How to Get Free Website Traffic Using Link Exchanges

Posted on November 12th, 2008

Exchange Links with Related Sites to Get More Visitors

Look for industry-related sites and request that they either link to you or exchange links with you. The one-way links are best because each link is a virtual “vote” for your site and used by the search engines to help rank your site in the search results for your topic.

Reciprocal links also get traffic to your sites because you are exchanging “votes” for each other. You will also be sending traffic between your sites if the sites compliment each other. If your product or service can be used as an add-on to the services of the other site, or vice versa, then you will have a good match and both of you can benefit from the link exchange.

Linking to or between unrelated sites does not provide your visitors with useful information. If you link to Affiliate sites, make sure those links are not on your main page and they are kept at a minimum. Having a whole page of Affiliate links, especially products or services that are not related to your site, will drive your visitors away. They will get the idea that you are only after making sales, not providing them with useful information to gain their trust.

When looking for sites to exchange links with, look for criteria such as the number of links on their site; Stay away from “link farms” – sites that have hundreds of unrelated links on one page; The Google Page Rank of that site – available with the Google Toolbar and online at WebsiteManagers.net in the marketing section.

Link managers come in various packages with some of the more complex scripts costing usually $50 to $100. Those are the ones that allow you to create categories, ban users, along with many other features. One of the full featured programs is AutoLinksPro Link Exchange Software.

PHP Junkyard has a free link manager named PHP Link Manager, also known as LinkMan that I often use. The setup is fairly easy, but requires editing some files with a plain text editor.

Once the files are in place, you will use the Admin section to maintain the links that others put on your links list. This software will check the linking site to make sure it contains a link back to your website. If the link is not there, the reciprocal link is removed from your list.

A Word of Caution: Not keeping your list cleaned can get you a negative Google Page Rank. Yes, negative. I made the mistake of allowing some links stay on the list that were unrelated to mine, added a “nofollow” tag to the links so the search engines would not follow them, and the links page achieved a Page Rank of -1.

Yes, that is a minus one. Getting busy in life is good, especially if it means that your business is growing. By having various processes set up properly, you can let them run with little maintenance. Make a mistake along the way though and you will spend more time trying to fix it, like I have done with my reciprocal links list.

If you want to allow non-related links on your site, then put them into a separate folder or category. Example: I copied LinkMan into a separate folder, changed the settings to reflect the new location and named it “Games”. That is because I received so many requests for gaming links that it was becoming a problem to keep them cleaned out. This way they have a list of their own.

If your website only focuses on one topic, then you will only allow links from that industry and remove the rest. That will keep your list focused and clean.

Software to Help You Generate Links

There is a program called HyperVRE that helps you create web pages search engines love. The VRE stands for Virtual Real Estate, which is basically what websites are.

Some of the benefits include:

· Generate THOUSANDS of fresh, unique content-rich web pages from highly-targeted keyword lists.

· Add extremely targeted auto-refreshing content to your website by using rotating keyword definitions and put your niche keywords on steroids. Fill each of your web pages with content the search engines will love.

· Keep your web pages fresh with unique content by placing several rotating RSS feeds to ensure that all pages are unique and highly related to the topic.

Learn more about HyperVRE and how it can help you get more incoming links to your site.

This article is a sample from my book, How to Get Free or Low-Cost Website Traffic.

____________

Jim Hutchinson
Author of How to Get Free or Low-Cost Website Traffic

Tags: free website traffic, hypervre, link exchanges, link managers
Filed under Marketing, Software | 1 Comment »

Low Cost Methods to Generate Traffic

Posted on April 7th, 2008

When you first start out in Internet Marketing, one of the biggest questions you probably have is how to generate traffic to your website.

Some things you can start with are:

Classified ads - visit Affiliate Referral Sources for a list of popular sites.
Blogging - get your own blog and write articles to generate traffic to your site. If you do not have your own blog yet, visit the Website Managers Blog hosting page.
Article syndication - write unique articles and post them on places like EzineArticles.com, ArticleAlley and ArticlesFactory.com. While using programs like Instant Article Wizard can help you generate articles for your blog, the articles you write for the article directories must be unique and will be rejected if any of the content appears to be duplicated.
Comment on other blogs linking back to your site
Participate in discussion forums. You will have an option to put an small add and link in your signature that shows up whenever you post a response or ask a question.
Record a video and post it to YouTube using popular keywords for the tags. It can be any type of video. Funny and instructional videos are usually most popular. When you create the video, use a program like Camtasia Studio to display your website URL on the movie.
Join Yahoo! Answers, add links in your profile and answer questions. When you do, there is a box where you can link to your resource for the answer. This will usually be back to your site. Be careful here though, because entering an link unrelated to the question can get you in trouble.

As you can see, marketing online is not an easy task. It takes patience and focus to get the job done. Once you get it going on a schedule, the traffic will continue to grow.

Just make sure you are leading people back to a lead capture page to get their contact information.

Learn More…

Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
A Division of Website Managers, LLC
Now in Our 10th Year of Website hosting
__________
Copyright © 2008 Website Managers, LLC. You may reprint this article providing that this copyright notice and resource links all remain intact.

Tags: free website traffic, internet marketing, website traffic
Filed under Marketing | No Comments »

Getting Affiliate Sites Listed in Search Engines

Posted on February 5th, 2008

This is probably one of the most important tips I can give you in regards to driving traffic to your websites.

You may have heard about replicated Affiliate websites not being allowed in the search engines. That is true with an exception: Only the most popular website, i.e. the one with the most incoming links, will be listed. You have the ability to get your Affiliate websites listed in Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others.

You can start by asking your Affiliate manager to allow creating a personalized introductory paragraph on your Affiliate website. That will make the first paragraph on each page unique. That is generally enough to get that page treated as being different from any other.

From there, you can go through the Free Website Traffic document that can be downloaded here and found on the newsletter subscription confirmation page. That document is just a start though. There are many other things you can do to get listed higher in the search engines and get more traffic, with or without the search engines.

The primary methods I use to get onto the first page of search engine results are:

Get my own domain name with the keywords in the name and build the site with unique content.
Advertise that domain name instead of my Affiliate websites. A blog is an asset to have on the site, which can be used for the site itself.
Participate in social networking (MySpace, FriendsWin), discussion forums and Yahoo! Answers.
Place classified ads on high traffic sites such as Craigslist, USfreeads, etc.
Publish articles outside the blog, such as in ezinearticles.com, articlecity.com, MySpace, FriendsWin, etc.

All of that can be broken down into one word: Participate

When you actively participate in various venues, you not only get traffic from those venues, but the search engines pick up your on your activity, follow the links you provide in them and drive traffic to your site. It makes you visible to the world and that is what brings people to you.

Along with the Free Website Traffic page, which has a PDF file for you to download and print, visit www.affref.com for more marketing ideas. There is a newsletter subscription option there that will allow you to get weekly tips in email.

Thanks for being with us!

Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
A Division of Website Managers, LLC
Now in Our 10th Year of Website hosting!
__________
Copyright © 2008 Website Managers, LLC. You may reprint this
article providing that this copyright notice and resource links
all remain intact.