How to Generate Traffic to a New Site – Focus on the Niche

Creating a new site is always fun. This has always been the best way for me to get inspired, find new valuable contacts, broaden my outlook, etc.

A solid start is important. This way you can quickly meet people who will than share your message, link to your content and grow your resource.

However doing it right is not that easy: we don't talk about any traffic here. It is not a problem now to drive people to visit: but they will come and go. We need visitors that will come, read, subscribe, share and the return.

Let me share how I launch new projects and get people learn about them.

1. Make sure you have good content to promote

The fact that you are launching a new site should mean that you have already done some research in the niche, know your competitors (and maybe friends) and can imagine what people like or dislike reading on that topic.

So assuming you already know the niche fairly well, make sure to create something worthy which get people interested.

A good piece of content that will ensure a solid start should be useful in the first place. Be sure to spend some considerable amount of time on doing some solid research and come up with something that will make readers appreciate it.

Don't try to invent something unheard, don't try to chase after the WOW affect - this will only prevent you from creating a really high-quality piece. Better focus on usefulness.

Here are some ideas and resources to help:

• A solid how-to article. This almost always works. MUO has a good, detailed guide and tool collection on how to research the topic properly and create a perfect how-to article.
• A detailed and helpful infographic. A good infographic helps to mind-map and organize massive amounts of information. Here's a good example: affiliate program review infographic called Affiliate Marketing Report Card
• A useful list. People love lists: they are eager to bookmark them as a good reference. Creating just another list like anyone in your niche won't help. Work on something more complete and better organized than anything that has already been published on the topic. Something of the type I once did listing free SEO tools.
• Going local is also a great way to pick the blog up almost immediately! Not only, local search results are easier to rank for, being a local blogs opens up several other traffic-driving opportunities such as being listed in local directories, like InsiderPages, SuperPages, DexKnows, DirJournal Local, etc

2. Step 2: Find best places to get the word out

If you are an established user on some general social networks, you don't have any problem looking for places to share your new content.

But what if you are a newbie or just entering a completely new niche? Where to start?

Some people will recommend buying some traffic by advertising on Facebook or StumbleUpon. I wouldn't start there.

Instead, I'd better start with smaller tightly-targeted niche social networks. They won't send you thousands of visitors - they will only let a few people come to your new website. But those few people are well worth thousands. They will expose your posts to many more interested visitors. They will promote your site in plenty of ways you've never heard of.

Back in 2007 when I was just starting blogging and was clueless about what is going on in that public SEO sector which seemed so huge and powerful, I wrote a short post branding your domain name. Looking at that post now, I see nothing special about that: but at that time it turned out to be fresh and useful.

No one was visiting my blog then, so I went ahead and dared to submit it to Sphinn. It got something like 7 Sphinns but one of the Sphinn referrals came and discovered the post on StumbleUpon.

Voila! Thousands of people coming from some mysterious referral (stumbleupon.com/refer.php - I had no idea what that was but I soon knew!). But most importantly, that submission to a tightly-targeted niche network (which never went hot) put me into contact with first valuable contacts in the niche.

Those people started visiting my blog, commenting at my posts, voting for my staff - they encouraged me to move further and are still my best friends and partners.

The Bottom Line

Now, the point of the whole post was that you shouldn't try to draw thousands of visitors to your new site. Start by little and you'll achieve much more than you have ever expected.

Post images by Phil McElhinney and twid