Simple to Shamelessly illegal ways to skyrocket your traffic
Blogging about illegal ways to increase traffic requires justification - Let us assume that guns were not manufactured but could be found lying around ( possibly left behind by aliens ). Generating awareness regarding the existence of these guns could lead to people finding them and using them. On the other hand NOT generating awareness would not necessarily mean that no one would ever find them. Those wanting to, would and the others would be at their mercy.
Whether we like it or not, there are "illegal" ways to generate traffic and they are "lying around". Although I am no one to judge those who make a living out of increasing site traffic, I do hope that talking about possibly destructive ways of doing it will help fight it much the same way in which hacking manuals help webmasters secure their servers or open source helps increase software security.
With that said, here goes ...
Study your target audience
Start off by trying to figure out why you want traffic. You might want visitors to buy stuff, read stuff or write stuff. "BE" your audience for a week. Whatever it is that you want your visitors to do on your site there are sites out there that would require similar interactions ( unless you have come up with a new and revolutionary way of letting visitors interact with your site in which case you should stop reading this now and focus on making your millions ).
As you move through sites you will notice some things that you like, and others you don't. Some blogs might require you to scroll past tons of advertisements before giving you the information you are looking for. Some may require you to use credit cards you have never heard of, some may have pop ups opening up every couple of seconds. On the other hand there might be sites that have shockingly relevant links placed just where you would want them to be, efficient product searches that let you find just what you are looking for in a couple of seconds. Note it all down.
Try to figure out what the potential visitor would be doing when she decides she wants whatever it is that you are offering. Is it likely that the visitor will be in a mood to spend time ( as a general surfer looking for interesting reading material would be ) or would she rather buy something and leave - ensure your site allows the visitor to do just that.
Have something worthwhile to offer
Lets face it - Its fun to have people coming to your site/blog/profile but they wont if you don't offer anything. In the real world what you offer need not be unique. You could sell shoes just the same as a million others do but you might still do well by virtue of your location. Such barriers are removed in an online environment, and competing against those that have been around and have an online "history" would be suicidal.
Questionable ways of creating content:
If you are thinking of giving up cause you don't think you can pull that off, don't. At this point you can either read the thousands of articles telling you that you can do it and that you are special or you could - use content generation tools. Content generation tools are tools that allow you to create entire web sites with the click of a button ( after, of course, you have spent some money on purchasing the tool ). Here are a couple of this curse to humanity:
Website Promotion
by spending money ...
Even if one has set up the most incredible site on the web, you will generate little or no traffic without promotion. The most important rule when promoting your website is: Ensure that people do not realize that you are promoting your website. Remember that big brands such as ebay can afford to advertise to increase brand visibility but most others can not. More often than not if a user does not click on an advertisement now, he is not likely to visit your site. Do not pay to optimize your search for Search Engines ( SEO ), most companies that claim to be able to do that have no clue what they are up to, instead use Search Engine Marketing ( or SEM ). Popular Search Engines that provide SEM are Google, MSN and Yahoo.
without spending money ...
Increasing traffic without spending money is not necessarily easier ( if you have the money ) but is definitely more fun. The first and most important thing to do is to try and make bloggers talk about you. There are approximately seventy million blogs on the web and a lot of them track other sites and blogs. It is extremely important for bloggers to read and comment on other blogs - we will come to why in a minute - and so if you have one blogger talking about you, you are likely to have a fairly large audience and others following. If you are the web master of a static web site then it is extremely important to provide your readers with a platform to interact with each other. This reason for this is primarily the fact that such platforms increase the stickiness of a website. There are many ways of doing this the most important being by having blogs and communities built around your website.
This integration of static websites into blogs and communities means that we now need to focus on increasing traffic to blogs and communities.
The first thing to do when starting off a blog is to decide on what it is that your blog is going to be about. You could either have an extremely niche blog or a more general one. Each of these options have their own advantages and disadvantages. Whatever your choice there are bound to be at least some other blogs that talk about similar things. If this is the case go ahead and read a few of them before starting off and carefully decide on what it is that you are going to blog.
