A website without traffic is absolutely worthless. If you expect to have any type of success online, you must have traffic landing on your site. But not just any type of traffic, but traffic from very targeted and specific types of people who are already interested in what you have, and are likely to buy.

And relying on only one or two sources for traffic can be hazardous to your business. So in today’s post, instead of talking about the hundreds of ways to get traffic, I’ll briefly discuss five.

1. Advertise on Other Related Websites

Often overlooked, but this is a great source for traffic. Many of the websites your prospects hangout at will likely allow you to advertise your website on theirs. A client of ours sells denture repair kits and one of the websites he advertises on gets about 1 million unique visits per month. 98% of the visitors consists of senior citizens and they allow him to advertise a text-link ad on 6 different categorized pages for only $100 per quarter. Now it’s not often you’ll find a deal like that, but they’re out there if you’re willing to look.

They’ll also allow him to put an article on their site as well for a small fee talking about his product in an ‘editorial’ type of format. Start looking for related sites in your industry too. You’ll usually find an “Advertise” link near the top or bottom of their websites. This is a great source for quality and targeted traffic.

2. USA Today Newspaper Classified Ads Marketing

The USA TODAY is a national newspaper and it’s readers are generally college grads with great incomes… In other words, smart people with the money to purchase your product/service if you do a great job selling it. Classified ads are broken into categories and if you can find a category that matches the product or service you have, then consider running an classified ad.

As with any classified ad, it’s almost impossible to sell a $1,500 business opportunity with the limited amount of space offered. Therefore, we ran lead generation ads that directed them to a pre-recorded voice message to learn about the biz opportunity (and we also directed them to a specific landing page on our website that explained the program in detail).

After listening to a 5 minute overview of the business opportunity, the voice-message prompted them to leave their phone number and mailing details to receive an information package by snail mail. This worked extremely well for us and I’ll talk more about classified ad marketing in a later post.

Running a classified ad in this paper will run you several hundred dollars but keep in mind it’s going out to a national audience. Plus, they’ll also include your ad in their online edition of the paper as well. Contact USA Today’s Classified Ads department today!

Tip: We generally ran our ad in the weekend edition (which sat in hotel rooms on Friday, Saturday and Sunday) and these hotel rooms have Internet access. So instead of getting only one day of exposure, we got three!

3. Getting Website Traffic From Forum Marketing

I know you’ve heard this one before and that’s because it works. Just try it and be consistent. Better yet, pay someone on your staff to do it so it’s done regularly. Find forums that’s related to your niche and add your signature (which usually consists of a brief description of your services with a link back to your website).

The key here is to bring value to the discussion. Don’t write 2 or 3 sentences and expect to get any traffic. Take your time and add content so valuable that people want to click your link to find more of the ‘awesome’ stuff you just wrote.

For example, if you make organic doggy treats, there are forums where thousands of people talk about their dogs all day… Don’t believe me? This dog forum has over 900,000 posts and will hit 1 million soon. And as you can see, this forum post here had an active topic going on about organic dog food. Which would have been a great opportunity for those who were selling an organic doggy treat recipe guide. Forum marketing works and it helps establishes you as an authority.

4. Add Your Details to Your E-mail Signature

This is a very simple, but often overlooked method of getting your website address passed on to potential prospects. An e-mail signature consists of a block of text that automatically gets added to the bottom of all e-mails that are sent out. For example, here is one of my signatures for a site I market:

Discover how to start your own t-shirt business.
Access free tips and resources on our website to
help you get started on a shoestring budget:
www.tshirtriches.com

E-mails tend to get passed around and this free publicity costs you nothing. Also, keep in mind that people are checking their e-mails from their mobile devices. Having your signature with a click-able link to your website makes it much easier for them to access it later. It also makes it easier for them to simply forward your e-mail/text/tweet on to their friends as well.

Also, don’t just put your company name or web address only. Type up a brief and compelling reason to get them to click through. Offer a free report or a download-able coupon. The idea here is to get them to take some type of action. Give them a reason to want to go to your website, or better yet… Give them a compelling reason to pass ‘this e-mail on to their friends’.

If you don’t have a signature attached to your e-mails, add it today.

5. Including YouTube Video Marketing into Your Repertoire

Aside from being the 2nd largest search engine in the world, YouTube marketing is one of my favorite secret weapons. If done properly, it’s a tool that’ll allow you to quickly build a following of people most likely to purchase your products and/or services. Lots of people search YouTube to learn how to do something and by understanding this fact, you should focus on creating video content aimed at establishing yourself as an authority, or as someone very knowledgeable about the topic. And the best way to do that is by ‘teaching’.

For example, I had a relationship with a wholesale supplier of magic tricks. Instead of outright selling the magic tricks, I started a magic school where I taught kids how to do magic. I made up free tutorials and dropped them on YouTube and the response was unimaginable. Instead of outright selling the products, I taught them through video and as a result the sales followed.

Here is a link to one of my first videos… Don’t laugh, this was when I first started using video back in 2007. This video has been viewed nearly 3 million times and throughout the video I referenced our website address to drive people there to learn more tricks. Now I shot that video back in 2007 when I first started learning video — so the quality wasn’t as great, but the content is what the people were after.

But now, I shoot quality video like this one here in the basement of my home using green screen.  And that video was shot with the Kodak Zi8 (a $149 camera from Target (OfficeMax, Staples, Wal-Mart). It can fit in your shirt pocket and outputs HD video. Get one and start educating your prospects today! Or hire us to make video content for you

6. I Promised 5 Ways to Drive Traffic… But I Want #6 From You

Leave a comment describing some of your favorite ways for driving traffic to your websites. I’ll add more in a later post.