7 Novel Ways to Generate Traffic

Everyone knows that buying ads and getting Googled are good ways to bring traffic to your site. But here are 7 ways to drum up some users to your site that you might not know about:

1. StumbleUpon
   StumbleUpon is a service that sends people stumbling about the Internet to view random websites based on their preferences. Unlike the real world, this kind of stumbling is not generally alcohol fuelled!While being picked up by StumbleUpon to be shown as random content is fantastic, it isn’t something you have any control over. You can however also pay to have your site visited. The price is a remarkably affordable 5 cents per visitor. To purchase stumbling traffic, simple visit www.stumbleupon.com/ and create an account and campaign. The traffic isn’t as targetted as some other methods, but what it lacks in accuracy it makes up in affordable quantity.
2. Get Design Blogged
   If you have a site that is very well designed either from a CSS/Web2 point of view, in its Flash quality or a general design aesthetic then you may be able to get linked to by one or more design portals.Such services typically send anywhere from 100 to 1000 visitors your way depending on the gallery, so getting listed in a dozen or so can produce a lot of through traffic. Of course the visitors tend to be looking only at design and this sort of traffic is usually best if your product, service or content is aimed at that same audience. Examples of design blogs include: CSSRemix.com, Webcreme.com, fcukstar.com/ and about a thousand others…
3. Press Releases and Announcements
   Depending on how news worth your website is, you may be able to get some traffic by spreading press releases on sites such as PRLeap. To find plenty of others simply type ‘distribute press release’ in Google. Similarly there are sites around where you can announce your launch, some URLs to visit for this purpose include: www.launchfeed.com and this list of web 2.0 company listing sites.
4. Get Blogged or Reviewed
   Getting mentioned on a prestigious, high traffic blog will almost certainly send readers your way. To get there means one of two things, either your service is good enough to be blogged about for free, or you have to pay your way in.The blogs you target are specific to your area, for example if you are launching a web 2.0 company you would definitely want to try getting a mention on the web 2.0 blog TechCrunch.com (also known as being TechCrunched). Although subject to some controversy in the past, paying to be reviewed is really not a big ethical question. Services such as ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com are increasingly accepted. ReviewMe.com represents such high profile blogs as JohnChow.com and Guy Kawasaki.
5. Produce a clever, free service and get it noticed
   The service can be anything, so long as its free, useful and relatively new. Examples include this freelance hourly rate tool from FreelanceTipster and this website analyser tool from onStartUps. If the tool is clever enough then you can use it to get noticed on big sites like digg and reddit, as well as smaller niche sites in your industry.
6. Run a Competition
   People love free stuff, so much so that they even love the possibility of free stuff. In fact they’ll do all sorts of odd things in the hope of getting said free stuff. So why not harness this urge by running a competition on your site. Provided the competition has prizes with some decent value you can get the competition mentioned elsewhere, thereby bringing traffic to your site. While you are at it, make the competition a content-generating exercise.
7. Make it worthwhile for people to refer you
   Referral programs don’t need to only be for big companies. If you have a stats program like Google Analytics, you can run your own referral program for traffic. Simply figure out a rule such as ‘every 100 visitors referred earns $10′ and publicise your program. The key of course is to find a balance between what pays off for both you and your referrers.

Now off you go, go generate some traffic!