“Land was wealth 300 years ago. So the person who owned the land owned the wealth. Then it was factories and production... the industrialist owned the wealth. Today, it is information and the person who has the most timely information owns the wealth.”
—Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

Once you have a website of your own, it’s not merely a matter of walking away and expecting it to be found by people automatically and start generating income for you. Actually, competition for website visitors (traffic) is fierce, especially when it comes to certain keywords that people search for on the search engines a lot. When it comes to websites, there are a few different kinds of TRAFFIC SOURCES you need to think about and be aware of:

1. Offline referral traffic

 When you include your website address on a printed flyer, business card or some other kind of living world (offline) advertisement, you are hoping to generate offline referral traffic. Some websites are made specifically for this kind of traffic, as a place to send potential customers who want to know more about your goods and services.

A veterinarian, for example, isn’t necessarily interested in generating huge volumes of traffic, but they do include their website address on all their stationery, and ensure it can be found in search engines (see no. 3) so that their customers and people in their local area can get information about them when they need it.

2. Online referral traffic

HUMAN

Other webmasters (the human creators of websites) linking to yours. When another website provides a link to your site, it is doing two things. Firstly, it is facilitating “click-throughs” meaning they expect some of their visitors to be interested in your website and “click through” to it by clicking that link. This is generally done as a value-adding service to their own visitors with the principle of not reinventing the wheel, but it can also be done as a favour to the other webmaster. Secondly, it may lend credibility to your website from a search engine’s perspective.

AUTOMATIC

There are thousands of websites that function as directories, helping visitors (and search engines) to organise and find information of relevance. Many of these sites allow webmasters to create an account and post information about and links to their own websites. The bulk of this article will discuss the different kinds of automatic online referral sites and how to use them.

Online referral traffic, whether human-generated or automatic has two purposes—firstly it sends traffic to your site via click-throughs and secondly it influences search engines. Ideally this influence is to improve your “Page Rank”, how highly on the Search Engine Results Pages—SERPS—your web page will feature for certain keywords and phrases.

Some directories I have listed GreensladeCreations.com on are: UseNature

3. Search engine traffic

As most of you will already know, search engines are the librarians of the World Wide Web, enabling visitors to type in words and phrases in order to find exactly what they are looking for. Search engines are programmed by human beings to find and store massive databases of website contents, facilitating the most accurate and relevant results possible for searchers.

The process by which a search engine finds content is complicated, but usually involves programs called “spider-bots” which “crawl” the Internet looking for connections between websites and information in order to prioritise the best ones over others. In other words, spider-bots are continually out on the web, navigating through text and images, updating databases for the search engines. The more high quality roads that lead to a particular site based on certain words and features, the higher that site will be prioritised.

The reason for the term “spider-bot” is that the programs literally crawl through cyberspace creating databases that can be visualised like spider webs with planes in all directions (not merely flat). Imagine it like this: when there are enough interconnecting silk lines, a cluster is formed with more opacity and weight than other parts of the web. It is no longer as relevant for search engines to know exactly where the websites are on the “silk lines”, but rather their weight in comparison to the other clusters competing for the same words and features. A “silk line” (link) coming from an important, aged and reliable website with lots of links to itself is a lot thicker and stronger than one from a patchy, new and/or unreliable website.

To understand specifically what techniques can be used to help the spider-bots recognise how valuable your website is, you need to learn a little bit about search engine optimisation (SEO). Because the search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are continually changing their methods of crawling and prioritising sites, the field of SEO is also fluid. Part of the reason for this is the volume of spammers, link farms and other illegitimate entities on the Internet that are clamouring for traffic. Your aim should be to provide genuine value to your website visitors and not to try to deceive the search engines, which are regularly updated with the latest tricks so as to blacklist those websites employing such devious tactics.

Volume and quality of advertising

Like your website, traffic sources have to be nurtured and updated regularly in order to perform well for you. You can’t just set them up and leave them forever, expecting them to work for you in the background. Think of them like employees—they are high maintenance—they need to be paid regularly, developed, trained, tested, guided, nurtured and sometimes disciplined or even fired. Like employees, the more effort you put into a traffic source, the more it will produce for you.

It is hopefully clear to you how to get offline referral traffic and if you learn about search engine optimisation you’ll have somewhere to start when it comes to generating search engine traffic. It goes without saying that the only way to get HUMAN online referral traffic is to have direct one-on-one communication with other webmasters or social networkers.

The rest of this article is about AUTOMATIC online referral traffic, a field that you will realise is enormous and constantly changing. Please bear in mind that these instructions are limited by my own research and sources and it is by no means the ultimate or most comprehensive reference to getting online referral traffic. What I hope to achieve here is teaching you some of the terms that are used in this field so you are better able to understand what it’s all about and go out and find these sites for yourself.

