might not be worth much. However, it’s likely that some will.)

Now you are ready to post your content – on someone else’s site!

The sites I am talking about are Web 2.0 sites. So technically, they are your sites – yours and everybody else’s! The sites themselves may be communal, the pages you make will be yours.

Do a little bit of research on what kinds of products are selling with those keywords. This isn’t too hard. Just take the keywords that had any search volume at all and search for them in Google. The keywords that bring up Adwords ads on the right side of the page are the ones you want. Find out what products those people are selling.

Make a Squidoo page, a Hubpages page, whatever you want. Remake your title to target whatever keyword goes with the best money-maker. This doesn’t have to be a product – you can make a lot of money doing leads as well. Now, tag your page with the term AND with the more valuable related keywords that Google showed you. Now ping your tag pages.

If you want, you can also Stumble or Digg your new page, submit it to directories, point other lenses or Web 2.0 pages at it – or just tag, ping and leave it there. More effort will always give you better results. However, even if you don’t feel like putting much effort into it, you have still put some pages up that have your money-making links on them. And your targeted content will increase traffic to your blog and do more for you on these pages than it will just by sitting on your hard drive!

Getting targeted traffic to your site is easy if you know how to do it. One very effective strategy is to use backlinks.

Backlinks are your website links that are displayed on another website. These links literally point back to your site from the host site. If the host site has a high ranking in search engines, you will get more traffic from the exposure.

Using backlinks makes good business sense, and there are different approaches you can take to increase your site’s ranking in search engines and draw loads of traffic to your site.

1. Post in forums and message boards

Participate in niche-related forums and message boards to bring traffic to your website. Most forums allow you to post your link in your signature line, and curious posters will click on your link to check out your site. The higher the site’s ranking, the more visible your site will be.

2. Leverage article marketing

Article marketing is another great way to get visibility for your site. Post in as many article directories as possible. At the bottom of your article will be a biography box where you will describe your business and add your website link. As website owners and bloggers link to your article, your rankings improve. The key is to write newsworthy and relevant content so that others will want to link your articles to their websites.

3. Participate in social networking sites

Create profiles in Facebook and MySpace. These social networking sites have worldwide audiences, and they rank high in search engines.

4. Exchange links with another website owner

This is where you exchange links with another website owner. It is a reciprocal agreement that creates a win-win situation for both of you. Do a web search to find other sites with high rankings and ask the site owner if he is willing to trade links with you.

5. Be a guest blogger

Approach website owners in your niche market and ask them if you can submit a free article or blog to their websites. You will add fresh content to their site, and you can include a short bio and link to your site at the end of the article.

6. Purchase backlinks

This is a sticky issue because some people question whether buying backlinks is ethical; however, it is common practice among Internet marketers. When you purchase backlinks from a broker, your site’s link will show up on other sites – multiple sites – which will increase your search engine rankings.

7. Practice strength in numbers

In order to have a significant impact, you should have backlinks on as many sites as possible. There is strength in numbers, and the more backlinks you have the higher your site will rank in the search engines.

Driving targeted traffic to your site is easy if you are willing to spend a little time and effort to take advantage of all the tools Web 2.0 has to offer. The more backlinks you have, the higher your search engine rank, and the more traffic you will get on your website.

The Google sandbox sucks. When you’ve put a lot of hard work or hard-earned money into your site, only to see it blip up on Google for an instant and then completely disappear, it can be enough to make you want to give up.

Even when you know your site is just in the sandbox, it can be easy to forget about it. Don’t! Giving your site some love is essential to coming back up on the radar – sometimes in a very good spot!

But all the work you’re doing doesn’t have to be just for the future. There are plenty of ways to get traffic that doesn’t involve any search engine whatsoever! Here are 3 of them.

Take advantage of Squidoo. Forget for a minute that Squidoo allows “do-follow” links on its pages. Forget that it indexes quickly in Google. Forget that it also ranks well, and is a good way to get backlinks to your site. You have probably thought of all of that anyway.

What you might have overlooked, unless you are a hardcore user of the site, is that many people use Squidoo as a search engine unto itself! When Squidoo-o-philes want to look something up on the web, they will often go straight to Squidoo to find what they want.

Squidoo is driven by user content and therefore, considered more trustworthy than search engines by many. After all, it’s still possible to get good Google rankings with a crappy site that has good SEO (but not nearly as possible as it used to be).

People who love Squidoo, really love Squidoo. They trust it, and do a lot of their web searching on the site. Take advantage of this by making informative Squidoo lenses, and you will whet people’s appetite for what they can find on your pages.

Network at places like Technorati. This is like commenting on other people’s blogs, taken to a higher level. If you blog as part of your marketing strategy – and you should – go claim your blog on Technorati. Fill out a user profile and put a picture up. Most any picture will work – it will get you seen when you comment or appear on the “viewed by” section of somebody’s claimed blog.

Make friends with blog owners in your niche and in related niches. This doesn’t take a whole lot of time and is easy if you spend just a little time doing it each day. You might not see an immediate traffic spike (though it does happen), but your efforts will pay off as long as they are consistent efforts.

Use other Web 2.0 sites. Social bookmarking sites are still good ways to get traffic to your site, and you don’t even have to get on the first page of Digg to reap the benefits. Social networking sites like Facebook are also good ways to get traffic, especially if you have a penchant for networking.

If you want to use Web 2.0 properties to make money online, you need to get people off of them and onto your sales, affiliate sales or squeeze pages ASAP. Here are three keys to making it work.

Make it ugly? You are not making your Web 2.0 pages in order to impress anybody or win any awards. You are using them to make money! It follows that all of your effort, then, needs to go into making that money – and that none of it needs to go into the aesthetic experience!

Don’t use any of the bells and whistles provided by your Web 2.0 site, unless those bells and whistles can make you some money. If you use video, make sure it not only relates to your niche, but your product as well. And make sure it relates to people wanting to buy that product, which is paramount.

If you use images, you will mostly need only product images. This can be a “portrait” of the product or of someone using the product. There is no need for cute animated GIFs or anything “cute”.

Don’t entertain them. You don’t want to entertain your readers with content, either. When you are targeting a buying key phrase, keep all information focused on that product or the problems it solves. If you are building a list, make the content about the benefits of your list and/or the solutions it offers.

You don’t need jokes or funny stories. You don’t need to convince your readers why the solutions offered by your product or list are something they need. Target only people who already want those solutions. If you do any convincing at all, it should be that your list will offer a quality solution.

(You shouldn’t have to do this with products, if you’re targeting buying key phrases. People who look up “buying keywords” – specific brands, makes, models, colors, etc. – already know what they want.)

Give them one option. Focusing your page on a single action and providing your readers with a single option is of utmost importance when monetizing Web 2.0 pages.

Most Web 2.0 sites already provide a link or two to click off the pages with their on-site monetization. You shouldn’t give your readers any other choices than possible! Provide them with the choice that is most profitable to you and only that choice.

This should be easy if you have targeted the buying key phrase. After all, it’s what they were looking to buy in the first place, so why shouldn’t they go ahead and click to somewhere they can buy it?

By all means, they should – so don’t try and show them something else they can do. After all, the internet seems to have attention deficit built in to it. Don’t make it worse by providing multiple choices for your readers. Stick with the choice – and only with the choice – that will satisfy reader needs and earn you a commission in the process.