I think sometimes we get a little to narrow in our focus on how to generate traffic to our websites. Some people spend all their time focusing on getting their websites ranked at the top of Google. Others try to optimize their AdWords Campaigns and earn their livings paying for traffic from the great and powerful Google.
However, if you only have one source of traffic, you are in a perilous situation, my friend. What happens if you suddenly fall out of the good graces of Google and your website goes from ranking #1 to #1000 overnight? It happens. Just hop into any internet marketing or search engine optimization forum and you'll see plenty of people freaking out about it.
And if you get your traffic from AdWords, you're not much safer. While a reasonable person would think that Google is happy to accept your money, just do a search for "Google Slap" and you'll see cases where Google makes it doggone to give them money in some cases.
It can happen. It does happen.
So today I'm going to broaden your horizons just a bit and give you seven ways you can get traffic without relying on search engines.
Banner Ads
After the Dot Com bust, banner ads got a bad rap as being ineffective and too expensive. This is really like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There was nothing inherently wrong with banner ads. The problem was businesses with too much venture capital throwing money around like a game of hot potato. They overpaid for advertising and didn't test and track results, and they didn't target. Banner ads do work and people use them profitably to this very day - try them out.
Guest Blogging
There are so many ways to get traffic from blogs, but this is one of the most powerful, by far. In any niche, there is likely one or a few prominent bloggers. You know, the ones that most people go to or have at least heard about. The best blogs tend to put out a lot of content, and they're frequently willing to let somebody else do the hard work and provide content for a day via guest blogging. All you need to do is contact these bloggers and offer to write a cool post for their readers. This builds you up as an expert in your industry, and can get you extremely valuable links back to your website.
Contextual Advertising
Ever heard of Google AdSense? Of course you have (there are others too). You can advertise your text ads on websites and drive tens of thousands of visitors a day to your website. You can also target specific websites instead of just by topic.
Video
Video is not only a great way to get traffic, but it is also a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Record a video. Put it up on video sharing sites like YouTube, and make sure you watermark the video with your URL so that people know where to go to learn more you and your services.
Podcasts
This one is pretty similar to video. In fact, you can take the audio track from a video and turn it into a podcast. You can even put your podcast on iTunes (trust me, it's actually really easy to get accepted into their program).
Articles
Articles (like this one) are frequently used to improve search engine rankings, but they can also bring a lot of traffic to a website. In fact, I have one website that gets more traffic from the article directories than it from Google (and it's not a small amount of traffic).
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