A website is nothing if it does not receives traffic, no matter how good it is or how valuable services and products it offer. So traffic is lifeline of any online business, not only online but off line business also need traffic, suppose you have a mega store but no visitors. So what’s the profit in it if there are no buyers?

Now back to our topic and that is traffic generation for your website.

The best way to generate targeted traffic to your website is search engine optimization and for that you need lot of relevant links.

Today we will discuss two easy and effective way to attract targeted traffic to your website, if done right.

Forums posting: Forum posting is an easy way to generate backlinks and traffic. My suggestion for all of you is to join at least 5 forums related to your niche and actively participate in discussions. Provide solution of the problems which members are discussing about.

Join 5 forums and use one forum for one hour a day. That means you visit each forum once a week.

If you will actively participate in forums you will be benefited in several ways.

You will get relevant Backlinks to your website, through signature links or links in the posts.

With time members will take you as an authority on the subject and will listen to your words. You can use your reputation for pre selling some offers, but please make sure you never try to hard sell, because people like to choose and not to be forced to buy some thing and never refer any poor quality product because it will diminish your authority

Forums act as a platform for people of single mental orientation who discuss a core subject. In this way you can get ideas for preparing content for your website. Pay attention to details and try to extract about the topics people are talking about and prepare your content for the same. In this way you can develop a lot of content for your website, which in turn will give you more authority over the subject, better rankings and traffic.

Blog commenting: blog comments are another tool for getting backlinks and direct traffic. Find your niche relevant blogs, you can simply do it by Googling “your keywords” inurl:blog . Find a relevant post read it and try to extract the information it provides and then you can comment on the post. Remember never try to spam them, as the comments will never get approved

Think in this way, you have a blog with good traffic and authority and some one posts a comment like “hello nice information” with a link to his website, will you like to approve the comment… NO you won’t, so when you are not ready to approve someone’s creepy comment why would others do the same.

So contribute some valuable and useful content to the post and the chances of getting approved will be the maximum.

Many of you will be concerned that many blogs add nofollow tags to the links in comment. Do no worry, nofollow links are still crawled and counted but their link juice transfer power is less. You can read more about nofollow links here at: Off Page Elements: Alternative ways of link building

So starting using forum posting and blog comments today for your link building and traffic campaigns and if you will do it right, you will see good rankings and surge in traffic in coming weeks.

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This blog is in continuation with the post about Off Page Optimization which can be found here: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach

Article Submission: Article submissions are done basically for two purposes (there might be some more but I submit articles for these two) one for traffic and second one is for one way backlinks. Ideally I like to submit 10 articles for each keyword I am targeting on my website. Many article directories like ezinearticles and articlesbase allow content syndication, which allows website owners to publish content on their websites. In this way you get more backlinks to your websites. If the article is interesting and your resource box is spicy it will get good click through rate sending a lot of visitors to your website.

While submitting article keep some points in mind. Write article with around 300 to 350 words as the article with more than 350 words loose theme and users lose their interest in them. Give a little time to your author’s bio box, use specific call to action words.

For reading more about submitting articles and scaling your article submission campaigns refer to the following posts about article submission.

Maximizing Benefits of Article Submissions

Scaling Article Submission Campaigns

Blogs Posting: For the purpose of link building free blog platforms (the blogs on these website is called hosted blog) are great resource. There are millions of free blog platforms available and you can choose one or several of them. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are most commonly used blog platforms. Here is the list of most common blog websites.

Aeonity.com

Blog.com

blogates.com

blogetery.com

blogger.com

blogr.com

blogsome.com

blogster.com

bravenet.com/webtools/journal/

clearblogs.com

ehow.com

googlepages.com

hubpages.com

iseekblog.com

myspace.com

pbwiki.com

quazen.com

rticlz.com

sampa.com

squarespace.com

squidoo.com

stikipad.com

thoughts.com

tumblr.com

wikispaces.com

wordpress.com

When using free blog websites chose wisely because some hosted blog platforms, wordpress.com for an example does not like blog with commercial intent and they delete such blogs. So in your blog posting provide information to the users and do not make your blog posting as sales pitch. My strategy is to make one blog for each keywords and I post at least 5 blog post on each blog of 250 words

IP Diversity: Try to use different blog platforms. Suppose you want to target 40 keywords, target each keyword using one blog having 5, 250 words articles. Do not make more than two on one website. For an example make 2 blogs on blogger, 2 blogs on wordpress, 2 on typepad, 2 on xanga and so on. In this way you will get backlinks with diverse IPs which would be more beneficial than having links from 10 blogs on a same account from blogger.com.

During your link exchange campaigns also do not exchange more than two links from website on same C Class IP.

Using Squidoo and Hub Pages : Squidoo and Hubpages get a lot of love from Google and I have experienced that they are easily ranked. So use these two in your link and traffic building campaigns. Take two or more long tail keywords for your niche and make lenses on Squidoo and hubs on Hubpages. Use at least 600 words articles for making lenses and hubs.

For reading more about choosing long tail keywords, read my previous posts on keyword research here at :

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

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