The biggest challenge for new website owners is how to drive traffic for the first months after the site’s launch. Search engines can literally take months to fully index and apply any ranking value to new sites meanwhile your website could be sitting there receiving very little to almost no traffic at all. Here is where creativity comes into play, there are many ways besides search rankings to drive traffic to your site. It is always advisable not to rely on search engines alone for your traffic goals.
Search results fluctuate all the time search engines are always fine tuning their algorithms, these changes can be either negative or positive, in a negative scenario your website could suffer a significant decrease in traffic and without a plan “B” you could be out of business in months.
Social Media
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become indispensable for webmasters in terms of interacting with their clients, website subscribers and recurrent followers. New websites should invest a great deal of time creating successful social profiles as it is currently one of the fastest ways to drive traffic and gain brand recognition. Social media is all about being viral and worth sharing, if your website doesn´t offer something incredible and unique you will have a difficult time promoting it.
Blog Commenting
The idea here is to leave useful comments in high traffic and relevant blogs in your niche but don’t get confused the main reason is not to build links but provide a really good and useful insight on every article. If you can make other readers feel engaged by your comments they might decide to visit your website for more information and that is your ultimate purpose.
Guest Posting
Similar to blog commenting your goal is to contribute with big websites around your topic, if your articles are interesting and informative you could drive a good amount of traffic from the links in the author bio.
Forum Posting
Forums are also great places for social interaction by being part of the conversation people will start recognizing you as an authority on your field and that can transform into targeted free traffic for your website.
Video Sharing
You can drive quality traffic by creating video profiles in popular websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, UStream, etc. These video sharing communities are becoming just as popular as search engines and offer far better changes for your message to be viewed. Again the advice here is to create a great video almost irresistible to share.
Tommy T. Campbell is the SEO community supervisor of sunsetscostarica.com an international travel agency located in Costa Rica.