subject: Increasing Your Web Site Traffic : Passive vs Active Online Promotion [print this page] Your website needs visitors, that means you need to promote your site to attract traffic. You have 2 general ways in which you can do this passive promotion, or active promotion. As you'll see, passive promotion will give you a greater return on your time and money if you give it time!
Let's say you opened a dry cleaners. If you place an advert in the paper, that is active promotion. You write and pay for an advert, and people reading the paper that week get to know about your business. If you want to continue promoting your business in that way though, you need to keep renewing your advert.
If, instead of placing an advert in the paper, you put up a permanent sign in the local town, that would be passive promotion. Once you have paid for the sign and got permission to put it in that location, it will continue to promote your business for months or even years to come, with no further input from you!
Generating hits to your website can also be done actively or passively. Active promotion includes things like PPC (Pay Per Click), banner advertising, adverts on classified sites etc. These all cost (either time, money or both) and last for a limited time. They certainly work but you have to keep working at promotion to keep getting the visitors.
Passive promotion means that once you have an inbound link to your site, it's likely to stay there generating traffic for you, freeing you up to do other things.
There are a number of passive online promotion methods:
Reciprocal linking
Sponsoring other sites (paid for inbound links)
Forum signatures
Article submissions
Blogging
Let's take a look at each of these in turn.
Reciprocal linking
A reciprocal link does exactly what it says on the tin! You link to another site, and they reciprocate by placing a link back to you. As other webmasters are also trying to get traffic to their sites, there are always people willing to trade links. They key here is to exchange links with quality websites that are on topic. By that I mean sites which have something in common with yours. There is little point in a link from a site specializing in disco equipment, if you sell hearing aids! Choose your link partners carefully and build them steadily over time.
A reciprocal link is great, but a one way inbound link is even better. Once you have a visitor to your site you want to keep them, you don't want them to click a link and head off to see your competitors. Therefore one way links are even better than swapping links with other sites. There are plenty of sites which will link to you for a fee. Again make sure you are getting value for money. Any site where you are paying for advertising should be on topic, high quality, and getting a decent level of traffic. Get some facts and figures before putting up any cash.
Increasing Your Web Site Traffic : Passive vs Active Online Promotion
By: Justin Brown
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