Using similar websites to find sources of traffic

The following article expands on the following ideas :
- Link trades ;
- Public Stats / Hit Counters ;
- Top Referrers.

One of the best ways to get an idea of sources of traffic is to surf websites that are similar to yours. No matter how unique your site is, there will still be other sites that have common content to some extent. Finding these sites is merely a matter of googling your keywords or keywords that you think are similar to yours.

Once you find a few appropriate websites, look over the links area and see if they are accepting link trades. If your site is up and running, send them an email or fill in the link trade form. Link trades are a great source of traffic and also help to increase your page rank. If the site does not advertise that it is accepting link trades, it may still be worth sending them a polite email requesting a link trade. Alternatively, you could put up their link on your site and send them some traffic for free. Some sites will place your link up as a result of this. Still looking at the links area, it is worth clicking on the listed links that are similar to your website to see if they are accepting link trades. Follow the same steps as in the previous paragraph.

Some websites have public stats. I.E. they make available the infomation for website viewers to see where the website is getting its traffic from. This is fairly rare, however keep a look out for this button as it is a common stat counter that shows public stats. Click on it and you can see where the website is getting its traffic from. Vistit these sites and see if you can trade links with them or submit your link. Similarly, websites may have a link similar to "top 100 referrers' which lists sites that are sending that site the most traffic. These links are well worth checking out.

Each of the concepts discussed above are explored further in the website and can be accessed by clicking on the labels either at the end of this post or in the sidebar.