Incoming Traffic – Word of Mouth
I have already talked about incoming traffic from free search engine results and pay per click. Today I want to talk about word of mouth. When you think of word of mouth you normally think of people just telling their friends at work or at school or calling them on the phone. These days it covers a lot more than that. There are many ways to tell your friends about new sites today.The first type of online word of mouth is through online communities. This includes Blogs, Forums, and Social Book marking. As I have mentioned before I got my start at forums. This is a great place to learn about things and to network with other people. Get involved in forums and create a profile page. On my other blog www.ogletreeseo.com I still get traffic from forum posts from years ago. Get involved in discussions. Make a name for yourself. Send messages through the forums system to people. Blogs are very similar except that every subject is brought up by the site owner. You can still have discussions in the comment section. Social book marking sites like www.digg.com, www.youtube.com and del.icio.us have comment sections you can comment on as well. You can get traffic by making good comments and submitting stuff yourself. The important thing is to contribute by being part of each community.
The other type of online word of mouth is electronic messaging. This often times is a result of doing the online community thing. People will see something you said or did or something about your site and email their friends. They can also send instant messages to their friends.
Right now word of mouth traffic is probably one of the best ways to get traffic to a site. It is not uncommon for a site to go down because it got so much traffic from people spreading the word on some of the more popular communities.