Before we go any further, know this—you will need to work at your automatic online referral traffic every day if you are truly committed to making it bring in tens of thousands of visitors every month. We will call this your “online marketing campaign”. You will also need to have the right content and contact-capturing methods in place on your website if you are hoping to get anything out of your traffic. Both are of vital importance to online marketing success so make sure you have all your ducks in a row before you even think about bringing in the spiders! (Yes ducks do like to eat spiders).

If you aren’t planning to commit an hour or more per day to this, then some would argue you might as well not even try. I tend to think it’s OK to do less when you’re starting out, and see if your web traffic increases even slightly. This will encourage you to commit more time to it. As you go into this field, remember to keep updating your website with valuable information that relates to the wording you are using on the automatic online referral sites. All of this data should be related to one fundamental theme that governs everything on your website. If you want a website with embroidery tips as well as manuals for farm tractors, build two websites with two separate domains and plan to work at two separate online marketing campaigns!

Get to know what the following terms mean and then you can start going out and signing up to these sites and promoting your webpage on a daily basis.

Article directories

What are they?

Does the term “article marketing” mean anything to you? If you can read and write and you have some life knowledge related to your website that you want to share, you can write articles and submit them to article directories online. Article marketing can bring automatic online referral traffic if you include links to your website. This creates direct traffic from your article to your site as well as influencing the SEO of your website (enhancing your credibility to the spider-bots).

Note: there is no point submitting your article to multiple directories unchanged, as this could incur a duplication penalty from the search engines (meaning they will ignore or penalise exact copies of a text). There are automated programs that help you post the same article to hundreds of article directories by changing the title and 30% of the article’s contents, but as most of these sites are employing online marketing tactics themselves to make money, it is uncertain how believable all their hype is. 

Examples include Article Post Robot, Article Submitter Pro and Article Marketer Distribution Service, all of which cost anything from $120. It’s the marketers marketing to the marketers, a tail-chasing phenomenon in online marketing and MLM that both fascinates and horrifies me. You can always tell if someone is pushing their own barrow when recommending a website as it will have /123456 in the link after the domain where ‘123456’ is their affiliate ID. The more referrals they get, the greater their reward. Generally, my advice is to save your money. Any time you see a web page longer than the Great Wall of China and filled with boxes of text, amazingly discounted software, marketing training memberships or eBooks, think very carefully before cashing in. This is how the internet marketer is making their money, by marketing internet marketing to you! Do you see how self-destructive this industry is?

You might be wondering if you can compete with such ruthless and aggressive online marketing tactics with the ten or twenty genuinely unique articles you can write in a week. Try to have faith in the search engines—they’re not stupid and they no doubt know about the article submitters I’ve mentioned above. A search engine is interested in delivering high quality, genuinely relevant information to its users. That is its primary function. Is it really helping searchers to flood the internet with the same information repackaged hundreds of times? I think not. It will only be a matter of time before each of these tactics is thwarted in one way or another.

The information that really does help people and provides a unique spin or brings new/up-to-date data to the Internet will lead for those keywords in the SERPs as it should. Some internet marketers do provide this kind of information, so it stands to reason that they want to get paid for it, but the majority seem to be scheming, self-serving scammers. The Internet Marketing industry is driving a culture of over-communication and there’s a fine line between genuinely helpful business trainers and greedy, faceless schemers.

What do I need to do?

Write at least ten or twenty articles per week and post them up on a number of different article directories. Ensure your articles link back to your website with appropriate, related surrounding text. Post summaries of them on relevant forums where you think they might be helpful with links to read the full article. This builds credibility for yourself as an authority and helps your article and/or website get some direct traffic from the forum. Write similar articles for your blog and provide links to and from each related article. Later, you could consider compiling related articles into an ebook or even a published book.

Examples:

• ePubster http://www.epubster.com 
• Article Snatch http://www.articlesnatch.com
• Article Gallery http://www.articlegallery.net
• Expertscolumn http://expertscolumn.com/ 
• Ezine Articles http://ezinearticles.com

Question and Answer websites may also serve a similar purpose to article directories. Try:

• Yahoo! Answers http://answers.yahoo.com
• AllExperts http://www.allexperts.com
• Able2Know http://able2know.org/

Classified ads

What are they?

They are ads on websites where people can find just about any product or service for giveaway or sale. Like newspaper classifieds, they are generally short and to the point, providing a snippet of information and contact details. Some are free, some are cheap and others are costly.

What do I need to do?

Open up the classified ad websites daily and post to them. It should take no more than an hour and could potentially give you hundreds of visitors a day.

