When it comes to launching a new website, there is nothing more frustrating to me than a lack of visitors.  I work hard on content and the creation of the site and to see a site receive little to no traffic feels like a slap to the face.  This site has been one of my better attempts at online marketing but I am nowhere near my goal of 250 visitors per day.

In the past, I have tried several things in order to bring in traffic to my websites and these strategies included, but were not limited to: writing articles for article repositories, placing links on directories, placing ads on Google with Adwords, telling my friends, putting out flyers, announcing the new site on web boards, and using social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon.

Out of all of those things, one has worked better than most of the other ones combined, and that is the use of social bookmarking websites.  The problem with the other methods (with the exception of Adwords) is that you get visitors who aren’t necessarily interested in your product or website.  They’ll visit your site because they see a catchy title or because they want to support a friend, or frankly, because they’re bored.  Since launching this site, a majority of my visitors have come from either Reddit or StumbleUpon.  These two sources have accounted for nearly 88% of my incoming traffic and have led to a few loyal (I hope) RSS subscribers.  These visitors actually have stayed on the site for a long enough time period to read a couple of articles and in my opinion, that’s a good visitor.

Reddit and StumbleUpon

Reddit and StumbeUpon are social bookmarking websites that drive traffic to a certain website as people vote for them.  The thing about relying on either of those sites is that only posting your site won’t immediately drive traffic to your site.  Sites only receive traffic if they’re voted on by other people and only the “popular” sites get a significant amount of traffic from their use.  I’m not sure exactly what makes a site popular because I’ve seen a lot of bad content reach the top of these two sites, but I think it has something to do with the ability to have others vote for your site for a small fee.  If you visit the forums at digitalpoint, you will be able to find people who are willing to vote for your site in exchange for a small fee.  I have yet to try this out as I think it’s cheating a little bit, but it may be worth a try to get your site over the tipping point once you have somewhat established yourself.  I don’t think that paying for votes is a good thing if your site is brand new, but if you already have a regular number of visitors to your site then gaining some paid momentum could be well worth the cost.

That being said, I will continue to write content that I think is good for my readers and good for my professional development.  I will keep sharing what I try to do online and hopefully we can all learn from my mistakes.  Thanks for visiting my site and vote for it if you like it! Don’t forget to sign up to my RSS feed too!