If You Build It, Who Will Come?

Just because you spent time putting a web site together, and maybe a good amount of money too, it doesn't mean anyone will come to your web site. Oh, the horror! Yes, pretty awful to hear the truth, but that's how it works - if you don't try and drive traffic to your site then no one will come, even if you have the most fabulous concept, or cool games.

So how do you get traffic - especially if you are trying to build a web site within a limited budget?

Easy Traffic Builder: The Page Title
There are many ways to build traffic but I will just go over one here for now: the title of your web page. And for arguments sake we will presume that you have a website about widgets and not a Carmen Electra photo gallery fan site - a site that will, by its very nature, get a lot more visitors than a site about widgets.

Your widget site must at its very base level have good content. But let's bypass that and just talk about how to get visitors to be curious enough to feel like clicking on a link to your site. If you just wrote a great piece on your site about the latest, greatest widget then by titling that page 'Widget X" you will not create a surge of curious visitors to your site. Take a leaf out of the tabloid press' book and create titles that make you want to click [turn that page].

Linkbaiting is when you create unique and interesting, and/or controversial content [not solely with web page content, but other media like videos and games too] that other web sites will link to. The main purpose of setting up linkbait is to get links, but that is not really what I am talking about here.

You won't get visitors to stick around your site if you brought them toy our site under false pretenses - "Carmen Electra Loves My Widget" might bring some traffic but they are looking to see what it is that Carmen likes, not your widget. A better hook would be something like "5 reasons why Widget X makes you cool," if indeed it does.

People love to know things in a condensed version, know that it won't take eons of scanning to get to the juicy part. Giving a "Top 10" of something, or if you can't think of that many - a 5 or 3 of something, will pique interest too. A negative works well also - "5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Buy X, " or a little mystery: "The Secrets of X Revealed" help bring traffic to your site. Tips for things, or information for 'Beginners' or 'Newbies' works well too.

So remember to make the title interesting, but relevant, and then people will be a lot more likely to click on your link. Later on I will talk about some great places to put some of those links to help drive traffic to your site beyond just the regular search engines.