Anyone can make a website, but there is an art and science to getting people to visit it, let alone buy something from it or click on an ad. Fortunately, there are many so-called “Web 2.0″ tools that anyone can use to drive targeted web traffic to their site. Many are things you can do right now, so let’s not waste any time.
First things first: you are very likely wondering what Web 2.0 is. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer here; Web 2.0 is a set of ideas rather than a specific entity. It’s a collective term for dynamic, interactive sites like blogs, social media and social bookmarking platforms as well as social networking sites. All of these are easy to work with and can be used to generate targeted web traffic for your site.
Social media sites are the ones you hear about most in everyday conversation: MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter primarily. No doubt a new one will come along in another year or so and be the next hottest thing, but right now these are the ones that people use most to drive targeted web traffic to their websites. On these social media sites, you have what amounts to a sociable resum that lets people know who you are, what your site is about, and why they should go there.
In order to make sure that other users of the social networks stay interested in your page is to keep updating the content regularly. If someone comes to your page and sees you haven’t updated it in six months, they’re not nearly as likely to visit your site. Online, people are looking for the latest information, so you need to make sure that you stick to a regular daily, weekly or biweekly update schedule.
If you haven’t put together a profile page on Facebook or MySpace yet, there’s no time like the present to start. It takes just a few minutes, so set up your account as soon as you finish reading this and remember that you don’t need to spend a lot of time on the design of your page or adding a lot of extra features to it. If you’re trying to promote your business, this can actually be counterproductive. Once your profile is finished, search for people you know and invite them as friends; more than likely, you know a lot of people who use these sites already.
The immensely popular social media platform Twitter is something you should already be using (if not, sign up right after you read this, even before you create your social networking profiles). Among its many uses, Twitter is an easy way to add updated content to your Facebook and MySpace pages, among others. Just go to the settings tab in your Twitter account and then down to account and select the “you can also add Twitter to your site here” option. This will give you the option of adding your Twitter feed to your social networking profile pages, Blogger blogs and more. Twitter will provide you with code to copy and paste on to these pages and that’s all there is to it! After doing this, your Twitter posts will automatically be added to these sites as you make them.
Digg and other social bookmarking sites allow users to share content they find interesting with others. You can set up a Digg account in a matter of minutes and in case you were wondering, you can use Digg to bookmark your own pages – there are instructions on the site to do just that. Of course, what you really want is for other users of these social bookmarking services to add your content to their Digg accounts, which helps to drive targeted web traffic to your site.
Blogs are something else which you probably have some degree of familiarity with already; many businesses already use them to increase their visibility. One of the chief advantages of having a blog for your site is that it’s easy to add new content, which interested readers can then subscribe to by using your RSS feed so that they’ll be notified when you add a post to your blog. You will have to keep posting regularly; however, this isn’t really as much work as you may think. A blog post can be very brief and does not need to be written using formal language. For example, you could make a short post to your blog to announce a new product or service and keep your readers updated about any new developments. You can also add a Twitter feed to your blog with ease to add even more content to this secondary site.
These are just a few of the things you can do to leverage Web 2.0 tactics to get targeted web traffic to your site. It would take a book to describe all the techniques available, but these can get you started.
Best Wishes to you. B. L. Marlow
B. L. Marlow writes some cool stuff including a book about increasing using Web 2.0 concepts. For a limited time, you can pick up a free copy by visiting his site.
