Top Site Traffic - Internet Marketing Australia

Web site traffic is the term used to describe how many people visit a web site. It's an important metric for measuring a web site's online success, as for both advertising-supported and sales-orientated web sites, the amount of revenue that the site generates will be highly correlated to traffic levels. There's a simple reason for this - all other things being equal, the more people who visit a web site, the more sales that site will make (sales-orientated web sites), or the more advertising impressions or clicks (advertising-supported web sites) will occur. Even for non-profit web sites, visitor numbers are important - if you're putting across an educational, religious, social or political message, you obviously want as many people as possible to read it!

As a result, the struggle to get and then increase web site traffic, is one of the main preoccupations of most webmasters and online entrepreneurs. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that generating web site traffic can often become an obsession!

The thing about generating traffic, is that many of the most commonly advocated techniques can be a struggle for most webmasters, and in some cases completely unsuitable.

- Search Engine Optimization ("SEO") - Redesigning your web site to get good listings in the most important search engines can work well - if you know what you're doing - but is also time consuming. Furthermore, if you start an SEO program, it may be weeks, in some cases months, before you start to see results.

- Advertising in Google Adwords can also work well, and get immediate results, but it can get kind of expensive. Additionally, you need to watch out - pricing of AdWords is per visitor ("pay per click"), and if you pay too much per visitor, you could actually end-up losing money.

- Press releases can generate massive publicity if they get picked up by the media - but there's no guarantee that you story will be.

- Ezine marketing (using opt-in email newsletters) is effective, but can present a chicken and egg situation - you can't get much traffic from an ezine until you have subscribers, but you can't get many subscribers until you already have traffic...

So what can you do? One idea is to get other webmasters to do the work - there is a method which will get other webmasters queuing up to send you traffic: top sites. Top sites are basically just an ordered list of web sites, all of which relate to a particular topic - be in Britney Spears, crafts, horse riding, photography, video games, wallpapers, etc. The sites are sorted in order based on the number of visitors that they have sent the top site (often called "Votes" or "Votes In").

Many webmasters like to participate in top sites, because a high ranking not only gains them prestige, but also helps them get more visitors back from the top site. However, the biggest winner in a top site is the person who owns the top site page. This is because they get to show their ads to visitors sent by all the other participating site. So, if you want to benefit from this form of free traffic, the key thing is that you must own and operate a top site yourself - and by that, I mean installing a top site script on your own web site, not using one of those hosted services which takes all the ads for itself!

When you've started your top site, what next? You need to get a few members - once you've recruited a few, the top site will soon become self-perpetuating. First, add your own existing web site(s) to the top site. Next, I'd suggest that you use Google to find some other top site's on your topic - and join your top site as a member of these other top site's. Finally, you might also want to add your top site to some web rings associated with your topic - I've found signing up for a free account at webring.com to be perfectly adequate for this purpose, but you can use other ring sites too if you prefer.