When we talk about how to increase traffic to your website, the first thing that we have to decide is what type of traffic we’re looking for and then, once we’ve established quality traffic goals we can start talking about how to get people to visit your site.

It reminds me of a great meeting I had years ago while working for Corel Corporation in Ottawa Canada. I had been invited to a management meeting in the fall of 2000 to discuss how to increase traffic to our corporate store. The web marketing person at the time was there and she’d voiced the opinion that we needed to get a million visitors to the site. I corrected her and stated that we needed to get 10,000 quality visitors. Frankly, she annoyed me but beyond simply having a voice that could curdle milk she was also wrong. After some time, I gave up and blurted out that getting a million visitors to the site wasn’t hard so if we could wrap up the meeting I’d get started right away. The trick I told her was that if you want to get a million visitors to the web store, all you need to do is place a banner on a few dozen sites that read “Want to get fucked? Click here.”

Needless to say, this wasn’t the traffic the company wanted and most likely also isn’t what you’re looking for so instead of looking at increasing traffic, let’s look at how to increase quality traffic.

Right up front there are a few easy ways to help generate traffic to your site. First off, offer people something for free. Contests, giveaways and marketing promos are always a great way to keep people coming back. Online Flash games that feature your products, quizzes, calculators and downloadable forms are also powerful tools for helping keep people online.

Newsletters, RSS feeds, PodCasts and subscriptions will also help you recycle traffic back to your website after they’ve come for a first time. Keep in mind that unless you offer something truly unique, the best way to build traffic and keep traffic hasn’t changes since the days of Greek stages … quality content, delivery and writing.