Seven Ways to Drive Web Traffic:
Wall Street Journal

Today’s Wall Street Journal ran an article describing effective increase web traffic to your business. Among the methods listed? Paying for sponsored reviews using services like Pay Per Post and Blogvertise. (John Fox of Venture Marketing suggests Pay Per Post as the more professional of the two programs.)

Other methods mentioned by business men and women visiting the WSJ’s forum included:

1. Business blogs: Blogs which are indexed quickly, and use RSS are a good way to improve visibility of your ad campaigns and get them indexed in the relevant time frame.
2. YouTube Videos: The business oriented Wall Street Journal forum also stress the importance of having your YouTube profile point to your web site and also including business logos and contact information in the video itself. Daniel De LaGarza of Bankrate.com also suggest promoting your video using TubeMogul.com which permits you to simultaneously upload videos to multiple services.
3. Blogger networks and social media: Participating in various social media are mentioned, but specifics are light. Do they mean groups like BlogCatalog, myBlogLog, Facebook and Bumpzee? Or bookmarking sites like Stumble, Delicious or Digg? Or do they mean old fashioned email groups (still popular with craft oriented groups like knitters?) Any can be effective, but dj_covels at the WSJ forum points out, these can be very time intensive and costly.
4. SEO: Making a site and blog search engine friendly is repeated frequently. Simple things like remembering to use keywords, making sitemaps and writing blog articles about your products are mentioned. Bill Leaky of Apogee mentions their list of resources about search engine marketing which includes a paper discussing how to avoid bad SEO firms and another discussing how to identify a good one!
5. Local Media Coverage: Small business people can get the local media to cover events. Heck, even some knitting blog groups have managed to get a local paper to cover their knitting group as a human interest story. Of course this is easier to do if you organize a fund raiser, invite a celebrity or do something even slightly newsworthy, but if you do, create a press release and contact the small local newspaper.
6. Pay Per Click advertising: All forms of advertising are recommended, but PPC is mentioned repeatedly. This includes Google Adsense, AdBrite and numerous other services.

Can your business or blog use these traffic generating tips?

After reading the article, I sat down to figure out which tips bloggers could use.

Videos are a natural fit for blogs. I’d explored the idea of video podcasts for my knitting blog and created and uploaded a (rather bad) video to YouTube which you can see at The Knitting Fiend.

PPC advertising:I know I can eventually use some PPC advertising to bring traffic to pillar articles– but I need to organize this blog to maximize stickiness first. I also try to pay some attention to SEO at my blogs. You can obviously do both these things.

Social media? Well, I admit I’m still trying to figure out how to use those effectively. There are so many out there! Spamming Digg or Stumble isn’t going to work. I can’t possibly actively participate in 10 different social media sites write blogs, do my real job and also knit sweaters! If anyone has time saving tips, I’d like to read them!

I’m not quite sure how to use the other tips, but if you have suggestions, fire away!

Tags:blogging Marketing monetize ppc seo traffic web

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