What are the best ways to increase traffic to my site without payed advertising

[Acroagogue]

First off. I'm very sorry the spelling of paid in title is wrong. It was a typo and I cannot reverse it now.

Hello DANIWEB! I'm new to the forum and joined because it looks like a place where I can possibly get some answers. My first post asks the question, how do I get more traffic to my site/blog. I'm hoping some of you here can enlighten me with some methods I may not be aware of.

To begin with, I'm fairly new to website design/blogging/and traffic generation. However, I am pretty computer savvy and know alot of people who are, shall we say (web inclined)

My blog is a about 9 months old give or take a month. I worked on it pretty hard the first month and customized a template, ect. You know, set up the overall look and got it off the ground.

I indexed the blog with as many search engines as I could. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more.

I created content. Right now I have over 150 articles. Some come from other sources but most are original articles with cited sources.

I use social bookmarking such as digg, reddit, ect. I never break the barrier on these sites though, I may get around 30 diggs on a post and then it stops. I also actively digg and take part in discussion ect. I also use stumble upon and actively stumble but my posts never make it big there either. My most looked at post only has about 130 stumbles.

I am a member of several forums which discuss the same topic as my blog. I use signatures and post and interact regularly. This is where I get a good amount of my traffic but still not that much. One time an article I posted on a big forum went viral and I received over 3000 views from it in 2 days but this only happened once.

I submit articles to news sites and am an expert author on ezine.

I use google webmaster tools and work on my keywords. I try to use them in all post tiles and throughout my articles. I also make them bold and italic. I only get a small amount of search engine traffic though. Under 20%

I have an RSS feed ect, I only have about 50 subscribers though.

I made my blog a do-follow blog.

I post content regularily.

I use meta tags.

I have over 200 backlinks coming in to my site.

I'm ranked in alexa under 2 million and in technorati under 25,000

Have about 20 google followers.

Ok, I'm sure there's more but these are the main things I can think of at the moment.
My traffic has been better recently since I had an article go viral but I want to make it bigger. I enjoy the blog and work hard at it. I think the most I have made in a day off adsense is about 17$. I would say it averages around 1$ to 8$ a day and on average 100-700 visitors a day depending on how much I'm posting. It just recently started averaging this much in the last month or
two. I have a small dedicated reader base but I'd like to keep getting huge amounts of unique visits, backlinks, ect. Iv'e tried link exchanges and usually only irrelevant sites send requests so I stopped looking at the requests. I have set up linking with some other nice sites in my genre but results are only decent.

Any responses or tips would be greatly appreciated. :-/

[DavidB]

Don't overlook including your blog URL on your resume. If you have your resume posted on some of the big job posting boards you should draw in some more visitors too. It might get you a job and, even if it doesn't, the fact that a potential employer did a search for somebody with your credentials and came across your posted resume is a good sign. I think that is well-targetted traffic. And the blog serves as a showcase of your talent--your web design skills, your writing ability, etc.--so that potential employers know you are not joking; you have results to display to back you up.

In any case, it should bring in a few extra visitors per week.

[mackone]

Create unique content, then submit it to the major social bookmarking and link sharing services. Social bookmarking has the great ability to reach where search engines cannot.

[Acroagogue]

Create unique content, then submit it to the major social bookmarking and link sharing services. Social bookmarking has the great ability to reach where search engines cannot.

in my post---->I use social bookmarking such as digg, reddit, ect. I never break the barrier on these sites though, I may get around 30 diggs on a post and then it stops. I also actively digg and take part in discussion ect. I also use stumble upon and actively stumble but my posts never make it big there either. My most looked at post only has about 130 stumbles.

Thanks for the advice, How can I increase traffic from these considering I am an active user on all the social bookmarking sites?

