If you want huge amounts of targeted new visitors to your site, read on and I'll tell you my secret.
I have spent endless hours trying to promote my sites through articles, link building, and other seo techniques. None of it has brought me traffic like the method I'm going to share with you. Since I figured this out, I've managed to increase my traffic by 1000%, and it has been targeted and quality traffic.
So, this is how I do it:
When I create a new site, I put something interesting on the first page - something that is FUN, or extremely interesting. Don't even bother trying this technique until you've found an interesting gimmick to put on your opening page. For my most recent website about hip hop music, I created a program with Macromedia Flash (an animation program). The program I created lets the visitor create their own hip hop music using their mouse. You can check it out at hip-hop-machine.com. It's quirky and fun enough for people to want to "spread the word".
Once you have something cool on your first page, it's time to let the world know. What I do is post it at linkfilter.net. Once you register with linkfilter.net, they allow you to post as many sites as you like. You'll want to make a really catchy heading for your post, so that lots of people read it. Make sure you have categorized it correctly so that your visitors are targeted. Generally, you will get around 150 visitors from this initial post, but that's not really what you're after....
I have discovered that Linkfilter.net is used as a reference by people who have "interesting link" sites or blogs. These "interesting link" sites simply link to cool and unusual blog articles and/or web pages for their visitors to see. Some of these sights get HUGE amounts of traffic (check out boingboing.net - with 87,843,115 hits so far this month, a link from them is golden).
If you're page is catchy enough, you can count on getting links from as many as a hundred sites like boingboing.com within 24 hours.
As soon as you have finished posting at linkfilter.net, do the following:
1. Bookmark your site at del.icio.us.com and stumbleupon.com - These are "search engine" type sites that work through social bookmarking instead of algorithm based ranking like Google. Create a membership on these sites and bookmark your site, again making sure you have a catchy phrase in your post, you're trying to catch peoples' attention. Del.icio.us.com is probably the most desirable of these sights, but stumblupon has given one of my sites over 30,000 visitors in less than a month. If you have a technology based site, another good one is digg.com.
2. Get some friends or colleagues to post and bookmark your site at around the same time as you do so you get more exposure.
3. Submit your site to boingboing.net. Boingboing allows you to submit your site for consideration. Most of the other "link" sites seem to enjoy finding you on their own.
In case I've lost you, here's an explanation of where your traffic will be coming from. You're initial traffic will come from your post at linkfilter.net (probably around 150 visitors). From here you will hope that "link" websites will find you and post links to your site (there is no limit to how much traffic this can generate). The last source of traffic is from social bookmarking sites (again, limitless traffic).
Remember, this all hinges on the "interestingness" of your home page. My sites usually have a catchy flash program on the first page. Who knows what will work for yours. Go to boingboing, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon to see what the "popular" sites have in common.
