Your website ‘door’ is wide open and nobody’s walking in. Here are 5 ways to generate more traffic.

As I entered Grand Central Station a few years ago, I was literally overwhelmed. I wont mention my crowd issues at this point. But suffice it to say that when we walked into the lobby and my mind registered all of those people, everywhere, in one place I had to take a few seconds to regroup. Some sat and some stood. Others were moving through the Station with a purpose and on a mission. No time was wasted.

Wouldn’t it be ‘grand’ if your website generated steady traffic like this? Targeted traffic from every direction with a distinct mission and purpose. Traffic that had in mind the purpose of finding you so they could get help accomplishing a task or reaching their goal.

This is definitely possible. Best of all it can be done for F*R*E*E.

The traffic sources are only limited by where and how you choose to market yourself and/or your products.

Social sites can be effectively utilized to market yourself, your business, or your product. Sites like:

1. Facebook - This is the #2 trafficked site just behind Google. People by the thousands are joining every single day. You do want to remember not to use your personal page to conduct business. But you can create a fan page. Joining groups and talking to like-minded individuals or at least those who have similar interests is a key to this strategy.

2. LinkedIn - This is a professional site. Not one for family pictures and witty statuses. People are about business and professional matters on LinkedIn. You want to respect that and use it to your advantage. The median income of LinkedIn users is ~$109,000 and about 40% of the members are business owners.

3. Youtube - Video marketing is huge. Youtube is another top 3 trafficked site. Whatever can be said with words can be said even better and more readily with a video. People like videos. If you check out youtube you’ll see that the quality of the video is really irrelevant. The content is what matters. Virtually everything you’re looking for can be found on youtube. Why not include your business in the line-up?

4. Twitter - You can update your followers all day long with your tweets. This site currently holds the #5 ranking for amount of traffic. Because it processes millions of tweets daily, it’s a great place for marketing.

5. Article writing - This is one of my favorite. You can write about whatever topic you choose and publish your articles on free article sites, LinkedIn, and/or your blog. Article marketing is great because the written word is eternal. Be sure to have value-based content. Give people what they need. Be concise. Don’t pitch your business in the article, though. Use your resource box for that.

This list is definitely not all-inclusive, as there are many other options. You can use myspace and free classified ads, to name a few more. In each of these aforementioned venues, you have the opportunity to tailor your profile to inform your visitors about you. Be sure to add a nice professional picture of yourself because people like to be able to put a face with a name.

All of this generated traffic is to be sent to your primary site. You want to be sure to update it regularly and make it inviting and easy to maneuver. Driving traffic to an outdated site is like marketing suicide.

Arlissa Pinkelton

Find Out The 7 Mistakes Most Network Marketers Are Making And How To Do It Right And Increase Your Leads. Arlissa Pinkelton is a leader in the area of Internet Marketing Via Social Sites. You can find additional articles on this subject written by her at Arlissa Pinkelton Blog.

There’s absolutely no reason to pay for keyword research tools. The best way to increase website traffic is simply to write about what’s trendy right now, and no keyword tools are up to date on a daily basis. Keyword research can be simplified into 3 ways of getting realistic numbers and related keywords.

When doing niche keyword research article directories are a great place to start. If you are looking for new niches to get into then simply look at the categories for the article son site. To see which keywords for your potential new niche site are getting searched for a lot, simply type in some of your niche phrases to see which ones get the most views.

Another way to conduct proper and realistic keyword research is to search through YouTube. If you use the search engine that YouTube has and enter in some niche-related keywords, you will see which videos get the most views. So if you intend to use video marketing and submissions as part of your overall strategy, then you need to do your research by using the YouTube engine first.

The third way to do keyword research for a new niche site is to use Google’s keyword tool. The bad thing about Google’s tool is their search volume numbers are inaccurate, but this tool does provide some excellent data for creating an “LSI list” of all words related to each other for a certain niche. Even though there are tools like Market Samurai, Wordze and WordTracker out there, none of them provide free LSI keyword research the way Google does. On the other hand, those tools provide accurate search volume numbers, but article directories and YouTube provide the most realistic data, period.

The most accurate and realistic keyword research is done by seeing what is already popular. When you use simple math to figure out how many views an article got, the you know the reality of how many searches a day certain keywords get. The main thing to remember when trying to get traffic to your site is to ask yourself what is popular now, then write about it.

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You don’t need to use paid keyword tools or services to conduct proper keyword research. One of the best-kept secrets to increase website traffic is simply to write about what’s popular now. A lot of people make keyword research a lot harder than it is, and that’s a shame.

If you want to know the general ideas for a niche, then go to an article directory and see what categories are listed there. An indication of popular niches would be a lot of articles in a certain category. To see what keywords are getting the most page views per article, search for those keywords on the search engines to see what articles come up then open thie first article to see how many page views it received.

The next best way to use free keyword research is to use the YouTube search engine. All you have to do here is search for certain keywords and phrases, then in the results which which videos got the most hits. This is a crucial tip for you if you intend to use video marketing as part of your traffic generation strategy.

The third best way to conduct free keyword research is to use Google’s keyword tool to gather together a nice list of related keywords. Google’s keyword tool is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to reporting actual search volume statistics, which is why it’s best use for doing LSI, latent semantic indexing keyword research.

The best keyword research and niche research is done when it is based on the reality, not numbers some tool gave you. The best way to do realistic keyword research is to see how many views the articles and video related to your niche got. Also when deciding on a niche just use common sense and think about what’s popular offline, as it will most likely be popular online, too