POPULAR NICHE BLOGS

If you don't know what high-traffic blogs are out there in your niche, take a look at Technorati.com. They list all manners of blogs out there and can give you some idea of their popularity. All you have to do is to locate a few within your market niche and then go out and visit them online. Read a few of their posts and then post a comment. Many blogs will allow you to post a link back to your own website if you are participating and contributing to the conversation. If you are just self-promoting, your link will not be posted, and you may get banned from that audience too as a spammer.

ONLINE DISCUSSION GROUPS

There are groups within Yahoo and also within Google. Even Facebook supports groups that meet to discuss a specific topic of interest to its participants. When you have a number of people all looking for information within your market niche, it makes it the perfect place to go, establish an online presence, and make yourself the expert there. More people will follow you back, particularly if you are allowed to post your backlinks as part of an automatic signature line that gets added to every post you answer within that group.

ARTICLE DIRECTORIES

Article directories attract many different people who may not be on other sites around the Web. They are highly indexed by the search engines too. It's a very easy thing to post a few articles within your niche in these article directories and use the resource box to set up links back to your online activities elsewhere. As long as you are following the terms of service with regards to your links, you can use them to help promote different areas on the Web where you are doing business. You may not be able to put a link directly to a product sales page, as some sites won't allow this, but you can certainly drive traffic back to a page on your website that is more informational and that also has links back to your products. Use keywords in your articles to make these search-engine friendly as well as people-friendly, and you will have better results with article marketing to create more traffic for your links.

Paying For Traffic

Lastly, we want to discuss the possibility of paying for traffic. The previous strategies that were discussed are known as “organic” ways to generate traffic; however, you can choose a more direct way and simply pay to bring in traffic. We don't recommend that you pay for the traffic itself, as this won't be targeted and can literally kill your Google standing. Instead, seek to use advertising platforms to pay others to build traffic streams back to your site by paying for effective backlink creation and advertising exposure without actually paying for hits to your site. This is done by setting up advertising campaigns, affiliate programs, or referral incentives.

ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

We already talked about Social Ads from Facebook that can be used to generate traffic back to your site. Google AdWords campaigns is a pay-per-click format that offers good exposure based on the keywords that you select, and you set your pricing in many cases. Other search engines also have their own advertising platforms that can be set up to create a campaign where you buy traffic for your goods and services online.

AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Affiliate programs include Google AdSense, where publishers get paid to advertise the offerings in Google AdWords campaigns. However, there are other networks that offer affiliate programs for other types of marketing that pay on a commission structure for a sale of a product or for an action performed that generates a sales lead in some cases. Take a look at setting up your own affiliate program to create traffic back to your site on any number of affiliate networks, including Commission Junction (CJ.com) or ClickBank.com. It can be very expensive to join as a merchant, but it's worth it to generate sales as well as traffic back to your site.

REFERRAL INCENTIVES

If you are the only person setting up links back to your site, it's going to take a whole lot longer than if you can persuade others to start doing it for you. One way to do that is through referral incentives. If someone knows that if he/she refers someone to your site, the referral signs up, and that person makes an easy $10, he/she will be more motivated to do that for you. You will want to limit the payouts to customers who not only sign up, but who also fulfill some marketing activity that helps you to cover the cost of the referral incentive too. Some places will give out referral incentives for people who refer a customer who signs up with a plan and stays with it for a set period of time. Some are multi-tiered where you get a commission off of your referrals and their referrals too if people buy something. There are multiple ways to set up effective referral incentives so that you have a whole army of people willing to go out and post backlinks for you. The nice thing is that you don't pay them unless they bring back business to your door.