One good way to promote your site among your friends (or friends of friends) is to set up a fan page for your site on Facebook. You can ask people to become a fan of your site and you can have a RSS feed box on your page to tell your fans the latest update in your site.

To create a fan page, just follow these steps:

1. Log on to Facebook

2. In the footer links, click on “Advertising”.

3. Then, right below the Facebook header, you should see a banner with “Advertising”, “Pages”, “Connect”, etc. Click on “Pages”

4. Click on “Create a Page” and then just follow the instructions!

Similar to RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook (and other social networking sites that you frequent in) are very good channels to tell your friends and your friends of friends about what is new about your website. You won’t believe it, but you can probably get a lot of clicks from your friends, simply because they want to know what you are writing these days!

When you have new contents on your website, here is what you can do:

1) Write a twit and let your followers about what’s new.
2) Change the status on your Facebook and give an URL for people to click to your new contents.
3) Post your site on your Facebook wall.

Let me know if there are other interesting and ingenious ways to generate more traffic!

Google AdWords has come up with a very easy-to-use keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) which helps web publishers find out which keywords they should use to promote their sites. The web publisher can enter a phrase (e.g. “pay per click”) and the page will tell him all the popular words that people use to search in that subject. The best part of the page is that it can analyze the contents of a page and tell you what the relevant search keywords are. Below is a screenshot for iselo.com.

Running Google AdWords Tool on iselo.com

I guess one function that should be added in this tool is how much these keywords cost on AdWords. Then people would know how much they would need to pay and they can pick the right keywords given their budget.

Allowing multiple ads in an Adwords campaign is a good and easy way to optimize your ads!

One of the things I found it surprising is that different ads with different wordings have different effectiveness in bringing people to your website. Therefore, when you try to create new ads for your website, make sure you create a couple of them and let Adsense display the ads randomly. Over time, you will probably notice that one of the ads is a lot more effective with a much higher clickthrough rate. Then you can safely delete the other ads and run your ad campaign with the most effective ad.

A good way to attract readers and to keep readers informed about new entries in the blog is to set up a RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. With a RSS reader, readers of your blog can be alerted when there is a new entry in your blog. RSS feeds are built-in in most blog systems such as Blogger and WordPress. However, you can enhance your RSS feeds by joining some free services offered by www.feedburner.com. FeedBurner has been acquired by Google and they offer free services that help you manage your feeds. Some of the features that I use are:

• Have Feedburner count the number of subscribers subscribing to my blog
• Have Feedburner send out an update email to my email subscriber every time there is a new post on my blog
• Have Feedburner analyze on the user data of my blog

RSS Feeds provide a channel between the blogger and the readers. And it should never be ignored!

One way that I found that have been quite effective so far to improve traffic:

1. Look at what people are searching for to find your website (The stats from  your website hosting company, WordPress, etc, should have a section on how people get to your site.)

2. There are a few items that are more popular than others. For example, you see there are a lot more people looking for “iphone button” than other search items. Most likely it is a new topic that hasn’t been explored too much and your website ranks quite high in this topic.

3. You should then write more on this search item, and then the rank of your website with this topic will rank higher and more people will arrive at your website.

Create controversies: write controversial stores, post controversial videos on youtube

Host a lucky draw /competition in the blog with quite good prizes

Write to local media for interviews

Post messages to other blogs and specify your URL

Can’t think of any now. If you have more, let us know in the comments section!

When writing a blog, you should try to include a picture or a video that is relevant to your blog.  This will stand out from the majority of the blogs that are text-based. And this will create more links to your entry. Search engine will link to your normal text-based blog and at the same time link to the picture or video that is part of the blog.

One very good way to attract people to your site is to give out free gifts. You can easily create some gifts that are unique to your website. Post them on your site and let people download the stuff.  Every one likes free stuff. For example, some pictures, a free software, or a tool that are related to your website can definitely attract people to your site. Some ideas for your website:

a) Investment website

A spreadsheet or software that helps user to track their investment, or to make better decision of their trades.

b) Pets website

A screen saver for all the cute pictures you’ve got for your pet(s).

c) Celebrities website

A screen saver for all the pictures you have collected on your celebrity figures.

Be original and creative and more people will visit your sites!

One thing that I’ve been told from various Internet marketing sites is that readers like to read blogs in point form. Instead of saying:

Beautiful girls from Los Angeles

You should say:

Top 10 beautiful girls from Los Angeles

Instead of saying:

Depressing things about dating a gorgeous girl

You should say

7 reasons why you shouldn’t date a gorgeous girl

And the entry should be in point form listing out the top 10 girls or the 7 reasons. It’s a lot easier and faster to read in point form than a long convoluted novel.