Increasing Traffic to Your Author Website

Your success online will often come down to your ability to drive quality traffic to your website or blog.

Go to Google and type in your key words or niche topic and see how many pages contain content related to your own website or blog. Quite often there are millions of pages or blogs that you are competing with for a position on the front page of a search result.

Inbound links can add greater value to your site. And if you can obtain quality inbound links from reputable sources then you will see your page rank rise and thus give you more chance of being found in the search results.

One technique used is called "link exchange" A link exchange is the process of exchanging hyper-links with a quality site that is related to your site in content.

Well established websites will often receive daily emails from sites and webmasters wishing to exchange links. The "catch-22" issue is that it is easy to get link exchange partners when you have a website that is generating a lot of traffic and has a high page rank with Google, however, when you have a low page rank and are just starting out no-one will want to link with you. Therefore you need to become creative in order to build inbound links.

19 Link-exchange and Traffic Generating Techniques that Will Help Boost Your Website Profile:

1. Offer to write a testimonial or review for a website that you like. If they publish it on their website request that your link be included with your name.

2. Give away an eBook with links to your site.

3. Give away a free product that requires people to sign-up on your website.

4. Offer websites or blogs free content to post on their site in return for your name and website link being placed in the resource box following the article.

5. Give permission to websites to publish your newsletters on their site which contain a link to your site.

6. Offer website free access to your member-only site in exchange for a link on their website.

7. Barter – provide a website (with a similar page rank) with an advertisement to your site and in return you can post their ad on your site.

8. Create an affiliate program – when you allow others to sell your products for commission they will add your product and link to their website.

9. Create your own award site or competition for other web sites. When you provide the participants or winners with a graphic or text link to place on their web site this will only draw more traffic to your web site.

10. Offer your expert advice in exchange for your link being placed on their website.

11. Write and submit articles to article directories.

12. Write a review – write a review of an author's eBook or book where you can include a link back to your site.

13. Participate in online discussions – many "comments" boxes allow for you to include a link back to your site.

14. Your email signature – add a link in your signature for emails.

15. Create a video and post it to YouTube that contains a link to your site.

16. Start a Twitter account – create a Twitter name and then start to build your list of followers. You can make the occasional post with a link to your site in it.

17. Start you own Squidoo page and add links back to your website.

18. Start your own Hub at Hubpages and add links back to your website.

19. Start your own free blog at Wordpress.com and add links back to your website.

The success of your "link exchange campaign" will come down to how much time and effort you are willing to put into it. Some creative thinking will also help you to build a network of people wishing to exchange links with you.

Just be sure to never succumb to all of the "amazing" success stories advertised by software programs that guarantee you certain number of links. Google and many other search engines do not look kindly to these types of programs and you could just find your site being blacklisted.