Of course the first thing you will have to do is optimize your site for the major search engines. It is not hard, but it is very time consuming, and very essential that you follow all the recommended steps! But I’ve covered this topic in an earlier article on SEO Optimization, which you can also find on this site.

This time, I’d like to concentrate on some of the more creative and less common ways in which we can make our site more visible, in order to drive traffic to the site, and give ourselves a far better chance of increasing sales volume.

One that I have found very useful is through some of the main forums, such as those at Yahoo, MSN or Delphi. These sites usually frown upon direct advertising, so we have to be more subtle. For example, in my signature, automatically appended to each post I write, I use a simple text link to the article blog I run at my site. It is usually where I try out my articles first, before submitting them to Ezines like this one.

If you’re like me and are a regular poster on one of the more popular forums, then you should get quite a considerable increase in traffic. Since I added the text link to my signature on my main Delphi forum, my traffic has increased by almost 15%. If I recall correctly, Delphi has around 100,000 members, so that is a heck of a lot of potential traffic! As my site is pretty much aimed at an international audience, I naturally chose a Delphi forum with an international membership. That way you do not exclude any potential visitor, but certainly do include far more than if you participated in a more domestic forum.

Another is the use of signatures, on your emails. Whether you use a free email provider, such as Yahoo!, Hotmail or Gmail, or a POP3 account connected to your web/email host, setting up your signature should be a breeze. Mine looks something like this (the website is fictitious):

Michael Davies

Tel: (603) 7725 NNNN

Mobile: (6012) 337NNNN

Skype: abcdefghkl

www.mywebsite.com

For your FREE COPY of an e-book on Search Engine Optimization (worth USD89), by A N Other, one of the Net's leading Internet Marketing exponents, please visit my website at www.mywebsite.com/SEO-book

This too can be very effective in helping to drive traffic to your site. Obviously if your email contacts are few, the impact also will be less.

You’ll notice that I also have a Skype account (not the address shown, of course), and I use that too, for simple promotions of my site. I have personalised my account with a simple statement: "Please visit my website at http://www.mywebsite.com " appended immediately after my account name. This is shown in the Skype directory and is therefore visible to a potential eleven million visitors!

If you are not yet a member of one or more of the social networking sites, like My Space or Facebook, I strongly suggest you join. This is a very easy, very effective way to promote your site. Another is the business networking website, Linked-In, where you can reach many decision-makers, aswell as increase traffic to your site.

Taking out simple text ads on appropriate, high traffic sites, is an effective, and relatively cheap way of traffic generation. I recently placed a simple text ad on the website of one of the top PR (page rank) sites for my business; it cost me only $19 for seven days, and the increase in traffic was pretty significant. Effectively even cheaper, at just $25 for insertion in two monthly email newsletters to 25,000 subscribers, also within my business area, was the ad I just placed through a friendly site.

So, in a few paragraphs I hope I’ve shown you a number of (perhaps new) ways in which you can increase traffic to your site. One I’ve not yet mentioned, is of course, this one, via online ezines. Article Marketing is now regarded as one of the most important traffic generation mediums we have, but you do need to find the best of the hundreds of article directories you can find on the web. A good way to find out which might be the best is to enter firstly "Article Directories" in a Google search, and then "Ezines" and see which are on the first page for both of these. The two searches will catch all you need, and certainly the major directories that I use, including this one. You can of course find some excellent Article Submission software, both free and paid, but be aware that some directories do not accept submissions via this software.

Another not yet mentioned, but particularly powerful for reaching the search engines, is a blog. I prefer Wordpress rather than Blogger, as the former not only links more easily to your own site, it also has a much wider number of features. That said, if you use Blogger, as far as search engines are concerned, it is just as good.

I hope this is a help to those just starting out with their own website, or indeed to the more experienced who may be looking for ways to generate more traffic.