[jennypitts]

You seem to have a pretty good grasp on what you are doing in order to optimize your site and increase traffic to it. Now, keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process. You may need to write more articles and double your efforts. If you are still having some difficulty then you may want to analyze your keywords and ensure that they have a decent search number. Most people think that by being #1 in SERPS for their keyword is incredible, and it is, but if your keywords are the wrong ones and not that many people are using them in searches then your defeating the purpose of all the hard work.

Now, after you analyze your KW and ensure you have good ones, double your efforts. At some point you may have to invest on some paid advertising like email marketing and solo ads. Free services like SEO are great but you should not put all your eggs in one basket and should expand your options. Combining free and paid methods is perhaps the best thing to do in order to maximize your results.

[silveraden]

Just keep doing what you are doing and don't rush... SEO is hardened by time. I have a niche site that outanks all of its competitors after 6 months of hard work, now getting more than 2,000 organic visitors per day giving me a couple of hundreds of daily earnings from CPA networks. And I never spent any single dollar in promotion since I launched this site....

[articlewriter1]

You are doing just fine... Make sure that when you submit your articles you are linking back to your site. Make sure that in your articles you are adding quality and informative content balanced with your keywords. Do the same on your site. Continue the SEO work you have been doing thus far and maybe intensify it. Be patient, SEO is a tedious and long process for which you must arm yourself with patience. Patience is a virtue but when dealing with internet marketing, it is an obligation!!!

[Acroagogue]

You are doing just fine... Make sure that when you submit your articles you are linking back to your site. Make sure that in your articles you are adding quality and informative content balanced with your keywords. Do the same on your site. Continue the SEO work you have been doing thus far and maybe intensify it. Be patient, SEO is a tedious and long process for which you must arm yourself with patience. Patience is a virtue but when dealing with INTERNET marketing, it is an obligation!!!

I just want to take a moment to thank you and everyone else for their replies to my post. Here is a brief update. I continued working on my site, tediously posting articles daily and traffic has finally increased. It still has ups and downs but is getting better. I had 2 articles go viral! And when I mean viral I mean 30,000 page-views each in about 24 hours. In fact, one started yesterday and is still getting huge traffic. The other happened a couple weeks ago. They went viral because 3 websites in my particular niche posted the article on their home-pages, and their websites are the top in my niche, which sent thousands upon thousands of visitors. I'm talking a thousand an hour for 30 hours straight. I also started getting a little traffic here and there from forums I post to. My organic traffic has gone up quite a bit but I'm still working on it. The problem with organic traffic is I have a website which discusses multiple topics, each post is different, similar to a news site so it's hard to isolate keywords throughout the entire site. I kind of do it individually on each article, I think this hurts my organic search. I have actually had multiple days where I have made over 40$ from ad-sense now, but it still lingers between 2-10$ a day most of the time. I wish every article could go viral, haha. I'm still not getting traffic from most social bookmarking sites although most of my articles on digg are starting to get up to 40-50 diggs each, but that's it. Stumbleupon has started to send some more regular traffic but still nothing huge. I would love more ideas!!! Right now I'm working on making my site navigation a bit better, and also working on the look of it. Gonna continue taking part in the social networks and hope it happens with them one day. For now though, I hope some huge websites post more of my articles on their homepage!!!! That was insane!!!

[ballantyneguy]

You can try video email marketing. There are several free services out there. mailVU.com, eyejot.com, tokbox.com, etc. It would be a way to push a video message to people instead of waiting for them to find videos on your site or on YouTube.

[qlipboard]

Press releases are a great way to get free traffic, too.

[jamesrayenz]

Many professionals use article marketing to drive traffic to your brand new site, and yes, only 1 article drive thousands of visitors. You have to do a little research on the title, go to Google, type in a sentence related to your niche, you title / that must find a sentence less than 10,000 competing sites.

Now once you got the title, articles, about 500 words, and writing EzineArticles, Sooper articles and submitting to directories such as headers, but I really would recommend Ezine you, since I only use Ezine Articles, and It brings me many visitors.