Best ways to boost your traffic

To successfully get quality traffic to your website, blog or any other page, you need to get familiar with all that is out there and what is best for you.

First things firs, there are three types of traffic: cold, warm and hot.

Here is their meaning in short, just to get the idea about what you are working with. These are not the official definitions, but my understanding of them:

1. cold traffic - those are all the people out there that basically don't know you or your business exist.
2. warm traffic - people who you already approached or made a first contact, or have a rather general idea on what is it you are offering.
3. hot traffic - when people know and recognize you and your business, take interest by themselves even and recommend you further, that is hot traffic.

So, the warmer the traffic the better results you are going to get. The most common hot traffic of course is to start promoting to your family and friends. They already know you and is easier to talk to them and introduce new things. Through them you can generate a substantial warm traffic (ex. friends of my friends friend). So for someone who is just starting i think that this would be the best way to start. You can get a good feedback from all those people, fine tune what ever needs your attention, and continue from there.

The hardest step, from my point of view, would be to continue widening your audience, because than you have to start with completely cold traffic, and warm it up step by step. You have to be patient with new people, give them information piece by piece, unless they ask for more on their own. People that don't know you can easily get scared, because lat's be honest, there are a lot of scams out there.

Knowing all this, not as few months ago, I started exploring all kinds of different "boost your traffic" options for my small blog. And to be clear, i am talking now only about starting from the cold traffic, and there are several sources that you can easily use.

The most obvious choice is the social media - Facebook, Tweeter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest... You can post to any or every and make it simple and easily appealing to anyone out there. The trick is to make them stick with what you are offering. So my advice would be to create a page or blog post where there are some explanations or information on what you are promoting, or something that will keep people on your page a bit longer than 10 seconds. It will not happen overnight, you have to be patient.

Another option is to write comments and articles on other peoples blogs or forums. It sounds strange, but it is rather effective. That way you are already reaching masses that are there to read something and will look for more content. But choose well rated sites, those that you yourself would read or are similar topic to yours.

There is also an option to use third sites that offer traffic exchange. So far i tried two different free types: automated and click to verify. 

Automated ones are easiest to use. You just spin your address in their system and let it roll in the background, collecting hits from all over the world. It is easy to use, it can run all night if your computer doesn't go to sleep and it does boost your traffic a lot. The one downfall is that also people who surf on the other end and visit your page, you guessed it, don't really see it or read it. So you are basically boosting your numbers and not the number of potential readers.

Click to verify traffic exchange is a bit better in that area, because it requires a physical confirmation (usually to solve a small puzzle and click the answer) that a certain page has been visited. That way you know that people at least looked at your page and maybe read something. On the downside, from my experience the maximum of pages i have managed to confirm in one day has been around a 100 so that will boost traffic a bit but with more quality views. This is a good option to use simultaneously when you are already doing something on the internet.

As a final suggestion from me, there are all these different options: 

• you can use sites that host posts and answer questions (like Quora), 
• you can use so called click sites (Clickworkers, Rapidworkers...) to basically pay a cent or two for people to visit your page, 
• you can go through an influencer (a person that has a lot of followers and has influence to promote your business), 
• you can even use payed adds and advanced marketing strategies... 

But my advice is to leave payed stuff for much later, when you have used up most of your other options. Paying money for an add will guaranty the prime placement and that more people will see the add, but there is no guaranty on how many people will actually go from cold to warm or hot traffic.

What ever you choose, this is summing it up in short: Some traffic is better than no traffic, but if you can choose always go for quality over quantity and be persistent and patient.