Seriously, if you want traffic to your site and don't want to pay or have no money to pay, then you can still generate lots of traffic. Follow my tips and you'll be fine. Ignore them and you can keep posting here forever with desperate pleas to help you achieve what we all ultimately want- More traffic/Visitors/Buyers/Players/Members etc...
Tips:
1) Make the site worthy and user friendly. People are very finicky and if the site doesn't grab them right away in some form, then you're done and your bounce rate is sky high and then Google won't like you and then you will never get a good page ranking. BOUNCE RATE is very important. Look into it!
2) It's a lot of hard work people. At first you must always be putting out your link, asking friends, joining forums, making signatures for your emails, finding free quality places to advertise like Oggix.com etc...There is really know easy road when it's for free.
3) Forums are probably by far the best way I found for quick members. Join every one that is very similar to yours (Hence people have the exact same interest which means targeted visitors to your site) If you don't find an appropriate place to post a thread, then usually the Off topic will do. Bookmark them all so you can go back later and respond. This will keep your ad or promo at the top which means more views.
4) Watch out for negative promotions. Link exchanges and credit systems usually fail because people just click and leave right away without truly visiting your site which in turn hurts your BOUNCE RATE with Google. An example? You join a banner exchange site. They promise that for each link you click, they will send you someone to click back right? What good does that do you if you click 79 links in less than a minute and the people visiting you do the same. USELESS! Forget about it. And who's to say that the people promising credits to your site for advertising theirs are even sending you members at all? Do you even have a traffic monitor program on your site to tell for sure what is going on?
5) Get a Traffic Monitor program so you see where the majority of hits are coming from and focus on those places. Google knows the web and search engines better than anyone so why not go and place Google Analytics on your site. Trust me, it sounds big and complicated but it is really simple and easy. I have almost 900 members to my game in under 2 months since I launched it so I know it helps.
6) Stay away from Traffic promoting sites that offer lots of visitors for money. Most of them just send bots which once again hurt your BOUNCE RATE which in turn kills your page rank. Others send untargetted traffic. What good does it do you if you have a site about hunting and the visitors coming by are interested in comic books???? Exactly, it doesn't!
7) Make the web and other sites work for YOU! Go to Yahoo Answers for example. If your site is about comics then ask a question like "DC or Marvel? Which do you prefer?" and let yahoo send that question for 10,000 people to view. And of course you have the link to your comic site in the post. And when people get to your site, make sure to have the same question as a poll.
8) Be friendly and greet EVERYONE you can personally. I have a generic message I made for my site and an admin option to view all members online. If/when I see a new member is online, I instantly send them a nice greeting message with some tips to my game. Not only does it personalize the game more, but I have had numerous people thank me and within a day or two they have already purchased a premium membership and money is ultimately what we all want.
9) LOOK BUSY! How you ask because you only have 2 or 3 members? Well then MAKE members yourself. Before my game went public I made about 100 bots or non player characters (NPC's) to make the game look like it already had great interest on the day of launch. No one wants to join your site on Macintosh computers if it only has 6 members and the other forums have thousands right? So do what your wife does and fake it! haha
10) Don't be lazy. Stop sitting on you butt watching SouthPark or the new Batman movie and wondering why you still have only 2 new members in a week. Get creative and find your own ways to advertise.
11) Word of mouth. By far one of the greatest ways to get members on any site. How did you suddenly join Facebook or youtube??? Because people started mentioning it to you right? Youtube didn't pull your name out of a hat and say "Yeah, lets email this lucky guy today and see if he'll join" So encourage friends to promote you even if they don't like your site themselves. Honestly, about 20% of my members are from word of mouth. That is about 165 people out of 900 and guess what? Probably about 12-17 of them are premium members which means more money every week for me.
12) Don't reinvent the wheel. A site will only grow if it is somehow unique and different from others. It doesn't matter how. Maybe the color scheme or the layout or functions or whatever. Just make sure to have something different or your membership will goto all the competetors who are busy making lots of money.
13) No mess and Spam and clutter! Don't throw ads everywhere hoping to get rich fast. Your 3 members won't help. Ads are a numbers game. If you have 50,000 members then you may make ok coin, but don't distract or annoy visitors or potential members when starting out. I have ZERO ads on my site because I hate them and they're ugly. I haven't had 1 complaint begging me to add some so apparently nobody misses them.
There are a lot more little tips, but that's it for now and if I helped a few people get a few more members, then it was worth it. Goodluck peeps and get busy!
