There are several standard things you can do to increase traffic on your website. These are publishing an ezine, providing free email, give things away for free, updating your site every day, installing a message board or discussion group, concentrating on main topics, submitting to search engines, writing press releases etc. But these traffic generators are used by nearly every well promoted site on the web. If you start a new ezine, for example, it will generate traffic but it will probably not be something special. There are ezines over and over on the internet! And don't believe that high search engine ranking is the most important source to get hits on your page. In fact successful websites get most traffic from people just typing in the domain name. You don't only need to have a domain name easy to remember. What I want to say is that you must have something special on your webpage to be successful today. Provide information and service that others don't do or only rarely do. Do things that the others don't do yet. I want to write about some internet marketing tricks that are less known in this article. They work very effective.

WHAT YOUR VISITORS WANT

Try to find out what your visitors really want to find on your site. Install a short opinion poll that is shown the first time a visitor enters your site. Ask your visitors to suggest what could be improved. Your site will get better for your customers steadily if you react on critics and suggestions. There are always people who don't know what they are really searching for on your site. If your vistors used the opinion poll they are fully aware of what they are searching for. This will increase sellings.

WAP: INTERNET FOR MOBILE PHONES

Provide internet information for mobile phones. There will be millions of people using mobile phones with internet access in the next years. You must prepare special WML(Wireless Markup Language) pages. These pages can be displayed by mobile phones with internet access. Having a WML homepage shows to be innovative. That is important for internet business. And there are only few websites providing information for mobile internet phones. You have got the chance to be a "first mover". You can find more information about WAP at www.wapforum.org

FREE-CD-ROM

Produce a CD-ROM about your business. Put some of your web pages on that CD. You can also insert actual Shareware/Freeware software, tools, older ezine articles and other material. You will give the opportunity to select things offline and buy online if you sell a product or service. That makes buying much faster and more comfortable. Give this CD-ROM away for free on your website. Your customers will give their Address and receive the CD some days later. If there is not much data you can also provide an archive file to be downloaded. People will buy again and again! The CD will also have the effect that your customers won't forget you! If you have a bit of luck you will even have the chance to receive a bit of money with that CD. You can sell places for advertising. An ad for another company is displayed 10sec. before you can use the CD-ROM, for example.

ADVERTISING

Sell places for advertising on your webpages. Give these places away at an online auction every month for one month. If you start at a very low price several people will probably be interested. This is a nice new opportunity to attract possible sponsors and keep people interested.

AFFILIATE OPPORTUNITIES

If you have a lot of traffic you can also sell advertising places with an affiliate program. That page that generates most traffic for your site will receive the advertising place. Ask visitors to install a banner to your page on their site. If they do you will insert these sites in a list. You can chose one site from the list at random every week. This site gets an attractive advertising place on your page. This will cause many links pointing to your site.

About the author: Jan Damberg manages several website projects in Germany and developes software for publishing wireless applications [Astro Solutions] Email: dambergj@muenster.de