There are easy ways of bringing traffic to your website, and there are hard ways.
Most people focus on the hard ways.
They spend hours playing around with their keywords and their Search Engine Optimization. They spend vast sums on AdWords and other forms of advertising. And they send out email after email in an attempt to swap links and create exchanges.
That\’s fair enough. It\’s all part of the job of being an online publisher and you have to do it.
But if you aren\’t doing the easy stuff too then you\’re making your life much harder than it needs to be.
Every content page on your website should have a \”Send a Friend\” link so that each user can bring another user. That feature shouldn\’t actually send the content; it should simply send an email with a link and a subject line that says something like: \”I found this at [your website] and thought you\’d love it!\”
Of course, not every viewer will use it, but many will and there are no more valuable users than those that come by referrals from friends.
You should also add links that let people recommend your content at various bookmarking/social networking sites.
There are lots of these now but the main ones are Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon and even Facebook.
Each article should have a link to all of them.
You could put these links at the bottom of the article. Although in general, ads at the end of articles perform less well than ads at the top of the page or embedded in the text, only people who read all the way through to the end of a post are likely to recommend it. And because the link should open in a new window, the recommendations shouldn\’t compete with your AdSense ads.
Publishers have seen their page views rocket after their articles hit Digg\’s front page, so add the links, check out what\’s being recommended… and write something similar.
It\’s much easier than SEO.