HOW DO I GET TRAFFIC TO MY SITE / MY BLOG?

Cross posted in WMNTODAY

Many of us think that having a good interactive website or blog is that required to get tons of websites but that is not exactly correct. Getting more people to your site takes a lot of hard work (at least some smart work :-) ). After six years in the web development and blogging, I found some of the answers and some short cuts to get it. It may help you, if you are very interested in attracting a lot of visitors to your blog or website. But why other people (whom you think got lot of visitors) not revealing to you, because you need to advertise about your blog or website. Here I have added some of the proven techniques used by most of the experienced persons in the industry without spending [much] money:

Submit your site to as many search engines as you can. Here are some of the popular ones you can start with:

Alexa

AltaVista 

AllTheWeb

AOL 

Ask

Bing
DMOZ 

ExactSeek 

Excite

GigaBlast 

Google

Kanoodle 

Live 

Lycos 

LookSmart 

MSN 

National Directory 

WebCrawler 

What-U-Seek 

Yahoo 

• Use a favicon.ico (which shows your logo in the URL bar)
• If you have a Christian Website, be sure to submit it to all the Christian Directories. We have a list of about 50 of the most popular Christian Directories here.
• Have Dynamic content on your site - Message Board, Links Directory, Guest Book, Online Search, Picture Gallery, Quote of the day, News items, Site Search, Links Engine ... It all makes for a more enjoyable experience for your visitors ... and interested visitors come back.
• Make sure you don't have broken links on your site! There is nothing more annoying when one clicks a link and it does not work. There are hundreds of places you can go on the internet that will check your link validity. Use them.
• Make sure your META TAGS are done right.
• Submit your site to as many privately run Link Directories/Search Engines as you can find. These will not generally boost your traffic in any major way but will help to maintain steady stream of qualified visitors.
• Use Banners with care.
• Subscribe to the Usenet groups and advertise there. A good place to start is Google Groups
• Be sure to submit your site in appropriate groups!
• Be sure to signup with a backup email or you will get onto every spammers database!
• Be sure you don't SPAM -- only submit a write up of your site once to any given group.
• Use social networking sites like Twitter, facebook, YouTube, Plaxo, Linkedin and others to get the word out.

Make Use of Available Resources

Always make use of the available resources, before going for purchasing of the domain or hosting and learn about the free file hosting providers (not all, only trusted domains like wordpress, blogger). Use Picasa web albums and other online free tools to do changes on the photographs required for the posting it in your blog or website.

Video Based Instruction Classes

Sites are beginning to teach classroom-style lessons and video-based instruction classes (e.g. Lynda.com) on web design and development. They can get pricey, but may be good alternatives to a degree.

Verify anything you learn

Remember to verify anything you learn through a third party resource. There’s an awful lot of outdated information out there (like W3Schools) that could encourage bad habits.

Read Books

There are many fantastic web design books and magazines out there. They also cover a wide range of subjects with ever-increasing depth as a source of education they are second to none.

Keep Learning

Always keep learning because there is no excuse in allowing your education to lapse or become deprecated. You could keep up to date with news through design blogs or perhaps learn a new web language.

List the various tasks

To-do lists may seem inconsequential and rather trivial, but you may find them useful in structuring all the various tasks you need to deal with and setting yourself deadlines.

Make use of Project Management Softwares

Getting some decent time-tracking or project management software is important. It’s far too easy to get distracted and lose sight of the big picture if you’ve lots of small tasks to achieve.

Don't be half-baked

Always have realistic expectations about how long a project will take to complete. Rushing your work and releasing it "half-baked" can cause issues — just look at Windows Vista.

Good Environment

Set yourself aside a decent workspace environment. The less distractions your workspace has, the better off you will be in terms of productivity.

Good Selection

Finding a good selection of checklists and cheat sheets can give the fledgling designer some quick, easy places to get advice on how best to approach a task.

  

List of Open Source Softwares

Open Source Support

You don’t need to rely on Adobe or Microsoft software to create a fantastic website as there are lots of free and open source products which can do the job without cost.

Choose wisely

Pick your development platform carefully as some products (such as WYSIWYG editors) inherently produce less reliable code than a classic text editor that allows you to write by hand.

Know what you’re doing ?

Unless you know what you’re doing and have the money to finance the infrastructure, hosting your own website may not be the best or most economical idea (as fun as it sounds).

Try Local Hosting...

If you want to have a good testing environment that will run PHP and mySQL on your own PC, install XAMPP. It’s quick, easy and will help you get things running before you go live.

Avoid Free Hosting for Commercial Use

Free hosting for commercial use is not a good idea. If you plan on having a commercial website, it makes sense to avoid the intrusive advertisements and purchase some basic web hosting.

Start with Shared or Grid Hosting

If you’re starting a website or service of your own, it pays to start off with shared or grid hosting rather than a VPS or dedicated because you won’t know how many visitors you will need to cater for.

Aware about the Package.

When picking a website host, ensure that you check what you’ll get in the package. Disk space, bandwidth, CPU usage and other specified features may decide the cost you’ll encounter. If you already have a web host, test their performance using these tools.

Do you know Domain Auctions ?

Domain auctions like Sedo can be a great place to get a domain that's already been taken. While it can be somewhat expensive to pick up a rare domain, you might find yourself the owner of your preferred domain name.

Privacy

WHOIS privacy can be a dicey affair when you allow your registrar to put their details in place of your own. You run the risk that you may lose the domain if a conflict occurs.