Submitting articles to article directories can get you a lot of targeted traffic, there are many online resources that you can use to increase the traffic to your site. Here are a few of them that I have found to be effective and how to use it.
Yahoo Answers
This is the place where people get answers to questions. If you find a question related to your niche, post a useful but incomplete answer. This entices the readers to follow your link to your website or blog for the full scoop. The other thing you can do is go in and create a niche question. Then find the answer and close the question. There are many ways to use Yahoo Answers to get links and some traffic.
DIGG.com
This site is ranked number 124 in Alexa as of this writing. Which means it has a lot of traffic. Digg is a Social Bookmarking site. If you post a article and it lands on the first page of DIGG, your server can crash from the tidal wave of traffic. Problem is how do you get enough people to digg your article. Again you can if you work it right create DIGGs to your article, site or what ever with either software or by creating a number of accounts. Be careful how you use DIGG cause they are very watchful of spam attempts.
Squidoo.com
Having your article on the first page of Squidoo has two positive effects. You get lots of traffic. You also can get plenty of Google Love from them as well. Essentially Squidoo Lenses are nothing but information pages that users create. Create some with your keywords and then a lense with information along with links to your site and you can increase your sites presence on the net. For my coffee site I currently have 5 lenses pointing at it and all of them show up as backlinks in Google Webmaster. A powerful source of link juice.
Wordpress.com
Blogger.com
Both Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have been around for a long time. Both sites receive a lot of visitors each day and thus it makes sense to post some useful there. Just make sure your profile in Wordpress.com contain a link back to your site and bingo you have link juice coming from two powerful domains.
Myspace.com
Facebook.com
Twitter.com
These are three of the largest social networking sites online. Even you just focus your attention on one of them, you can get tons of link juice to your site. Make sure to set up a good profile that links back to your site. Users of MySpace and Facebooks frown upon promotional materials and so post only useful content and let your profile do the work of driving them to your site. In some of them you can create groups, use your key words and make groups and let others join as well. Twitter is a different beast. You get a profile where you can put a link and if your careful you can put in other links as well. Twitter will ban your account for two many links so always nice to re-tweet things and send out lots of non-sense posts to cover your links.
Traffic exchanges
Few traffic exchange online are really worth the effort actually. But there are still a few that works very well. One of them is of course TrafficSwarm. I have not used this yet, but have heard good things about getting your site put into a part of an article.
Hubpages
This is another site that hosts a lot of useful content. Much like Squidoo if you get into the top pages you get serious link juice and traffic to your site.
Ezine publishers
Thre are many ezine publishers that are looking for good and unique content. All you need to do is search ‘ezine directory’ in Google and you can find many sites that list the ezine publishers looking for content. Put in unique content about your niche and you can get a link or two in as a resource. Just make sure you submit unique content.
Coffee-n-Caffeine website. This is a gourmet coffee website with lots of age. Earlier in 2009 I started looking more closely at the site and determined my ranking for various coffee keywords, the traffic for the various high value keywords and my SERP for those terms. It was not surprising from the amount of traffic and what various server stats were telling me was that I was doing well for specific but not the general terms.
Thomassnosports.com – About Sept 2009 I was visiting a local Arctic Cat dealership doing some computer repairs. While there I found they actually had a website and were already doing some good business with it. I said how about if I can increase your SERP to the first page of google for Arctic Cat Parts and Arctic Cat Used ATV as they were not even in the top 100 in google. As I have known them and I explained what I had done to my coffee site he was interested. I made him a deal. I put you in the top 10 for Arctic Cat Parts and Arctic Cat Used Atv and you pay me a $200 bonus. Having nothing to loose and everything to gain he took me up on my offer. I went back a month ago and reported to him that he was sitting comfortable in postion 35 for each of the terms. He had to look… there he was. I was back again in the middle of Nov 2009 and told him he was sitting comfortably in postion #18 and that by christmas I expected to be getting that bonus.
Basic Experiments Results are that I have come to a couple conclusions. First links, no matter where they come from so long as they are good PR (even low Pr are good as it looks more natural) have an effect. Tossing out Videos, Articles, Creating Profiles on diverse sites, all with links to your site will have an effect of getting you either into the top ten or very close. Then comes the difficult part. Finding links that push you into the top of the first page. but that is another experiment.
Now all of this is going to change as Google changes its search methods and that could make things change as to what kinds of links give you better juice. I am still convinced that a link for a relevant source is much better than one from an unrelated source and has more juice, at the same time it is clear that to some extent google likes links to your site no matter where they some.
Sparky
One of the hot new things is the Social Networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. These are also excellent ways to advertise your site, you just have to be creative in how you go about it.
First is to create graphics and things that people can use as comments or layouts on their page. In the graphic and other elements you use to make it easy for people to use your site to get comments, you put in things that bring people to your site.
Creating comment Graphics is much easier and it can also show off your product or services. I run a site called You Sexy Thang which sells sexy clothing for men and women. Part of the site is obviously pictures of the various products, so I have taken some of the pictures added some text and then saved them in a different location on my site so that they are seperate from the product pictures. Then create a page with the code that people need and Bingo ready made comments with links to my site.
This creates several things that will benefit your site. First it brings people into your site when people click on the image to look for reply comments and while there maybe buy something. Second, It also creates inbound links with proper tags that eventually the SE’s will find and thus it adds one-way links to your site which should increase your PR and SERP.
This is a fun and interesting way to promote your site and your products.
Sparky