So, how do you get people to come to your web site? There are a few things to do to get your web site ranked a little higher, which basically means getting more people to visit your site.
Link / Banner Exchange - Exchange link text or banners with other web sites. RELEVANT ONES! No one is going to click on your Christian Music Banner on a completely unrelated web site; but, they might click on your Christian Music Banner on another Christian or Music related site. Use your favorite search engine to find pages that do this. You give them a banner to display on their site... they give you a banner to display on your site. It's pretty simple once you get the hang of it. A couple that I use are
ultimatetopsites.com and
fishthe.net/top1000. You can also email someone with a related web site and ask to exchange links. People email me requests all the time.
Message Boards / Blogs - Join message boards... Start a blog... Comment on blogs... once again... RELEVANT ONES! And be sincere. I don't know too many people that like SPAM. For example, don't sign up to every message board possible and post things like,
"Buy Our New CD... On Tour Now!... Come to Our Web Site... etc." Instead, actually read through older posts. Find out what people are talking about and, if you have real things to add, post something. Here's the great thing about this... most message boards allow you to put a signature to all your posts. That's where you put the URL to your site and maybe your mission statement. Before you know it, you have dozens of real links back to your page. Here is what I usually attach to my signatures:
People
will click on that! And they'll respect you for not SPAM-ing. And the same goes for blogs. Read through blogs that you are interested in and that relate to your site in some way. Although, usually when you comment on someone's blog, you don't leave a signature, but you
can simply put your URL. It's not saying, "Hey Come to My Site!... etc." but it lets people know where (on the web) you are.
Linking to Other Sites - How does linking to other people's site get people to come to my site? One way is like this:
Tracking. I use a couple of different tracking tools on my web site. One is
extremetracking.com. What happens is, when you use a tracking tool, you want to know how people are getting to your site. The tracking tool will show the site that
linked someone to your site. For example, I login at
extremetracking.com and look up the referrers that link to my web site today. I'll get a list (sort of) like this:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm
http://dir.blogflux.com/state/tennessee.html
http://www.blogcharm.com/happyblog
http://www.bloginspace.com/mostlikelytobecontacted.php
http://forum.christiansongwriters.org/viewtopic.php
http://voxpop-swicki.eurekster.com/Adult
http://rockrules.com/slideshow.asp
These are sites that link to my site and where my visitors came from today. If I don't recognize one, I'll click it! I have found a few web sites who have simply linked to me without me even knowing. That's (kind of) how it works. They can also be used to tell you what search term someone used to get to your site, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly averages of how many people usually visit your site, what state and town they live in and much more. So if I've confused you on this one, just remember this...
Link to relevant sites and don't worry about the details!MySpace.com - Yes,
MySpace. It's not just for teeny-boppers, but tons of bands, solo artists and comedians use it. It is a great way to build a fan base. We've just started using it in the beginning of 2006 and we've made a couple of potential contacts for getting gigs and a couple of hundred "fans". And, I know that not everyone who is your MySpace friend is going to buy your albums or go to all of your concerts, but
some will. And one more time... make friends with relevant MySpacers. We try not to connect with cecular bands or people who have a lot of @#&*%$@ on their MySpace page (if you know what I mean).
WHAT DOES NOT WORK:
Traffic Exchange Sites - In my experience with these kind of sites, there are very few "real" sites on the traffic exchange. It basically works like this: You "surf" as many sites as you can and accumulate credits for each site you visit. Your credits are then cashed in to get people to visit your site. It's mostly people looking to increase their hit counters and people who don't care about what sites they are surfing. Yes, I got tons of new "hits" to our site, but this method has never had any
real impact on our web presence.
** Traffic exchanges for blogs tend to work quite a bit better though. People who are surfing blogs are actually looking for good things to read about since blogs are generally updated frequently. Most blog traffic exchange web sites will not accept SPAM sites and will only accept your site if it is a blog. We happen to have a blog within our site so it works for us!SPAM!! - This is how I deal with SPAM, and if I deal with it this way, you can bet that many, many more people do the same thing: If I get any kind of SPAM in my inbox or as a comment, I DELETE IT! That's pretty much it :-)
You can check your web site's ranking by visiting
widexl.com or
marketleap.com. I've seen our site's ranking go from a range of about 0-10 to a range of about 800-1400 in a few months after applying these few things... and yes, it will take time, but it's worth it. Remember to keep the term "Targeted Marketing" in mind when getting the word out. It's much more effective. And good content, keywords and updating your web site regularly won't hurt either! Yes, there are other methods, and one method alone won't really work that well, but the combination of all of these will work great. And it all depends on how hard you try at all of these methods which will determine it's effectivness.
Charlie