Some Knowledge

One way to generate traffic to your website is just to have lots of interesting, original content.  This is known as a method of passive traffic generation.  You are relying on the search engines to find your site and send people who are interested in what you post to you.  This is a fairly good method of generating traffic, and it only costs you the time and energy that it takes to generate content.

A completely useless way to get a lot of traffic is to run a bot.  Sure, you can have a program surf your site repeatedly, but what does this accomplish but to eat up bandwidth?  The robot is not going to read your articles.  The robot is not going to look at your funny pictures.  The bot is just going to download whatever you have and either save it or forget it.  Your traffic can be increased this way, but this is not actual people going to your site and perusing your offerings.

One way to get more traffic is to buy advertising.  You are essentially paying to promote your work to an audience that might not otherwise know about your site.  You can use Google Adwords or another outfit who will place your advertising link on the search results page of their home page or on third party websites that already get a lot of traffic.  The downside of this method is that it will cost you money.

You could always print out fliers and post them on bulletin boards around your neighborhood.  Stores often have free bulletin boards.  Schools and universities are full of the things.  There might be kiosks in your town where people post announcements for concerts or try to sell their items.  Good old paper and ink can get you a few visitors to your site.

The big time in any promotion is of course the news media.  If you can think of a reason your website is worthy of a news story, then go on and issue a press release to the editors of your local news.  You might try to get your site on TV if it is novel and interesting enough.  Maybe you are running some sort of a contest to attract attention.  If you have money to burn you can hire a PR firm to promote your site.

One way to generate links to your site is to leave comments on forums, blogs, and various reply sites you might find anywhere on the net.  This does not cost money, but it takes time to fill in forms and write a decent comment.  Chances are few people will check out your website this way, but the link will be there and will be available to whomever wants to follow it.

You can of course submit your site to search engines and directories.  Some of these places charge money for consideration.  As far as directories go, you should be able to categorize your site into one of the headings on their list.  If you have a site that is not targeted to some common specific category you will probably not end up in many directories.

Perhaps the best way to get a lot of web traffic is just to have a lot of information.  Popular sites like Wikipedia have millions of words of information on many different subjects.  The volume of information causes the search engine to rank these sites highly.  There are also many cross links in the Wiki that generates a high authority for the pages that are hosted there.  It takes time and effort to have a large site, and you will probably need to get material from outside sources if you hope to generate much traffic this way.

One method of generating web traffic that is not used a lot is to become famous for something.  You can record an album and get famous for your music.  You can make friends with a celebrity.  You might run for office on a major party ticket.  Even if you do something stupid like sell yourself to a politician you can still get some sort of fame that will cause people to seek out your website.  Be sure to have some kind of identifying information on your site that allows people to find it based on your name, or the name you are using when you become famous.

There are plenty of places that will attempt to sell you web traffic for your site.  They all have some gimick like redirects from popular sites or advertising or something that gets them people.  What you have to remember is that you’re trying to get a person’s attention and trying to give them something that is valuable to them.  People look for things that they think will be beneficial, not things that are a waste of time.

If you have a good website with a lot of interesting content you are bound to get some traffic.  If you have a boring site with nothing interesting and a lot of just wrong information, there is really nothing you can do to promote your site, because once people get there they will click away fast because there is nothing for them.  Concentrate on building something useful, and the search engines and people will find you.