How to Increase Your Website’s Hits

Started your own website and realised it’s not the cheap, easy way to make money you thought? Well you can either start crying and give up or you can start doing some actual work.

It’s not easy to get the ball rolling (and get consistent hits to your website). If you are ready to do a bit of work for your future, read on. Otherwise, get back to the softcore porn you found on MySpace.

There are many many ways to promote your website. Some are more effective than others. Some are more costly that others. The most effective are free, but time consuming. You could pay someone to do it for you, but this is also expensive.

1. Pay for Advertising
Advertising is only effective if you have something to sell, that way you can justify the costs and see a return. If you are completely advertising based yourself, you are wasting your money.

2. Write Articles and post them on article directories
You can usually do this for free. Write about something interesting and helpful to someone. Most article directories will allow you to have a profile page and an "About the Author" bit down the bottom of your article.
Be weary of "We distribute your article to 1,000’s of directories for $2" jobs. Some are good, some are a waste of time. Depending on your category, you may only get posted on less that 100, and sometimes, they are no pagerank, 4 million alexa rank kind of deals.

The most important thing to help get ongoing traffic is build some backlinks, get a decent rank on search engines and keep your website working, up to date and add new content!

3. Make interesting comments on blog and other websites
Some allow you to put a link to your website. (Many will disapprove your comment if you put a link in the body of the comment).

4. Write interesting content so people will link to it
Pretty self-explanatory… If you write/make good content and post it on your website, people will link to it. Easy!

5. Offer useful tools
An SEO tool for example, like a PageRank checker or broken link checker.

6. Link Exchange
These are a pain in the arse to get, but very useful. E-mail all the websites you can find that are in your field, but not competing. Make sure you have something to offer them. If you have a 0 PageRank and they have a 5, they are not going to be interested (unless you are really lucky).

7. Forums
BE CAREFUL here. Many forums are on to this and do not allow you to post links to your website AT ALL – you will get banned. Read their “Read Before Posting” sticky thread. Probably the best thing to do, is be an active member. Be part of the community and have links to your website in your signature. Also note that a lot of forums have “nofollow” on all external links, so no backlinks will be obtained from this.

8. Social bookmarking
These are useless for backlinks, as almost all social bookmark websites have nofollow on external links, but if you post something good, that gets dugg (of positive votes), you may get some hits.

All of these can be very time-consuming, but are necessary steps to making your website work. It can be hard to find time in this busy world, but people that are willing to make the effort to do that bit extra that gain sucess and financial freedom!
Think about it...

-Cash