Saturday, April 19, 2008

22 Ways to Get Traffic Without Search Engines

Increased search engine traffic for our websites can be a real boon and blessing. But there is a slight problem.

With search engine competition becoming really really fierce, and it is getting difficult day by day to gain top search rankings and maintain those rankings once you have achieved them, I was forced to think of alternative ways to remain in internet marketing and get targeted website traffic without heavy reliance on search engines.

The Google Algorithm keeps changing every few days. I do not want to lose my sleep and rely on things I do not completely control. So I was forced to seek ways I can get traffic to my website without Google or any other major search engines.

To my surprise and delight, I found a lot of people seeking and discussing alternatives to search engine traffic. And some of them had good suggestions. So I have compiled a small list of articles or suggestions I came across which I found worthy of mentioning here(I might keep updating this small list as I find more such useful articles).

First review this list of websites providing useful information for getting traffic without search engines, then I will give you my own list of suggestions for increased traffic without the SE's.

1. Moving Away From Search Engine Traffic and Towards Independence:

This is a good post on how we can move away from over dependence on search engines for our website traffic and do things that we would be forced to do if the search engines do not exist.

Imagine for a moment that there is no Google or Yahoo to drive traffic to your website. How then would you get attention for your website? What things would you do? This post offers some suggestions.


2. Build Websites Like Search Engine Traffic Didn't Exist

This is a really good post on why we need to forget the google robot and focus on the reader first to build traffic. The author of this blog offers his blog traffic stats and mentions that a relatively smaller percentage of traffic to his blog comes from search engines while the rest comes through other sources.

When you build websites without thinking of SE's you will be forced to contribute articles which are worthy of being read, referred and linked to. This can be an excellent strategy in the long term instead of relying solely on increased search engine traffic.


3. Is Article Marketing Dead?

In this post, the author covers a few topics like is wordpress good for SEO, is article marketing dead and so on. Makes for a good read.

4. 38 Niche Social Media Sites That Can Send You Targeted Traffic:

If you want traffic from social media sites and are fed up with big sites like digg or reddit, then you can try the smaller but more focused to a particular niche sites mentioned in this post.

5. Do Long Sales Pages Work?

When you get traffic, you should also convert it well, otherwise it might go waste. Check out this article which should make you think again if you believe that long sales pages convert better.

6. How long does it take to make okay money from internet marketing?


This question can be important for newbie internet marketers who have been lied to and given over-hyped claims. It is important to be realistic and patient and work hard at it initially. If you try to take shortcuts then you might try and game Google or try other such techniques which might work for a short while then backfire.

It is important to work on great content and building good site. Then you will not even have to depend on search engines for traffic and you certainly not have to try and games or black hat techniques. But it can take time and effort. So be prepared for it.


Some of my tips to get traffic to your blog or website without search engines - Search Engines No More:

1. Submit to as many web directories as you can
2. Submit RSS feed to as many RSS directories as you can
3. Make useful podcasts relevant to your niche and submit to as many podcast directories as you can
4. Make useful videos and submit to as many video sites as you can
5. Make some useful e-course and submit to as many e-course and ezine directories as you can find
6. Create as many short useful free reports and submit to as many ebook directories as you can
7. If you have a script or free software related in some way to your niche, then submit it to as many software sites as you can
8. Participate in forums
9. Make useful comments on other blogs
10. Use Social Bookmarking and other web 2.0 sites
11. Write and submit articles to as many article directories as you can without worrying of duplicate content penalty (remember you are pretending that search engines do not exist)
12. Join yahoo and google user groups related to your niche as well as user groups on sites such as myspace, gather, orkut and lots of others and post useful relevant content with links back to your site
13. Use linkbaiting articles to get others to link to you
14. Participate in link exchange networks and reciprocal linking
15. Try some paid linking programs with high traffic websites and related to your own site (remember we are not worried about any search engine penalties)
16. Find and try out some free and cheap advertising methods like ppc ads or ads on high traffic websites related to your niche or theme
17. Make landing pages where you are offering some free stuff and get traffic to it through traffic exchanges - to see how you can do this with good results, check out this report: Easy Traffic and Money System
18. Make use of popular classified and auction sites like craiglist, gumtree etc. to get cost-effective advertising for your site
19. Write guest articles on other blogs or sites
20. Make powerpoint presentations relevant to your niche or product and submit to slideshare site
21. If you have your own product to sell, join many affiliate networks like clickbank, shareasale, maxbounty etc and let the affiliates promote your products for commission
22. Do some offline advertising in newspapers, magazines, brochures and pamphlets etc. with your website address on it
23. Put your digital products for sale on sites such as lulu, payloadz, spotbit and others. These sites have a lot of existing traffic so that you can get free exposure to an extent without advertising


All the above might take time and patience on your part. But slowly and steadily you might start to see a lot of increased traffic building up to your website without the help of search engines and chances are that this traffic is not likely to vanish all of a sudden.

Hopefully the results you achieve doing the above things might not be as volatile and unpredictable as search engine rankings.

This does not mean that you give up search engine optimization and marketing completely, but you should try to find other means of regular targeted traffic and referrals to your website or blog. The amazing effect of this might also be increased search engine traffic as well even though you were not concentrating on that at all.

2 comments:

H. Hyerd said...

Thanks for the post. I also would like to share my list of 150+ social bookmarking site you could use to promote your site.

http://bookmarkindo.com/blog/2008/11/08/social-bookmarks-which-publish-a-site-easily/

and

http://hy-freeblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/list-of-150-social-bookmarking-site.html

Automated seo said...

Thanks it was an great article. I am reading articles regarding seo and related topics from quite a while but i felt that this article was informative and i hope i get these kind of informative article in future also.I would also like to know whats your opinion on automated seo.