How to Get Found Online Part 4- The Basics Get You Much Farther Than You’d Think

If someone who was brand new to generating traffic asked me for an uncomplicated plan for getting targeted visitors to their site, I’d tell them to focus on 6 things, in this order;

1. Advertising - on search engines, in ezines, on blogs
2. Blogging and RSS - create a blog, create a feed/podcast, promote it, participate in neighboring blog communities
3. Expertise Marketing - write an article, let other people publish it in exchange for a link back, do webinars, teleseminars, interviews.
4. Joint Ventures - partner with another individual or company for mutual benefit and/or publicity
5. Affiliates or Referrals - get other people to sell your products and let them worry about how to generate traffic, get additional visitors from existing visitors/customers/clients
6. Social Media - bookmarking, news sites, document sharing, networking online, video sharing

Now, that’s not in order of importance, that’s in order of what newbies can do to get up and running fast.

It’s not impossible to do a joint venture as a newbie, but it’s harder when you don’t know people.

It’s not impossible to launch your product with an affiliate army, and with industries like timeshare resales or wholesale airline/cruise tickets, it’s not necessarily practical. And despite what all the $97 course sales letters say, getting social media traffic in your first 24 - 48 hours is not easy. It may be simple, but it’s a lot of hard work to get traffic from it that quickly.

But a blog you can start in a day and your web host may have an automatic installation of it for you. If you’re not technical, you can also go with domain mapping and a hosted service. If you’re tagging, and commenting, and you pick the right topic, you could get a trickle of people in your first day. Same with RSS - and you don’t necessarily have to create new content.

The process doesn’t have to be complicated. The newer ways of getting visitors, like blogging, podcasting, and getting on the first page of Digg are all well and good. but throw some of the foundational techniques in there. Those traditional methods still work.

How do you know I’m an expert? You don’t. But you can Google me, or read my site on traffic generation and decide for yourself. Test everything - with at least logic.