Just wondered what the best ways are that you guys (and gals of course) have found of attracting new visitors to your site?
Banner ads? Exit exchanges? Word of mouth?

cheers,
Andy.


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Top of my list would have to be word of mouth, particularly if you can get genuine interest from a "recognised site in the industry".

For example, in February this year, Webopedia linked to my site as the only link (back then) for the term flat-file database. Later on (in late March or early April), CPanel added a new feature to their control panel and I suddenly found a lot of interest from sites I hadn't even heard of before... you see, rather than writing a reason for adding the new feature, they linked to my article on hotlinking and let me do the talking. You can see the link to my site if you have access to the latest version of CPanel.

I didn't ask for either of these, but because they are respected sites they appear in my list of top referrers. They also bring highly targeted traffic.

for attracting new visitors to your site there are many things you can do.

top of my list is definately search engine optimisation. if you can get listed highly on google, altavista and yahoo for a good search term / keyword, then you can drive thousands of highly-targetted visitors to your site.

its definately worth getting optimised and submitted to the big boys in order to get traffic.

other than that, word of mouth, business cards, links from other sites, forum posts etc are all good ways or getting traffic. basically, if you work on your site enough, you can get thousands of hits for little expenditure. getting well ranked on a SE gives hits for free basically. word of mouth from satisfied customers also drives more traffic toward you.

if your site is good enough for other people to WANT to link to you, like Tiggy, then you will get yet more traffic comming to you BECAUSE you are good.

building up a stable supply of traffic is a starting point. From there, more traffic will come because of the traffic you already have, and so on to a peak point.

my advice, get listed on the SE's, and make your site good enough for it to be of importance to people. link exchanges are useful, but can drive traffic away from your site. the better your SER, the more traffic you will receive, its logical. Get listed on the big boys, get people to link to you, build a reputation, and the net is yours for the taking

I agree with both DaveTodd and Tiggy. One of the reasons I get a lot of my traffic is that people have linked to my tutorials etc. I haven't asked for their links, but because they found them useful they put a link on their site. I've ven got links on a number of college sites now as reference to courses!

Apart from that (which can take a while) I would say get listed in DMOZ. It'll greatly boost your Google ranking, even if there arn't many links to your site (I went straight into Google at number 2 for a search on free webhosting because of a combination of my domain name and being in DMOZ, beating many well-established sites). As its free its probably the easiest way to promote your site.

One of the basics for "word of mouth" (that I didn't see here - sorry if i missed it) that can be used on most sites is a simple "Tell a Friend", or "Email this Page" option. A step further, but (IMO) worth the effort is a "link to us" page... with some variety/combination of graphic/text options for anyone to link to your site. Instead of making visitors ask, or search themselves, for how to do this, I like the idea of a simple "Link to Us" link near the pretty much standard copywrite/contact us/privacy policy links so often found at the bottom of pages.

IMO people in general will take a site more seriously if referred by someone or "a site" they know/feel comfortable. (CIP: If a salesman tells you a product is good, you think, of course they are going to say that... but if your neighbor tells you it's good, it takes on a whole new validity. The internet version: If you see a banner ad (or any ad) for something while surfing, it's suggested, but if you see a link to a site on a site you already have a pattern of visiting, it's more endorsed than just "suggestive".)

Yet of course, banners, exit ads, text links, etc. do work. BUT why not let the visitors/contacts you already have help you out *wink* in addition to your own efforts. (silly question perhaps just rhetorical).

Good suggestions diana and Welcome to Webmaster-Talk

I agree with the others. Word of mouth and local advertisement is my best promotion for my "Las Vegas Hawaiians" web site.

Since I have a small target audience I do most of my advertising/promoting in person, contacting different organizations and businesses around town. I also cover events and have radio commercials. By doing this, people like what they saw and told their friends. It has made my site very popular with the Hawaiian/Polynesian community who live in Las Vegas and now I am attracting visitors (mostly Hawaiians) worldwide.

My site is also found in search engines/directories and I have exchanged links with many related sites. That has helped too.

For my business site, the internet is already saturated with web design and web hosting companies. It gets harder and harder everyday to get noticed on the internet, but I still keep on trying. I have found that local advertisement and word of mouth are still my best options.

Most of my visitors come from reciprical links and search engines.

First i emailed as many relative sites as i could and asked if they were interested in exchanging links, then after i have a few good recip links I submitted to the search engines.