How to drive traffic to your site

Presumably … if you own or operate a website, you want visitors.  The more the merrier, right?  So, how do we get more people to visit our website?

inQbation launched a new website in June 2010 called SEO Quotient under the domain name SEOQ.COM.  As of today, 9 months later, we have about 5,000 unique visits per day, which is about 150,000 unique visits per month.  According to Alexa, we rank about in the top 100,000 of all websites in the world.  And, since there are at least 10 million websites in the world, that put us in the top 1% of the world.  Not bad for 9 months work.

So, how did we do it and why are all these people coming to our site?  I’ve asked myself the same question and I’ve come up with the formula: cool tools and cool content equals traffic.  Or Ct + Cc = Tr.

So, what are cool tools?

Cool tools could be anything from search engine analysis tools like what you see on SEOQ to ways to get videos on demand without paying per video like what Netflix offers to convenient ways to file your income tax return.  Anything that makes life convenient, fun, or entertaining could be categorized under “Cool Tools.”  A cool tool needs to either solve somebody’s problem or increase their pleasure.  It has to address the pain and pleasure principle.

Cool Content (information) is similar to Cool Tools.  You have to provide pleasure or ease pain.  It’s the pain and pleasure principle all over again.

So … keep that in mind as you brainstorm solutions to your traffic problems.  Give people an incentive or motive to visit your site.  Ease their pain or increase their pleasure. Give them cool tools or cool content and traffic will come.  Hopefully, it is relevant to what you do and sell so you can convert the traffic and make a buck.