You’ve signed up for Google and you’ve got your website up, now what?  Well to make any money you’ve got to start getting visitors.  And not just any visitors: targeted visitors.

Of course you’ve got great keywords, you’ve optimized for the search engines and tweaked your content.  What else can you do?

You can join forums and discussion groups that relate to your site’s niche. Search discussion group sites like Yahoo groups and Google groups for groups that are relevant.  You can also search for discussion groups by subject matter. Type in the search engines  +discussion +groups +mothers +young +children, for example.

Another alternative is to find websites that relate to your website that have forums.  There’s a huge forum for writers at AbsoluteWrite.com, for example.  Many publications on your topic will have forums as well.

Join these discussion groups.  In your profile make sure you keep your signature short and sweet but do include a one sentence description of your site and a link.

When questions come up, or the conversation focuses on your topic, you can post a short answer and then mention there is an article or suggestion that would be helpful to the members at your site and give the link.  Of course don’t spam the members or just post one or two word answers, like “thank you” or “I agree” just to post.

Blogging is going gangbusters and can be a valuable tool to get visitors to your website.  You can also incorporate Google’s Adsense on your blog for an added income stream.

LiveJournal
blogger.com
myspace.com

are just a few of the free sites where you can quickly and easily set up your blog.

Every few days post on your blog.  Make sure you include a link to your website in your blog post.  Search engines count the link as a back link which can increase your ranking in the engines.

Most of the blog sites are searchable by keyword.  Search on the same words you’ve used for your site to find other blogs.  Then leave a comment on the relevant blogs and include your link to both your own blog and your site.  If you don’t have time you can hire people to comment for you.  The cost runs between 10 cents and a $1.00 per comment posted.

If you set aside just 30 minutes a day to participate in forums and blogging you can increase the traffic to your site and have a little fun as well.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!