There are myriad ways for you to build traffic to your website.  At a high level, you can buy advertising.  You can create something sticky that people can’t stop using.  You can create something that plays nicely with search engines and win the SEO game.  You can become a social media star, build a popular blog for your website, or even (gasp) use offline promotions or advertising.

Beyond that, you can go deeper into your expertise.  Learn how to effectively target your ad campaigns, reduce your CPCs for your online ads, or find free ways of advertising your site.  Measure what your users use most, build human-friendly URLs, write keyword rich content.  Start your Twitter campaign, Friendfeed account, and Facebook account — then, link them all.  Now, take all of the various ways I’ve just described, throw in all of the techniques I’m missing, mix and match, and, well, you’ve got innumerable ways to build traffic.

Please, please, just don’t use the automated email request for a link exchange with other sites as a way of building traffic.  Anyone that’s ever run a barely popular website has seen one of these things:

Hi

My name is NAME. I’ve just visited your website
enterventure.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in
exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back
from my Business and Marketing website which is WEBSITE URL HERE
with page rank #.

As mentioned, your link would be placed on the site HOME PAGE, not on
any “links” pages which may be buried in the site somewhere. I’m sure
this exchange would be benefitial for both of our sites, helping
towards increasing our visibility in search engines.

If you are interested, please add the following information to your
website and kindly let me know when it’s ready. I’ll do the same for
you in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from your
site.

I’ve only recently begun receiving these emails at EnterVenture.com, but I’ve seen an almost bi-weekly message like this one while working at Wikinvest.  (Remember what that feedback email breakdown looked like.)  Quite honestly, I don’t know for sure that these messages don’t work (some people must buy into them or else they’d have died out by now); however, I’m fairly certain that any site worth it’s page rank isn’t going to respond to this message.  More importantly, if you’re relying on this stategy, or are relying on a “web consultant” employing this strategy, it’s very clear you’re fishing for an easy path to success where one simply doesn’t exist.  By virtue of using this strategy, you’ve already predicted your site’s future demise. 

There’s only one free lunch you’ll find at a startup — the one given to employees to keep them in the office working longer.

Posted in Marketing, Startups Comments