Building Traffic For Your Website

Brian Provost wrote a great article outlining 8 simple steps for building traffic for your Internet startup. Here is his list…

1. Defensible traffic
2. Buy good domain names
3. Hire competent Internet people
3 a. Hold off on hiring MBA’s
4. Understand the cost of traffic
5. Build links
6. Engage your community
7. Engage social media
8. Push, pull, prod, and poke marketing

I’d like to add another one.

9. Usability - Nothing will keep a visitor from returning to your site more than poor usability. If they can’t figure out the value prop or how to use the site then you’ve just lost that person that you worked so hard to attract. And chance are they won’t ever return. It also helps if you have something of value in the first place.

5 Comments

  1. Brian Provost on February 2nd, 2007

    I wholeheartedly agree. I ran out of caffeine after 8.

  2. Cameron on February 2nd, 2007

    It’s cool, I ran out after 1.

  3. Damon Billian on February 4th, 2007

    A great read! Thanks. I also agree that UI/UE has to rock for folks. If something isn’t working correctly on the UI/UE front, make sure that feedback gets up the chain & that your company makes a product easy to use by internet novices as well.

  4. Brett Derricott on February 5th, 2007

    Thanks for the link to this article. Very helpful. I also agree with the additional point about usability. I’ll sometimes come across a site that is “recommended” as a great resource but find that the design/navigation of the site is so terrible that it isn’t worth my time. I’d rather keep looking for another site that is less painful to use!

  5. whiteshark0121 on February 16th, 2010

    Driving traffic to website is really very important to make your site visible and to do this I suggest you do all the techniques listed in this post because we cannot succeed if we do just 1 or 2 strategies, I have an idea to add to this post because there are millions of people going online each day to play game. I used YourKidsClub games as it has wide variety of games that are related to my niche and can help generate more traffic.

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