Finding good keywords for your website content is only the beginning.  Without a good strategy in place for getting traffic to your new site, it will simply sit there like an island in the middle of the ocean.  No one will have a clue that you’ve just published a great site full of wonderful articles just waiting to be explored.  So, let’s take a look at a few ways to get visitors to your new site.  I will go into this in more detail in future posts, but here are a few quick ways to get your site visited.

1. Create a blog and use a tool like Feedburner to help you promote it and publish it in a format readable by most RSS readers.  Search engines love fresh content, and blogs are great sources of fresh content.  You can get your site noticed much more quickly with a blog.  If you use the low-competition keyword strategy I outlined in the last post, you’ll already have content full of good keywords.  Getting the search engines to index the content will likely get you a top position for one or more of your selected terms relatively quickly.

2. Post comments on blogs, in forums, and on social media sites.  Include a link back to your site or blog, and the search engines will likely find you.  But be intelligent about this.  Don’t just spam the sites of others for your own benefit.  If you provide value, you’ll reap the benefits.  If you spam, you may get a short-term reward, but you’ll have a hollow victory at best.  And as search engines become ever more sophisticated, you could eventually find your sites removed from their listings.

3. Write a few articles related to the content on your site and include a link back to your site in your author bio.  I’ve used this technique successfully on numerous occasions.  In fact, I like to use this strategy to send traffic to landing pages where I promote various affiliate products. (We’ll talk more about promoting products and services as an affiliate in future posts.)  Submit your articles to sites like EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com.  When the articles are published, your link must be included.  This not only provides you with publicity, it also provides links back to your website all across the web.

4. Create a video and post it on YouTube.  Include your site URL as a caption at the end of the video.  Some of your viewers will look you up. 

5. Create a Squidoo Lens at Squidoo.com related to your topic.  Provide good, relevant content and include a link back to your site within a list of links to various other related websites.

6. To get traffic flowing to your site quickly and easily, set up a Google AdWords account and pay to have your advertisements displayed in search engine results or on other websites related to the content of your site.  Using AdWords effectively is a topic for another day, but take a look at the program.  If all of your other efforts fail to live up to your expectations, spending a few dollars can get traffic flowing to your new site.

We’ll look at other great ways to get traffic and effective use of AdWords and other PPC systems in a future post.

In the last post, I talked about using the Build a Niche Store script as a way to quickly create a site that can begin generating income quickly.  Although the script is extremely simple to use and provides a great way to generate affiliate income, there are a few things that should be done to get traffic to the site in the beginning.

It’s true that the store script will create SEO-friendly URL’s that will help you to get traffic from search engines using long-tail keywords.  This is because the affiliate listings included in your store will typically include products closely related to your site topic.  These items will have titles and descriptions that provide content for the search engines to index.  When I first checked my site logs, I was surprised to see all of the keywords that were bringing visitors to my sites.

But, you must first make your site visible to search engines or you won’t have any traffic at all… 

To begin, I used the included WYSIWYG tools to add a few content pages.  I did some research on my site topics to create several articles that would be relevant to my visitors.  If you prefer not to write the content yourself, you may also use PLR content or articles from an article directory.  You could also hire someone to write the articles for you through a site like Elance.com.  Just be sure that the keyword you intend to target is mentioned in the article a few times in a number of different ways.

Next, I used the script’s page listing tool to add relevant product listings to each of the pages.  You can do this by selecting the specific product category number from eBay’s category list, or you can enter your own custom search term.  (Just be sure to check eBay to make sure the search term you use will actually return a list of products.)  Adding these listings will add relevant content to your page that may include some keywords you may not have even considered.

Next, I used IBP to submit my sites to all of the major search engines.  Because it often take weeks for your site to be indexed, you want to be sure to do this as soon as possible.  I know that you’ll often read that you shouldn’t do this because search engines will rank you higher if they find you through links into your site like from blogs or forums.  I’ve tried it both ways, and I find that submitting the sites up front with a good tool like IBP works best.  At least I haven’t had any problems getting my sites indexed - and quickly.

Finally, I write articles related to my sites’ topics.  I’ll make a few different versions of an article and submit them to sites like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, and ArticleCity.com.  You can usually submit 3-4 unique articles on your topic to the top article directories to begin getting a few good links into your site.  You don’t really need to submit to hundreds of directories, especially now that search engines are smart enough to ignore duplicates.  Be sure to include a link to your site in your author bio because that will drive traffic back to your site.

You can then follow up by making relevant posts to blogs and forums, wihch include a link back to your site.  You’ll also want to alter the anchor text on the links when possible.  For example, if your site is about model airplanes, you might want to change between the anchor terms model plane, model airplane, or model aircraft.

NOTE: If you’re not familiar with the term “anchor text,” it’s the word shown in the browser that is linked back to your website.  The HTML looks like this: 

<a href=”http:\\www.profitwithyour.com\”>Make Money Online</a>

You replace the website address with your own, and the words between the >< brackets is the anchor text.  In this case, the anchor text is “Make Money Online.”

There are dozens of ways to get traffic to your site.  Using the technique I’ve outlined here will get you going quickly without a lot of effort.  You can always write more articles and continue to post in blogs and forums to increase the number of links.  Add to this numerous ways to get traffic from sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Squidoo, MySpace, and YouTube, and you see just how quickly you can start building a steady flow of traffic to your new online store.