How Do I Get the First 1,000 Visitors to My Website?

In the lens How to Build a Recession Proof Online Business, I suggested that a website could get 1,000 visitors in its first month after launch. A number of readers contacted me to ask how they could achieve this.

So here is my answer with real data to illustrate each activity.

Like all marketing activities you first need to set goals and break the target into bite size chunks. As the old saying goes:

"The only way to eat an elephant is one mouthful at a time"

So if we want to achieve 1,000 visitors, we need to get 34 people a day coming to your website (1,000/30days).


Step #1 - Create Some Fantastic Content

The first thing you MUST do is create and publish some excellent content. Without this there is absolutely no point in driving traffic to your website.


Step #2 - Open a Google Reader Account

Google Reader allows you to get all of the latest posts from all the best websites and blogs in your niche. If you actively monitor what these sites are publishing you can jump in with comments quickly.

Have a look at this article to learn about setting up a free Google Reader account - http://www.subhub.com/articles/google-reader-how-to-use


Step #3 - Create some Squidoo and Hubpages

Squidoo (www.squidoo.com) and HubPages (www.hubpages.com) are sites where you can create pages about your area of expertise. Then link from these pages back to your website.


Squidoo Example



Today's traffic (according to Google Analytics) from one Squidoo page was 30 visitors.



And the traffic since the start of April from Squidoo is 380 visitors. These visitors looked at an average of 3.13 pages on SubHub.com and stayed on the site for 4 minutes 47 seconds. These figures suggest that these visitors were interested in the SubHub content and therefore are potential customers.




Hubpages Example



Today's traffic from Hubpages is quite low at 6 visitors, but they looked at 4.5 pages each and stayed on the SubHub site for 3 minutes and 31 seconds which shows they are well targeted:




The Hubpages figures for all of April show 58 visitors. Not a high number, but the quality of these visitors, indicated by the number of pages each one looked at (6.72 pages) and the length of time they spend on the site (7 mins 12 secs), is very high.




Step #4 - Comment on Relevant Blogs

Most blogs allow you to add comments to posts and include a link back to your website. If you write carefully thought through comments which help the community, readers will click on links to articles on your site.

Here are a couple of examples of how well targeted comments on good quality blogs can generate good quality visitors. I made this comment on ReadWriteWeb.com. The link I included was relevant to the article content:




This comment generated 76 unique visitors to the SubHub site:



I also made this comment yesterday on the excellent Problogger blog.




... and it generated 26 good quality visitors.



If you make one good comment on an active blog every day you could generate between 600 and 1,000 visitors to your site in a month.

But it is not always possible to find 30 blog posts to comment on, so you should also participate in forums that are relevant to your niche subject.


Step #5 - Add Posts to Forums

Generally comments on blogs generate more traffic than forum posts because they remain in place and are relevant for much longer. A post on a very active forum may only stay on page one for a couple of hours.

However using forums you can generate traffic very quickly without much effort.

This is a post that was published by someone on the WarriorForum.com which includes a link to a SubHub article:



As you can see 354 people read the post and 13 of those readers left a comment.




The result from the link in this post was 15 visitors clicked to read the article on the SubHub site. Each of these visitors, on average, looked at 3.13 pages each and spent 3:37 minutes on the website:




If you created one good post on one or more active forums every day you could generate between 300 and 600 visitors to your site every month from this activity.


Conclusion

Using these simple activities you could generate over 1,000 visitors to your website in its first month.

Squidoo and HubPages ~ 200 - 600 visitors.
One blog comment a day ~ 600 - 1,000 visitors.

You would also be creating lots of inbound links which will help the search engines find, index and rank your website.

Remember to build your authority and reputation on the important blogs and forums in your niche by making valuable and useful contributions. Never just stick links into posts. You will quickly get blacklisted.

I hope that these techniques will help you get your traffic building activities started.

Remember to track your daily progress using a web statistics service like the excellent (and free) Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics).