Without traffic, your website is just talking to itself. Which isn’t much use except maybe to stroke your ego.

Unless you pay for traffic with things like Google AdWords and Facebook ads, it takes time for people to find your website. Paid traffic is good for an immediate “hit” but stops as soon as you stop advertising and can cost a lot of money to test and tweak.

For most smaller niches and small businesses, the cost of advertising on Google can be prohibitive. Facebook is usually cheaper but still has a high learning curve.

Organic traffic – which is what I’ll be concentrating on here – arrives slowly but, depending on the mood of Google’s computers, can build up over time.

Make sure your web site is OK first

You need to make sure that your website is reasonably OK before you start promoting it.

That means getting your on-site SEO done.

At a minimum, make sure your site doesn’t look spammy (some people will check it before linking to it) and that it has reasonable page titles and meta descriptions so that Google can figure out what you’re talking about.

Your pages should also look nice for human visitors – they don’t have to be full of flashy images but they should be clean and informative.

If you’re not sure, ask a close friend or two to give you an honest opinion of your website. And then be prepared to act on the suggestions they make.

Go for the low hanging fruit first

Traffic to your website arrives in lots of different ways.

Some of the links you’ll be adding will be clicked on by people as well as crawled by robots.

And some links are easier to get than others.

Google knows that, so it tends to downplay the importance of very easy links. Which is why the once-popular art of signing up for as many forums as possible with the sole idea of getting a backlink isn’t anywhere near as effective as it was a few years ago.

But there are still some places that count and have the added bonus that they could be seen and clicked on by real people:

• Your LinkedIn profile – this has the added benefit that if people are searching for you by name, these profiles often show up high in the search results as well as on LinkedIn itself. Consider joining relevant groups and contributing to them.
• Facebook. Don’t spam your friends with links to your website every time you post something! But you can certainly add links in occasionally. You can also join relevant groups and pages.
• Twitter. There’s always a link available in your profile. Plus you can get links (albeit cloaked via a shortener) when posting Tweets about your latest posts. You can also help your followers by tweeting relevant news (set a Google alert to give you fresh ideas) and retweeting other people’s posts.
• Google+ profile. Popularity of this varies by country (Google+ seems to be more popular in America than it is here in the UK) but it’s still worth adding a link from it and publishing updates to your profile.
• Videos you’ve uploaded. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. get crawled and indexed regularly. Most of the video sites allow you to have a clickable link from your videos and sometimes elsewhere in your channel as well
• Document shares – sites like Scribd and SlideShare allow you to include links in the documents you upload. I like to use Word documents as these allow me to include a link in the footer of each page.
• Amazon. If you review products you’ve bought, this can be a nice way to get a few extra clicks, Your profile has space to include a link back to your website.
• Amazon again. Create a Kindle book, upload it and include a link back to your website. If the link is early enough in the document, it will show in the “Look Inside” area of your book and people can click on it without buying your book. And, yes, I know you’d prefer them to buy your book but if the link takes them to a squeeze page with a free download in exchange for their email address, that’s a good “second best” compromise.
• Forums. If you regularly contribute to a forum you can usually include a link in your signature. Most forums also allow links in your posts and threads but you need to make sure these aren’t too promotional otherwise the forum moderators are likely to remove them.
• Web 2.0 sites. These are any site where you have a degree of control over the content on the pages you publish. Some sites are stricter about promotion than others (for instance, a site hosted by WordPress rather than on your own domain) but can be useful links. Just follow the guidelines. Start with sites like Buzzfeed, Tumblr, Weebly, maybe Blogspot, maybe EzineArticles (it’s faded a lot but still gets some views and good articles can get reposted elsewhere)
• Guest posting. The difficulty of this varies considerably, Stay away from guest posting networks as Google has identified them as places it doesn’t like very much. But there are opportunities on Fiverr as well as ones that cost more and/or take longer to find and nurture. Incansoft has a (currently free) product that will find possible places for you to send your guest posts.
• Web directories. If you’ve got a relevant site, it’s worth spending a little bit of time (or $5 on Fiverr) to get a few of these links. Don’t spend too much time on this and don’t sweat about being listed in places like Dmoz. As much as anything, they just add variety to your inbound link profile. Some local and national directories can be worthwhile if your business fits their traffic but test with a free entry first.
• Google Places (or whatever they’ve renamed it to this week) and the Bing equivalent. Useful for local businesses as they can often show up high in the search results.
• Skype profile. There’s a space for your website link so that any contacts you have on Skype can find your website easily.

All of those links are easy to acquire.

Individually, they may not bring much traffic to your site.

Collectively, they may not bring much traffic to your site.

But the people they do send will be reasonably well targeted depending on which link source is involved.

As much as anything, this is a numbers game.

The more opportunities people have to find your website, the more likely they are to do so.

Do each of those options just once and there will be at least 14 opportunities. And in reality more than that as almost all the options I’ve listed have the chance for more than one link.

Which in the case of most local businesses is likely to be a dozen more places than most of your competition.

Monitor where you get results and traffic

This is more an art than a science and you shouldn’t spend too much time on monitoring.

The time is far better spent creating new content with new links and therefore new opportunities for people to find you.

But maybe once a month, take a look at your logs – they’re normally in your hosting control panel with programs like AWStats and Webalizer – and check which, if any, are listed as referral sources.

Remember that traffic takes time to build up, so don’t be disheartened if there aren’t many clicks.

But if one or two sources are showing up more than most, focus more on those areas and take a bit of time to figure out whether there are similar sites that you could also get traffic from.

Build an email list if possible

Not every niche or website lends itself to building a niche – that’s especially true of one-off or intermittent purchases – but if you can. it’s well worth building an email list.

If your list isn’t likely to be too big and if it doesn’t breach their terms of service (for instance, affiliate marketing is no-go) then MailChimp is an acceptable, reasonably reliable, free option.

If you’re in a niche that MailChimp doesn’t allow then Aweber is the email marketing service that I recommend.

Encourage people to sign up to your list – some kind of free giveaway product is the usual way to do that – and then send them reasonably regular emails on related subject matter.

Sending emails to your list is like walking a tightrope.

• You’ll bug some of them anyway, just “because”
• Send messages too frequently, you’ll bug some of them
• Send messages too infrequently and people will have forgotten who you are
• Send messages that stray too far from the initial topic and they won’t be read as much
• Send messages that are too selly too often and people will unsubscribe
• Send messages that aren’t selly enough and no-one will click your links

There’s nothing you can do to please all the people all the time. That’s just not possible.

But the more you can do to keep your list alive and growing, the closer you’ll get to having traffic on demand.

Aim to write emails in your own voice rather than trying to be big and corporate (which usually comes across as being indifferent).

Some people advise writing your emails in advance and letting your autoresponder send them out at intervals – you won’t be able to do that with the free version of Mailchimp (although it does allow email broadcasts to be scheduled ahead of time) so you’ll need to pay for a service if that’s the direction you want to go in.

My personal preference is to write most of my emails “on the fly”, so if I sent you an email today, I’d have written it today.

For me, that keeps them fresher and means that the links inside them should work and I’m not contradicting myself as internet marketing changes quite rapidly.

It’s your choice.

If you prefer to write a batch of emails and store them to send out, go with that route.

If you prefer to be a bit more spontaneous, go with the write-now-send-now option.

Or mix the two together – put your best performing emails in your autoresponder sequence and send out broadcasts to top up the series.

Experiment until you find the best way.

But do your best to keep your list involved and eager to receive your messages (or at least not too eager to delete them on receipt).

It’s a nice feeling having traffic available almost on tap.

You can also tie-in services like Aweber to your blog so that subscribers to your email list get notified each time you put up a new post.

Remember that YouTube has the equivalent of lists as well

People can subscribe to your YouTube channel and get notified each time you post a new video.

The emails aren’t quite as personal as the ones you’d write in your own sequence but people are probably less likely to unsubscribe from YouTube’s service than they are from an individual autoresponder list.

Facebook also has systems in place to notify at least some people when you add a post.

Getting traffic to your website is a constant part of your marketing.

Links rot over time as domains don’t get renewed or sites get a facelift.

Some links go out of fashion as Google tries to stop methods that have been too heavily devalued.

There are policy changes on sites – Yahoo! has such a history of doing this that it was forced to announce that it wouldn’t be changing how Tumblr worked after it bought the site to the extent that their CEO personally promised “not to screw it up“. To date, they’ve been true to their word.

But that’s the exception, not the rule.

So don’t rely on any one site or forum to the exclusion of everything else. Otherwise you run the very real risk of all your work disappearing at the flick of an electronic switch.

Make yourself a blueprint to follow.

Do your best to follow it, even if you don’t always quite manage.

If you’d like more help with your internet marketing, check out this page.

And if you’ve got any comments, feel free to add them below.