Now that the blog content is there you need to go about hunting for ways to get people to read it. At this point:
Now go back to each of the blogs that you visited before blogging and post comments on each of them. Try to add value to those who may read that blog, don't post comments saying "read my blog" cause such comments are likely to be deleted. When commenting some blogs ask you to enter your website url -- put in your blog url. Next try to integrate your own post into your comment. You could try saying something like: "what you are saying here is true/not true/sucks because of blah blah which I have elaborated on in my post <you post url>". If your comments actually add value at least the author of the blog you commented on is likely to visit your blog.
Once this is done you are likely to get a trickle of surfers visiting your blog. The first thing to do is to study their trends: do they stay on for a while? Which page do they leave your site from? Which are the popular pages on your blog? You can get all information regarding web traffic by use tools such as Google analytics or eXTReME tracker. One you have done this you will also know which sites people are coming to your blog from and which site they are not. Participate as much as possible on those blogs that generate traffic and ignore those that do not. Also when analyzing blogs that you are likely to comment on find their page rank and try to stick to those pages that have a high page rank.
The next step in traffic analysis is to look for searches that turn up your blog. For this you need to first have your site indexed by search engines. The normal procedure for this is to submit your blog to all popular search engines and then to wait around for them to find the time to send a bot to your site. This could take months and most of us are not that patient. So the way around this is to run Google Adsense on your site. Now the beautiful thing about this is that Google runs contextually relevant advertisements on your site, and for that it needs to figure out what the context of your site is - and here is the shocker - to do this Google will send down its Google bot to your site and Voila, your site is indexed in a couple of days!!
The searches for which your blog turns up are extremely important. Most people who visit your blog will eventually come from some search engine or the other.
Questionable Semi SEO method:
Write a post of each of the terms that your blog turns up for. This will ensure that your blog moves further up in the rankings. This blog, for example, turns up on Google results for the following search terms:
You will notice that what I have done above is to carefully integrate each of the terms that this blog shows up in search results for into a blog post so further boosting the result position. Also i have left out the search terms that I do not want my blog to show up for.
The next thing to do is to sign up on MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is about the lowest you can stoop to generate traffic but it is important that every blogger starts off from MyBlogLog because it demonstrates how the blog community works in a very real way. The basic rules that you need to keep in mind when working with MyBlogLog are:
Questionable use of MyBlogLog:
MyBlogLog has this option which allows one to see which members have visited your profile. Most users whose profiles you visit will visit your profile to see who you are, and more importantly visit the profiles of all your contacts on a reasonably regular basis. In general this can be a pain, and so the way around this is to automate this visiting. The simplest way to do this is to open a whole lot of profiles in different tabs ( say about 300 of them ) and then to "bookmark all tabs". The next time you want to visit all 300 of those profiles you simply open your browser login to MyBlogLog ( important ) and select the folder in which you have bookmarked the profiles scroll right to the bottom and click on "open all in tabs" -- go out for dinner and when you are back, you will have about 50 visits from fellow MyBlogLogers!!
Questionable use of Wikipedia:
Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of traffic largely due to the extraordinary content that they provide. Having a link on Wikipedia that links to your site can be a source huge traffic. Remember however that all articles on Wikipedia are written by volunteers non of whom are paid for what they do. So if they find that you are trying to use Wikipedia to obtain cheap traffic they are likely to make things hard for you. Edit Wikipedia articles with care.
NOTE: Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information on or off the web and is an example of how effective collaborative work can be. Please do not ruin it for a few users on you site.
Questionable use of blogger:
For those of you ( such as myself ) who use blogger, there is a neat way to generate traffic. Blogger provides a so called feature that lists the "most edited blogs" on the log in page of Blogger. Clearly getting onto that page can be a killer in terms of traffic. The way to do this is to repeatedly edit and republish your blog. Even if you have made no changes whatsoever, Blogger assumes that you are editing your blog heavily and so gives your blog more credit.
Clearly this is by no means an exhaustive list of methods to generate traffic. I intend to continue to add to this list but for now, lets hope this can get you started.
