Flood Your Website WIth Traffic

Analyze your Competition

If you find a consulting site that is in direct competition with you, get some inside information on the company like its top 25 competitors and if they are ranked in the top 10 of any search terms by using http://googspy.com/

Link Building
Another way to get traffic to your consulting site is to look for sites that offer related information or products (not competitors) and then offer to put links to their site on your site if they will reciprocate. The search engines look favorably at sites that have multiple links to them providing that the links are related your consulting business. For example a link from a site that sold business books would be considered a “good” link; a link from a costume store would not be looked at favorably by the search engines.

Blogging
Blogs are small posts that are done on your website or on blogging software platforms like Blogger which is owned by google. There are many advantages to blogging. You will get additional traffic to your consulting site. You create a loyal client base. You build your reputation as a credible consultant and advisor. So why would you not do them? They are very time consuming and many blogs are often written daily so it is a big commitment.

If you want to give blogging a try, I suggest going to Blogger.com and signing up for a free account. If you like the blog content management system you may not even need to pay for design beyond a site logo. If you are serious about using a blog as part of your overall image and campaign to build business, consider using blogging software like Wordpress or MovableType.

Participate in Forums
By joining a forum you join a community of users with similar interests. Over time you develop a reputation in the forums for providing consistent and value added advice. By using a signature, which is a short description of your consulting practice with a link to your site, you will generate leads just by posting in the forum. Be careful not to sell or market your consulting products, let your signature do it for you, it is important that people see you as an advisor not someone who is just trying to market their business.

Consider joining our sister site www.smallbusinessforum.com for starters, the site has thousands of small business owners, a place for you to put your blog and a consulting discussion forum.

User Groups
Similar to forums, find User Groups who are in your target market. Search for the various groups and how much activity there is in a particular forum by using this link http://groups.google.com/

You can keep track of these quotes through a service provided by http://www.google.com/alert

Use Craigslist
www.craigslist.org, the free (mostly) alternative to eBay that has taken off with advertisers worldwide.

Craigslist is divided into localities which is great for your consulting practice given most of your business is likely to be local. This division makes it perfect for your local search advertising and marketing campaigns.

Readers search Craigslist by these localities, the goal is to not abuse your free listings, but optimize your listings and list them in a way to draw traffic back to your consulting site. You only need one listing in the proper category (usually under the Services section) and locality to make this strategy work, but nothing says you can’t post in other sections and localities of Craigslist if you wish (though Craigslist has restrictions).

Even though Craigslist doesn’t have the household brand name of eBay, it is a serious traffic source to consider, and the price is right.

Ezine Submissions

If you are currently writing a newsletter for your subscribers, gain further exposure for your newsletter by submitting it to online newsletter repositories. Like posts you are able to put your signature at the end of the newsletter to gain exposure for your consulting business. By searching online with the terms ezines or online newsletter you will notice that there are a lot of sites dedicated to providing online articles. Make sure you submit your articles to the sites with the highest page ranking.

Site Submission

When your web site is finished and ready to promote, you should go to any of these sites and enter your web site address to ask the search engine or directory company to include your site in their database of sites so that it is available when a user searches for a related keyword or topic.

While most search engines have spiders that crawl the internet constantly looking for new or updated web sites, the World Wide Web is now so huge that it could take months for these engines to find you on their own.

Do not use the automated submission services. It doesn’t take that long to submit your site manually, and you will know that it has been done.

To ensure validity, most web site submissions require authentication which means that you will receive an email after you submit your site for consideration.

You will have to respond to that email by following the instructions provided, so that the search engine will recognize your request as a valid request.