Tips to Increase Your Traffic (for Free!)
This is something nearly everyone wants to do, whether you have a website, blog, or forum. Increased traffic leads generally to more revenue from your advertisements, increased community engagement, and, if you have something interesting on your site, more people who will return for information in the future. Once you get the traffic flowing, it tends to grow off of itself as long as you continue to provide good content and/or services. But the problem most of us face is how to get that initial traffic going.
A lot of people already know about promotion forums, of which there are thousands. These might help bring a little traffic flow, but generally its going to only be a small amount. Better opportunities exist, and that is where this article will focus. Best of all, the tips that I am going to share can all be done for free!
Most of the tips are more well suited for blogs, which regularly post articles and news. But even a forum or website that occasionally posts articles, or a forum with posts of an interesting analysis of a topic may be able to use these strategies.
1. Use Reddit!
Reddit, especially if you can get your article to start trending on it, is an awesome way to draw traffic to your site Thousands upon thousands of people use the site, and therefore it provides great visibility. It should be noted that Reddit will really work best for articles, not an entire website or forum. Also, you should be careful when self-promoting your content on the site. Reddit does not outright ban it (some sub-Reddits don't permit it, though), but it does state you need to maintain, on average, a 9 to 1 ratio. 9 refers to posts not related to the topic you are self promoting, whereas the 1 refers to yourself promoted content. This is why if you can get your content onto Reddit from other sources and people, it may often be easier.
2. Hackernews - https://news.ycombinator.com/
Hackernews is similar to Reddit, except in that it is more geared towards computers, internet, and other technology. The site can draw huge amounts of traffic to your site, and if the post you put on it starts trending, it will be tweeted across several accounts related to Hackernews plus more which crawl the site for articles to tweet about. It is also likely that if your post trends on here, it will be posted to Reddit, hence letting you slide by the self-promoting regulations that Reddit has.
While Hackernews is a little more forgiving then Reddit, you still can get blacklisted for self promoting too often, particularly if the content is the same as can be found elsewhere. Therefore, be sure to include analysis in your articles, have them be well written, and add on additional, but connected information to article if there is a similar story about it elsewhere on the internet. These tips will not only prevent your Hackernews account from being blacklisted on the site, but also increase the chances of people upvoting it and commenting on it, both which will help draw greater traffic.
3. Twitter
Perhaps the most well known out of the tips I have provided in this topic, Twitter is a major way you can generate traffic and nearly everyone knows that. What most people don't know, though, is how they can do that. The first is probably everyone's favorite -use hashtags! But not too many. One or two per post is a good rule of thumb. If possible, try using hashtags that are currently trending as it increasing the chances of people seeing it as well as responding to it, whether that be in a retweet, a favorite, or just tweeting in comment to it. The other piece of the Twitter puzzle is to tweet your content more than once. Not all within a five or ten minute window, but spread it out over the day. If you tweet about a newly written article in the morning, tweet about it again in the afternoon, and then once more at night. This way you get people who may have missed the tweet earlier in the day to see it. Each time change the content of your tweet slightly as well, experimenting with new hashtags if possible.
Let me known what you think of these tips in the comments below! If you are going to start using them for the first time, report back on how they work out for you!
This article was written by TheSurge. He is a member of the Forum Promotion community.
This article was written by TheSurge. He is a member of the Forum Promotion community.
