Top 5 Ways To Generate Low Cost Website Traffic

When you sit down to write an article about a topic that interests you, it’s not always enough to have a good voice and comfortable words on the page. Sometimes, you also need to know where your audience is online and how to draw them in. This can be done through targeted referrals and more specific keyword-driven content about your topic. When paired well with copywriting or SEO skills, this strategy can help generate significant website traffic without breaking the budget.

Once the article for this post is done, I’ll be publishing it to my own site and a few other distribution channels. I’ll share some of the channels in this post, but you can use your own judgment about their appropriateness and level of effectiveness for your own traffic generation needs.

1. Guest Blogging

Sign up at Media Shower to get access to a ton of sites that accept guest contributions! Their list is comprehensive and includes everything from travel-related sites up through the Huffington Post. It seems like every day new blogs are being added as well, so if you need more options, try searching for some on Google or Bing.

Once you’ve signed up for an account at Media Shower, it’s fairly simple to get started. Just start filling out your contact information, and then click the “Guest Bloggers” tab. Media Shower will supply some basic instruction on how to use the system. It’s pretty straightforward, all you have to do is provide a link, then submit it when you have finished writing the piece and sent it in! The process usually takes a couple of days to complete.

Another option is to use WordPress MU (or its sister blog platform WP Multisites) as a place for guest content. You can also try posting directly with existing blogs as well. Just install the free WordPress plugin and follow the instructions. When I install a plugin, I like to read the descriptions of other users before selecting it. That familiarity helps me determine whether it’s what I need for a given task, or if something else will serve me better.

2. Listing Aggregator Sites

Listing sites are great places to target local traffic because these are companies that want your business in order to grow theirs. Listing site owners want you to write articles about your business and then they will list you in their directories. The result is that you’ll get exposure to local customers who are typically looking for a local business to fulfill a need.

I used to post on one of the most popular listing sites in my market (New York City), but they have stopped allowing new members. I found this to be quite unfortunate because it was a very good site with many avenues for traffic generation. They also offered lots of networking opportunities, and of course the traffic that was generated from the site could be used on a wide variety of different channels. The unfortunate thing is that they’ve allowed their domain name to expire and they are no longer accepting new submissions.

Conclusion: If you’re really trying to target local traffic, putting together a free listing on any of the major directories is worth a try. To approach this option from a slightly different perspective, it might be interesting to talk with your friends or colleagues about the idea of doing a joint venture and getting together all your business contacts and putting them in an ad. The key is that you could split the cost for the ad. It’s always a good idea to make sure you’re not violating any copyright laws in this process, but there are ways to get around this if you really want to do something like this.

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