Get traffic for your website - episode 5 - get more traffic from friends and networking

Welcome to the fifth episode in my series on how to get more traffic for your website. In this epsiode I'll be discussing how you can use a network of friends to build your traffic.

As everyone knows, backlinks normally equal traffic; directly or otherwise. More backlinks will help your search engine listings (especially if your network of friends are within a similar niche). So how does this work?

If you have friends within a similar niche, trade
If you've got friends in a similar niche as yourself then offer to trade links with them - even better if you can get them to use your RSS feed to showcase your latest posts. You obviously will do the same for them. This means that their readers will see your latest post titles in the same way your readers will see theirs.

If you have no friends, make them!
Become an active participant on a blog within your niche of comparable size; once you get to know the owner you'll both see that it'd be mutually beneficial. Your content may be similar but not identical. It's a tough trade off because it'll feel like you're helping another blog, but they'll be helping you too.

How this helps you
Backlinks = SEO. SEO = good. Good = traffic. You've then got another friend within your niche and that's good. It's also not costing you anything - that's the big bonus. If you were purchasing text links on random niche sites it'd be costing you $30 per month per site; and even then readers aren't seeing your latest post titles. However doing an RSS feed exchange with a friend means you do, so that's good too.

It's a good lesson in writing titles too
If you're trying to steal as many readers from the other website as possible it becomes a great lesson in writing attractive article titles. I'm not advocating pointlessly sensationalist titles but you need to write descriptive titles to entice users into reading them - it's simple really. It's also an important lesson in blogging.

Build a network of friends; if you have 5 friends sharing feeds then you could see some noticable traffic. One of the sites my feed appears on is my 19th biggest traffic source over the past 12 months (which may not sound like much, but would you rather have it or not? Plus that's still 2,000 visitors). Sure it's not as impressive as the 75,000 StumbleUpon sent, or the 120,000 Google sent, but those are 2,000 high quality visitors.

There you have it, friends and networking may not change your world but it can really build into something quite meaningful.

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