7 More Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Author Website

As erotica writers, it’s not enough to be able to tell a compelling sex story. We must be master marketers as well. Unless you and Oprah are BFFs, marketing yourself is the only way you are going to attract readers and get them to buy your books. Internet marketing is an excellent way to promote yourself. But having a website is not enough. You also need to know how to drive traffic to your website.

In a previous article, I detailed seven ways you can get more website traffic to your blog or author website. Here are seven additional ideas for getting people to notice you.

Increase Website Traffic with a Contest

People love to win things. I think it has something to do with our natural competitiveness and the ego boost we get at beating out everyone else for the prize. Hosting a contest is a fun way to drive traffic to your website. The thing about hosting a contest, though, is that the amount of buzz and participation directly correlates to what kind of prize you are offering. A big screen television is likely to attract more people to your website than say a DVD movie.

But you should work with what you have even if it’s only free advertising on your website. Make sure to have a clear set of rules and guidelines for the contest and a backup plan in the event of a tie or few people participate.

Get Viral

No, I’m not talking about catching a disease. Viral marketing is the art of using social networks to get other people to pass your message around. Most people think getting their website on the front page of Digg or getting a lot of views on YouTube is what viral marketing is about but those are only the benefits of this type of campaign.

Viral marketing is creating content so compelling, people can’t resist sharing it with others in their social network. It can be anything from an awesome article that hits a nerve to a funny video to a fun flash game. It’s a challenge to come up with this type of content. The effort is worth it, though, because you’ll gain a torrent of free website traffic from it.

Ping All the Aggregate Services

There are several websites on the internet that gather together all of the newest content posted on the internet. Syndic8, Technorati and Weblogs are a few examples. The main purpose is to provide their users with the latest news about the topics they are interested in. By pinging these sites, you can disseminate your content and drive traffic to your website.

WordPress users can set their blog so that it automatically pings the most popular aggregators. You can find instructions for this on the official WordPress website. If you are using any other blog service, use a ping service like Pingoat or Blogflux Pinger to notify the web that you’ve just updated your blog.

Podcast Your Posts and Offer Free Downloads

The world is becoming increasingly mobile and what better way to tap into the content-on-the-go market than to record an excerpt of your stories and submit them for download to podcast directories. Not only can you give potential book buyers a taste of what is in store for them, if the excerpt is good enough it has the potential to go viral and increase your website traffic exponentially.

Create a Video of Your Story

Along the same lines as the previous tip, take an excerpt from your story and make a video out of it. You have to be careful here especially when it comes to adult material. Many video sharing sites, like YouTube, do not allow X-rated content. Pick a non-sexual part, create a skit, and video tape it. If you have animation skills, create an animated video of the story. This is a particularly create way to generate targeted website traffic for your author blog.

Ask for Book Reviews

Connect to book reviewers who blog and ask them to review your book or some of the stories on your website. In addition to finding out what your target audience thinks of your stories, you will receive free website traffic from the people who read their blog. Be prepared, though. Review bloggers are often inundated with requests so you will need to be patient, diplomatic, and persistent. Additionally, they will be reviewing your work so don’t expect aces across the board. If you can’t handle criticism then avoid this marketing tactic.

Engage in Offline Marketing

Don’t underestimate the value of offline marketing. Take out an ad in the paper, do radio spots, advertise on television, network with other writers, or sponsor fundraisers. These are just a few offline marketing venues that you can take advantage of to draw people to your website.

These are but a few alternative methods of marketing your website. Use one or use them all to drive traffic to your website.

Daria Black is a fiction writer. Although she writes all types of stories, she enjoys writing erotic fiction stories with science fiction, fantasy, or paranormal elements. Stop by her website to read some of her writing or to talk about sex, art, society, books, or other randomness.

Get More Website Traffic For Your Erotic Site Than You Can Handle

It used to be so easy to get free website traffic to your blog. All you had to do was fill out a few meta tags and made sure you used relevant keywords in your content. Now everyone is on the internet trying to make money, get their message out, or just plain connect to other people with like interests and the competition for attention has gotten fierce. Getting free targeted traffic to your website is a lot more challenging.

But with consistent action and these seven tips, you can drive traffic to your website without having to spend money on hit or miss advertising.

1. Increase Website Traffic by Getting Involved

Get involved in the internet via forums, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs. This accomplishes several things. First of all you are meeting people and making contacts. By helping out on a forum in your niche, you are increasing the perception of you as an expert and because most forums and blogs allow you to link to your website, you are also improving your search rankings with back links and getting targeted website traffic from both the sites and the search engines.

2. Generate Free Website Traffic with Guest Blogging

Submit posts to other sites in your niche or just outside your niche. The major benefit of guest blogging is that you are tapping into an already established audience who is ready and waiting to hear what you have to say. The best way to take advantage of this is to submit unique and useful content to avoid the duplicate content trap and to maintain the reader’s trust in their favorite blogger.

3. Submit Articles Directly to Websites and Newsletters

If you have a stable of articles that you want to distribute, consider submitting them directly to the source rather than using article directories. This provides you with control over where your content shows up as well as the ability to confirm whether or not the site has a reader base.

4. Generate Free Traffic to Your Website with Blog Carnivals

A blog carnival is a roundup of posts from the blogosphere that are centered on a main theme. You submit a link to a post on your blog that fits the theme of the carnival. The host will usually review your article and, if it fits, will add the link to a list that they then post on their own blog for their readers to peruse. You will gain both relevant links and targeted traffic from this. A well known blog carnival is Thursday Thirteen. However, a search on the internet for blog carnivals will turn up more.

5. Increase Online Website Traffic by Offering Freebies

People love free stuff especially if it helps them solve a problem or be more effective in their business and life. Another good marketing technique is to provide useful freebies that people can only get from your site. This could be anything from a WordPress template to a plugin that helps with the functionality of software to an e-book that provides valuable information. In addition to getting more people visiting and reading your blog, you can also build a mailing list if you set things up right.

6. Join a Social Marketing Group or Blog Network

A good way to increase website traffic free is to form a social marketing group or become a part of a network. A social marketing group is a group that promotes each other. This could be anything from highlighting each other’s posts to giving each other a boost on social networking sites like Digg.

A network is a group of websites owned by one individual that span a variety of topics. Most of the networks on the internet have been around for awhile, have quite a number of blogs, and use an internal link and marketing structure to drive traffic throughout the network. Blogging for a network helps you gain a good amount of credibility as an expert as well as exposure for your other projects.

7. Increase Exposure and Traffic with an Interview

Get interviewed by other bloggers or interview others in your niche/market. Doing interviews is probably one of the most effective marketing techniques that you can use. As the interviewee, you get to sell your business and yourself by letting your potential customers get to know you better. People like to do business with those they know and interviews go a long way towards making them comfortable with you.

As the interviewer, this is a great way to make contacts in the blogosphere. People like to talk about themselves which is evidenced by the popularity of blogging. So if you do an interview about someone, most likely they will send readers to your site earning you both traffic and links.

Generating free website traffic takes commitment and drive because it is not an instantaneous fix. However, you can get targeted traffic to your blog using these tips. Just keep your eye on the prize and you’ll have a popular website in short order.

Daria Black is a freelance and fiction writer. Although she writes all types of stories, her specialty is science fiction/fantasy erotica. Stop by her website to read erotic fiction stories, or talk about sex, art, life and other random topics.