How to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Anyone who is a writer and or is trying to make money online knows that the key to doing so is website traffic. It took me a while to figure out how to get people to visit my various websites, but now that I have I'm finding that there are several ways you can do so.

1. Take advantage of pinging when it comes to your Associated Content Producer Page, and your blogs. Pinging lets all the blog services know that you have updated your pages, and helps gets your pages listed in the search engines. My favorite pinging service is Pingoat.

2. Bookmark your articles, blogs, and websites. This is another way to get listed by the search engines and help others find your articles, blogs and websites. One very cool way to do this that I have found and which will save you loads of time is onlywire.com. This website allows you to use multiple bookmarking services at one time. It is one of the easiest websites to use and I saw my traffic go up exponentially when I used them. When you sign up with them you then have to go and sign up for whichever bookmarking services you want to. Then onlywire saves all your passwords and you place a link under your Links section in your My Favorites section that you can click on whenever you are on a website that you want bookmarked. It is then bookmarked to all the services you signed up.

3. If you have more than one website that is related, post reciprocal links on your related websites. For example, I have an author's website for my romance books, and I have a link on the front page of that website for my Associated Content Producer page. However, I do not do reciprocal linking between my Paid Online Opportunities blog and my author's website. I like to keep these two parts separate, mainly because each one really doesn't relate to the other.

4. Sign up for Free Viral. Free Viral gives you your own website with your text add and a link to the website you want to drive traffic to. Then all you have to do is place a small text link on your website or blog. Whenever someone clicks on it, it takes them to your Free Viral website, where they can sign up as you did. The catch is that you have to view 5 websites and ads, but this takes less than 10 minutes, and there actually are some good websites listed. Most of the websites you'll look at will be websites talking about making money online. I also actually found a couple of interesting blogs on this topic when I signed up, so they are not all those long ad pages where after you read everything and get to the bottom in order to do the offer you have to pay a fee.

Free Viral will not sell your e-mail address, and you don't get a lot of spam from them. I can attest to this because I have only gotten like 5 e-mails from them so far. One was with my password and user ID info, and the others were instructions for how to maximize my use of Free Viral. They do try to get you to put pop unders on your website, but I don't suggest doing this. I hate pop unders and when I see them after having been on a website I am far less likely to visit that website again. My advise is to put the text link on your blog or website and then blog about Free Viral and tell your friends!

5. Sign up for Inbox Dollars. Now, most of you who have read my other articles know how much I HATE get paid to read e-mail programs. However, this one is a bit different. First of all they have a $30 minimum cash out in order to get a check cut which isn't all that bad. Second, they give you $5 just to sign up, so you are already on your way there as soon as you sign up, and they have a program where you can complete one survey per day and make $1 per survey. Also, you can complete both free offers and offers that require you to pay after the trial. I don't do these because they are a pain. Even the free ones end up taking forever while you scroll through more offers, many of them ones you would have to pay for. Just skip these. Finally, they have a great referral program that pays you $5 for every person you refer. This is all in addition to doing the read e-mails thing which you are only going to make about .01-.05 per e-mail but in combination with the rest this is not too bad. A final way you can earn money is by doing searches but you can only do 2 per day and they only get you .02 per search which is not very lucrative. I do occasionally use their search engine because it does give you decent results, but it's not the way to make money at Inbox Dollars. Now, here's the reason it's a great way to get traffic to your websites. Once you reach the $10 point in your earnings, you can ask for 10,000 banner impressions! This is a great way to get what is basically free marketing for your articles, website, and blogs. You could even use a different one each time you reached the $10 mark so that you can maximize this for all your websites.

Signing up is free, and only takes a couple of minutes. I don't spend a lot of time on this one, but in the first day I easily accumulated $6.05. Don't be discouraged if you start a survey in their survey program (make sure you click on Cash Surveys for this one and not Survey Offers) and you don't qualify for a survey. This happens all the time, and it gives you the opportunity to keep trying until you find a survey you do qualify for. It took me about 20 minutes total to find and complete a survey I qualified for. I really like their survey program because it is so no nonsense. Oh, and I suggest getting a different e-mail address for this one, that way the Inbox Dollar's messages don't get mixed up with your personal e-mail.

6. Traffic Exchanges. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of these, but I wanted to cover them here because there is something important to be learned, and that is that if you have Google Adsense ads on your blog or website you cannot participate in traffic exchanges because Google will close your account if you do. So, while traffic exchanges can for some be one way to drive traffic to your website or blog, don't do them unless it is to a website or blog that you are not monetizing with Google Adsense.

I only use 5 of these methods to drive traffic to my websites, and I have found them all to be effective. The sixth one, traffic exchanges is not one I use, but I know it has been effective for some.

I hope you find these methods just as effective as I have!