Driving Traffic!

I am curious to know how you drive traffic to your site?    When it comes to exchanging reciprocal links, I am frustrated that the links.php page does not provide categories and pagination.  Search engines decrease your popularity if you have over 25 links on a page.

I tried setting up My Link Helper (http://www.mylinkhelper.com) and had it working at one point, but after reinstalling my site, I can't get it going.

What is your best secret to driving traffic!????

Thanks for your comments.

Lisa

FIRST AND FOREMOST,
you learn to abide by forum posting rules and you dont double post. you posted this same thing in three seconds. do not do that. if you have a legitimate question, post it and somebody will answer you. 

Later,
DosDawg

Oh ok Dawg.  So sorry.  I did not mean to break the law! :)  Thanks for educating me on the rules and regulations of proper forum posting!

Happy Day!

Lisa

Oh, and P.S.  How do YOU drive traffic? :)

Lisa, glad you understand, and it wasnt a law you broke, but the rules of posting in a forum. with the number of members this community has, we try to get an answer to each and every post if we are avaliable to. we are volunteers, and donate our time to answering and helping those of you who are new to this community. we appreciate the new faces and challenges as well. but the point of the matter is that you dont double post on any forum, anywhere, and some forums will ban you for doing just that.


ok now that we have that part out of the way, you are looking to get traffic to your site? this is a billion dollar question you know that right. the way to market your particular site totally depends on the audience you are looking for. but the first thing you have to do is have a clear and present target, you can step out here thinking you are goin to take over the internet, it will simply be depressing, and you wont feel sucessful in your attempts. now since i dont know your target market i am going to speak generically, in regards to getting traffic, now you said traffic, not members, but traffic, those are two different and distinct entities. the first thing i would do is once the site has it content, and is ready for public use, i would get a google account, create some adsense, place the max number of ads on the site, i think its three per page. then i would look at some affiliate programs CJ, and linksenergy are the two best places i know to kick that off.

now you have content, you have paying affiliate ads on the site, and you are ready for traffic. if your site is optimized, and you have done your homework for your target audience, you will start to see an influx of traffic, but most likely nothing overwhelming. if you are desiring more traffic than that, you can setup an account with google for adwords, this is where you pay for keywords and your advert will show up on the google page. keywords get pricey, just forwarn you on that one. same with yahoo, you can run yahoo ads, but you cannot run yahoo ads in conjunction with google ads. i also seen something and i have it on my site freeki ads similar to adsense, but not google.

the other most profound way to get traffic to your site, is the old fashioned way, word of mouth, you tell 10 people, they tell 10, so on and so forth.

you can also place flyers and banners in businesses in your town that are part of your target audience. go around and post on bulletin boards. craigs list seems to be a hot place for a lot of ads.

well i dont know if any of this will help you, but i did take the time to put forth an effort to explain what gets traffic to your site.

regards,
DosDawg (links was removed)

Also, have something worth coming back for.  It's hard enough getting people to come to your site the first time, but if they're not impressed by what they see, it's unlikely they'll return.