Create your ads in a word processing program so you can re-use them day after day. Use a powerful headline that instantly tells the reader what’s in it for them. Use nice looking photos if images are allowed and text that makes sense, keeps it simple and offers to solve some kind of problem for the reader. The use of headings, bullet points and image captions is even more important in the classified ad format than it is for printed magazines and newspapers because people usually don’t want to sit around for a long time reading great screeds of text on their computer screen. Finish with a call to action, instructing the reader to act now, eg. ‘Buy here’ or ‘Click here to find out more’ or ‘Sign up to the free newsletter now’ etc.

Examples:

• Craig’s List www.craigslist.org
• US Free Ads www.usfreeads.com   
• MySpace Classifieds http://classifieds.myspace.com
• Oodle www.oodle.com
• AdPost www.adpost.com

Traffic exchanges

What are they?

A traffic exchange website receives website submissions from webmasters that join traffic exchange networks. The person who submitted the website then has to browse other member sites on the exchange program to earn credits, which enable their sites to be viewed by other members through the surf system. This increases the number of visitors to all the sites involved. (From Wikipedia)

What do I need to do?

I tend to think this is a waste of time, but it may result in some visits which you wouldn’t ordinarily get, mostly from other webmasters. Contact me (details below) if you think I’m wrong—I still have a lot to learn.

Examples:

• Trafficswarm www.trafficswarm.com
• ListJoe www.listjoe.com

Forums and email groups

What are they?

Forums are public (or private) conversations using text, html and images that get saved in a format similar to that of email programs like Gmail that permanently display the messages and their replies in consecutive order. Many different people can “chime in” with their opinions and information to help others solve problems, interact socially and learn. There are tens of thousands of forums (also called bulletin boards) online, some controlled by large corporations or organisations, others set up by individuals for their own offline social groups. Email groups are similar, except the conversations take place in people’s email inboxes and are often for members only.

What do I need to do?

You can use forums and email groups to get subscribers or sales for your own website by always following a daily schedule. To get a noticeable benefit, you will need to spend an hour each day posting useful, genuine comments and information to forums and email groups in your niche market. This kind of interaction may be rewarding for you socially as well—something that you will enjoy.

Search Google for five–ten of the top forums in your niche. The ones with the most traffic will be up the top of the list (rank high) if you type in your keywords and the word “forum” or “bulletin board”.

Ensure your posts are useful, informative and positive. Have a signature at the end of each post with a link to your website and a powerful call to action and reason to click like ‘Click here to get your free report’.

For email groups, your approach may need to be more subtle. Include your web address at the end of your comments, but leave out the call the action. ;)

Examples:

• Forum service: www.yuku.com
• Email group services: Yahoo! Groups http://groups.yahoo.com; Google groups http://groups.google.com; MeetUp www.meetup.com

Social bookmarking sites (tagging)

What are they?

Websites where web surfers from all over the world log their favourite websites and any pages of interest along with words that briefly describe them. “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".” (From Wikipedia)

What do I need to do?

Ensure your website has valuable, regularly updated content with good Search Engine Optimisation.

Post links to your web pages (use a free syndication service like OnlyWire to speed up the process) with highly relevant tags that relate to your keywords.

Examples:

• Delicious www.delicious.com (pioneered tagging/social bookmarking)
• Linkatopia www.linkatopia.com
• Furl www.furl.com
• Simpy www.simpy.com
• Citeulike www.citeulike.com
• Connotea www.connotea.com
• Stumbleupon www.stumbleupon.com
• Facebook www.facebook.com (social networking with tagging built in)
• Twitter www.twitter.com (social networking with tagging built in)
• Digg www.digg.com (news website tagging)
• Reddit www.reddit.com (news website tagging)
• Newsvine www.newsvine.com (news website tagging)

Social networking sites

What are they?

Online communities that interact with text, images and video using personal profile pages, feeds (automated lists of the activities of peers), email and instant messaging (chat).

What do I need to do?

Build a profile on every social network service you can, upload images, information, links and continually update them. Add your friends and colleagues, put links to your social networking profiles on your email and forum signatures, then go out and search for other people with similar interests to add to your friends list. Then create an interesting blog (or several) that you post short articles to, including your call to action and a link to your website on every post. Send email newsletters to your list (if you’re capturing contact details on your website or if you already have a database of customers) letting them know about each new post and anything else of relevance to them.

Examples:

• Facebook www.facebook.com
• Twitter www.twitter.com
• MySpace www.myspace.com (music focused)
• LinkedIn www.linkedin.com  (career focused)
• Bebo www.bebo.com
• YouTube www.youtube.com (video focused)
• Flickr www.flickr.com (photo focused)