This is a guest post by Debbie Dragon who is a full-time freelance writer and co-owner of Trifecta Strategies, LLC. The company provides a full range of content management and marketing services to clients around the world. In addition, Debbie mentors new writers through her Make Money From Writing program. Students of the program learn how to earn money writing online, find clients and run their own freelance writing businesses.

If you are interesting is submitting a guest post, please visit my guest poster page to find out more info. Now on to the the good stuff.

According to the Field of Dreams – “if you build it, they will come”, right? If only it was that easy online! Having a website or blog online will not immediately result in people finding it during their internet travels. The hardest part about having a website or blog is bringing traffic to it. How can you get your site in front of people who are interested in visiting it?

There are many methods for bringing traffic to your website, and most of the commonly used traffic generation strategies cost money. If you want to increase the traffic to your site on a tight budget, why not use some of these often overlooked strategies to increase your website traffic for free?

Set Up a Blog – If you currently have a traditional website or storefront, you should connect a blog to it. Search engines love blogs because they offer frequently updated content (as long as you remember to post!) and they are quickly indexed in the search engines. A blog gives readers a way to interact with you through blog comments, and helps you send targeted traffic to your website or storefront. For example, if you’re selling blue suede shoes, you can write a blog post about blue suede shoes and link to the sales page. Only people who are interested in blue suede shoes would be reading about them on the blog, and so only targeted visitors would be clicking the link to find out about buying them.

Use Blog Carnivals – A unique method of advertising blogs that is not available to a standard website is through the use of “blog carnivals.” These carnivals give incoming links to blogs. They’re heavily weighted by search engines because they’re coming from blogs on related topics, and the readers of the carnival host who click on your link are already interested in your topic since they’re visiting another website on a similar subject matter. You can submit your blog posts to carnival hosts, and if you’re included in the “carnival” you’ll get a link back to your site. Carnivals are a long-term strategy for building website traffic, but if you do them on a regular basis you’ll improve your positioning in the major search engines and receive direct traffic from people clicking on the links from the other blogs. To find out more about blog carnivals and to submit your own posts for inclusion, visit www.blogcarnival.com.

Use Article Directories – There are tens of thousands of article directories online. An article directory allows people to submit articles they’ve written on any topic and categorize it so that other website owners and publishers of newsletters can find it when searching for articles on a specific topic. When you submit an article to a directory, you give permission for other people to reprint that article – but only if they include your author byline with a link to your website. Each time your article is republished, you gain another link to your website which is great for SEO purposes – and it also gives you the potential to receive traffic from individuals who read the article and click the link to find out more. Some of the more popular article directories include iSnare.com, EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and GoArticles.com. Once again, this is a strategy that is free to use but offers the best results if you do it consistently. Aim to submit one or two articles per week on an ongoing basis to several article directories. Writing articles on topics related to your website has the added benefit of establishing yourself as an expert in your industry.

Write an Article for Another Newsletter – Visit websites that are likely to have site visitors who would be interested in your own website. If they offer a newsletter, ask to write an article for their newsletter in exchange for a link to your website. Often, the article is accepted in exchange for payment for advertising – as long as you make the article informative and interesting rather than a blatant advertisement. Not only can this generate new visitors to your website, but it also helps establish yourself as an expert in your field of expertise.

Traffic generating methods do not have to cost a fortune in order for them to be effective. If you use the methods in this article with consistency, you’ll start seeing positive results from your efforts.

Debbie Dragon is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

This is the twenty-fifth day of a 30-day trial. Follow the link to Marketing Ideas En Masse to find out more.

Since I am on the theme of sports from the last post about Dick Beardsley’s Running Store Fargo I was shown an article talking about Nike targeting female athletes. Thanks to Apyrl from the Women Like Sports blog it appears that Nike is starting a new marketing campaign to encourage and promote women’s athletics. Here is an excerpt:

The Nike Gamechangers: Change the Game for Women in Sport competition encourages people from around the world to showcase their game by outlining their exciting ideas for women in sport on their website.

“Nike understands the transformative power of sport and we know there are social innovators around the world doing amazing work in this area,” states Nike “Let Me Play” Global Director, Maria Bobenreith. “Through the Nike Game Changers competition we are providing an online platform to form a community of game changers and showcase their ideas and innovations around empowering women through sport.”

The idea is to find new and innovative ideas and use the power of social interaction and promotion to determine the top ideas for creating more opportunities for women in sports. By way of blogging, voting, commenting and group participation, ideas can move up or down in popularity. The most popular ideas will be voted on by a panel of judges resulting in the top ten winning $5,000.

Even if you do not offer a proposal of your own, we invite you to join the dialogue. Your experience and insights are invaluable to the emerging field of sport for social change.

Join the online Changemakers community to make suggestions and recommend resources that will help refine and strengthen the strategies presented by competition entrants. Tell us what you’re thinking, how you see the field, where its challenges and opportunities lie.

I would love to see a tribe of people build up around this idea and only time will tell how successful the idea turns out to be. I think that there are many positives stacked on the side of success such as group interaction, worthy cause, enagaging people with a similar interest, connecting people and a place for central and quick communication. I have no doubt that this will produce some sort of results in promotion of women’s sports and female athletes. Have you heard of this competition before? What are your thoughts?

Just the other day I noticed Starbucks had started a new promotion, the Starbucks Gold Card. Although, it is not quite like the Centurion Black Card, it is on the right track. If you have seen this card or have purchased one, let me know your thoughts about the promotion. Do you like it or dislike it? Are you interested in getting one? Play the video below to hear my thoughts on the Starbucks Gold Card.

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Click the pictures below to view the larger version

Outside of the Starbucks Gold Card Brochure

Inside of the Starbucks Gold Card Brochure