How to Market Your Website

Posts Tagged ‘web traffic’

There are a ton of traffic surfing websites out there. Basically how it works is browse other people’s websites for about 20 seconds and you get a credit. Then that credit can be used for someone else to browse to your website. I guess you can say it’s like trading traffic. Most of these websites are free to signup but I wouldn’t suggest it as
the best way of getting traffic. You may get a lot of traffic but traffic surfing is very tedious and the traffic you receive may not always be meaningful. Because when you are forced to browse someone’s site to get a credit, how many of those sites would you actually browse?

If you do end up using these traffic surfing websites and track your traffic with tools such as Google Analytics. You may notice your bounce rate is high. Basically, the closer it is to 100%, that means visitors are not staying on your site very long and more than likely exiting after seeing the first page of your website.

But if you are just looking just to generate any type of traffic, then using these sites are worth a shot. Below are some traffic surfing sites we can can recommend and have used before:

Trafficswarm: TrafficSwarm is probably the best one out of the bunch here. The bounce rate is still high but you actually get some unique visitors that go through your site. There is also a web directory within TrafficSwarm you can search for and get credit for visiting those sites. I have found some useful sites in their directory. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 87.7% after getting hundreds of referral hits from the website.

EasyHits4U: Get easy traffic but bounce rate high. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 95.3% after receiving hundreds of referral hits from the website.

TrafficG: Get easy traffic but bounce rate high. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 96.7% after receiving hundreds of referral hits from the website.

Webmasterquest: Get easy traffic but bounce rate high. Google Analytics show the bounce rate at 100% after receiving hundreds of referral hits from the website. 100% is not good! That means every single visitor that goes onto your website is exiting after viewing your home page.

What is a Banner Exchange?

A Banner Exchange is another way of exchanging traffic through the use of banner advertisement. An example is placing code on your website which will display the banners. Depending on the banner exchange program you are apart of you earn credits every time a banner is displayed on your website. Those credits are used for impressions. Impressions pretty much means the number of views that the banner displays. So basically, when you earn impression credits, your banner will be displayed on other websites who are part of the same banner exchange program.

The one question people may ask is: are banner exchanges effective?

Personally I’ve tried both banner exchange programs and even paying for banner advertising and I’ve noticed the click ratio is usually pretty bad. I don’t think banner advertising is that effective unless your website really targets a specific audience on a website. An example is if you are a rock band releasing a CD, it is probably best to target music or to be more exact, rock fan pages that have similar taste to your band. But this is just my personal opinion and experience. Who knows, maybe banner exchanges may be effective for your website.

A lot of the banner exchanges I use to know no longer exist so I have been experimenting with new banner exchange programs just to see if they are effective or not. I will also be updating this post time to time once I have experimented with more banner exchange programs. So far I’ve tried the following:

BannersXchange: This banner exchange is probably the best one out of the other ones I’ve tried so far. The click ratio is still bad but at least I was able to get some clicks. The click ratio for this one was about 3-5 clicks for every 500 impressions.

eBannerTraffic: eBannerTraffic was not very effective. You do have the option of using different sized banners such as 468×60 to skyscraper or smaller sized banners. I have tried the 468×60 banner and I’ve received 0-1 click for every 500 impressions.

Adsvert: Adsverts was not very effective for me. Instead of your link appearing as a banner, it appears as text. They give 2500 free impressions but after finishing my credits off in a week I received ZERO clicks.

Whambanners: I didn’t have a good experience with this website. My banner was displayed over 2500 times and I did not receive a single click!

Alexa.com provides free web traffic metrics, demographics, sites linked in and other web analytics and stats.

Here are some basic steps on how to use Alexa.com.

Once you arrive to the site, type the URL of your website or any other website you are interested in checking. If you just created your website, it may take some time before Alexa starts giving results. I not only use this website for tracking my own results but I also check competitors websites to see how they are ranked, websites linked to them and the type of keywords that have been successful for them

Once the website populates, there are several options you can choose from such as “Traffic Stats”, “Search Analytics”, “Audience”, etc. The one example I use here is “Search Analytics”. As you can see in the above picture, it gives you the top keywords that drove traffic to this particular website. The stats is updated monthly, so it is good to check it once a month if you are interested in seeing what keywords are successful in driving traffic to a particular website.

After viewing the top keywords, if you scroll down further you can also see “Search Terms”. This can also be helpful with using specific keywords as they also help in driving traffic. This section shows “Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic”.

As mentioned before you can also check what sites are linked to this particular website. With a new website, your stats will most likely show zero. What I usually do is check a competitors website such as “www.myblog.com”. If I see a good number like above, then I check it out to see what websites are linked. You may find some good websites such as web directories or web portals which you can use to add your link to the website. To not only increase traffic but also your website’s visibility on search engines, it is always good to build link exchanges to as many websites as possible.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?

Google Webmaster Tools is another free tool provided online which can help improve your website’s visibility in Google’s search results.  It can also help you with Google’s view on your site, help with keywords and traffic sources to diagnosing any problems your website may have.

Check it out to find out more – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you improve your website by helping you with the right keywords, tracking and analyzing visitor traffic to helping you better market your website.

You can sign up by going to http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html

Google also provides a good video on what you can do with this free tool. Click here to check it out.