This Simple Practice is Still One of the Best for Guaranteed Website Traffic

Even though nowadays we’re all buried deep in junk emails and spam, it is still possible to make new business contacts on the internet. The recent joint venture craze reflects the simple principle that in the end, people do business with PEOPLE – not with bits, bytes and pixels.

Old fashioned networking is still alive and kicking online. Its the best method for getting some good exposure if you’re just starting out and have no money for marketing. By building strong business relationships, you’ll soon have other marketers offering to link to you, publish your articles, write about your site in their newsletter, and maybe even offer you free advertising.

As with all business networking, look for ways to help your peers or colleagues. If they own a website, offer them a backlink on yours. If they happen to have a subscriber list, you could set up a purposed page, and give them a rebate on any commissions. If they write their own content or articles, perhaps you can turn them into a mini-ebook and offer it to all your visitors. There is no reason you can’t be proactive, and send an email to non-competitors – or perhaps even competitors – whose sites you find admirable. You don’t have to consider every competitor your total enemy. Simply put look for opportunities to assist.

One easy way to help – provided you do it diplomatically – is to point out a problem on someone’s site or in their published article(s). If you find a faulty link or another other problem, drop them an email to let them know. Most webmasters WANT to know if a link suddenly stops working or if their database is generating server errors.

Another way to make powerful friends online is to read your Junk mail. And that is because ALL online sellers will want to know if someone is promoting their products via an illegal practice such as Spam. This is because it’s not just the Spammer who can suffer some stiff legal penalties – the vendor can too. So if you see someone else’s products being sold via Spam, email to them and let them know. Make sure you keep the original Spam, and send it to them as an attachment (not forwarded) so they receive all the mail headers intact for proof.

If you make 20 strong, personal, one-on-one business contacts every month, at least five of them will end up sending you some traffic.

Somehow, someday, they’ll start sending the right kinds of visitors to you, almost guaranteed website traffic. It might be by via linking to you. They may mention your site in a viral ebook or in some of their published content. They may want to do a JV or partner on a money making project. They might do all these things – and many more. Yes, it’s old fashioned. It’s not autopilot. It’s not passive. But networking costs you nothing except time – the guaranteed website traffic that results can be worth gold in the longer term.