6 Popular Website Marketing Techniques

Having higher traffic is a goal of most websites and it is particularly important if you have monetized your website. Throughout this article I will discuss 6 popular marketing techniques used to increase your website's traffic.

The Techniques

• Search Engine Optimization - Many new website owners assume that search engines will send massive traffic to their website with minimal effort. While search engines can send massive traffic, they will only do so if your website is optimized accordingly. To rank highly your website must be better optimized than the other websites competing with you for a certain keyword. Search engine optimization is a quite in depth topic so I have split it into a separate article. If you're interested in optimizing your website for search engines, you should read our SEO Article.
• Social Bookmarking - Websites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us are social bookmarking websites; they allow anybody to submit links (bookmarks) but only the most popular links reach the homepage of the website and in turn gain a large traffic spike. It is reasonably easy to optimize for social bookmarking websites - if your content is unique, cutting-edge, nifty and amusing your page has the potential to be successful on social bookmarking websites. Once you have the quality content you can submit your pages to social bookmark websites in under 1 minute per page.
• Quality Content - I've said it before in my SEO Article but I'll say it again - high quality content is almost crucial to developing a high traffic website. If you're content is of a high standard your website will naturally generate related backlinks which not only improves your SEO but can also be a significant traffic source. High quality content will help to build traffic and it will also help to retain your traffic. The best content is that which solves a problem, for example if people want to know exactly how significant backlinks are to SEO you may decide to do an analysis on this topic - your content will be unique and will generate backlinks.
• Trading Links - Many websites owners with related websites to yours would be happy to exchange links with you as you will both gain mutual traffic and PageRank benefits. To find link partners you can do a simple search on google such as "web design inurl:contact.php" then you should send them a message requesting the two of you trade links and remember to point out the traffic and PageRank benefits. This technique is more useful for SEO than traffic generation but is still a useful one.
• Paid Advertising - Paying for traffic can be the quickest and easiest way to generate traffic but this method is only viable if your website generates a reasonable income per 1000 visitors. Google AdWords is one very popular paid advertising system, you pay a certain price per visitor to your website and the price varies between website topics. But as I said, this technique should only be used if your website makes a reasonable income per 1000 visitors.
• Directory and Article Submission - Directory and article submission may have been important marketing techniques in the past but have little benefit at present. While this may be discouraging, I'd still recommend trying it if you come across a free bulk automated submission process.

Marketing Techniques Conclusion

From the techniques I listed above, the top 3 are the most important to implement into your marketing strategy - each are free and can send substantial traffic. Link trading is important for SEO but not so much for traffic generation, paid advertising is quick and easy but is only viable for monetized websites and I wouldn't recommend article and directory submission.