Have you ever driven down a road you’ve been down a thousand times, and just noticed a business that has been there for years? That business could use some better advertising.

It’s a similar situation for online businesses. Traffic steers, or is steered by search engines and referrals, right past your website to the competition.

So how do you get your website noticed in a sea of highly visible competitors?

Use someone else’s resources.

YouTube Video Marketing

According to Nielsen stats from April 2010, YouTube is the top online video brand in the world. Over 12 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

If YouTube were Hollywood, YouTube would release 240,000 feature films per month, or about 8,000 per day. So, simply adding a video to your channel isn’t the best way to market your business using YouTube.

Instead, use the Promoted Videos feature to display your ad alongside related content, and to make your video appear in search results for certain keywords.

Through YouTube’s marketing programs, you can stream video live to your audience. They also offer YouTube Mobile (m.youtube.com), which has 7.1 million unique viewers per month.

You can also purchase ads on the videos of others, or place a link to your website within your own video. For instance, say you want to sell Halloween accessories such as lawn decorations and zombie costumes. You could create a video of your costumes being worn and submit it to someone else’s account in a related niche, or make it a promoted video with a link to your website in a Flash overlay ad. See YouTube’s advertising overview page for more information.

The Money is in the List

Create a free report or some kind of tool people will find useful and ask other webmasters in your field if they will include your report or tool in their next newsletter. This is easy to do, and it will not take long before you see a major flow of traffic from the recipients of those newsletters.

Make sure to include a link to your website, preferably to a page related to your report or tool. For example, link to your report’s bibliography or the source code of your program.

Create a Useful Report and Sell It

Have you heard of Fiverr? You can create a report and sell it there for $5 with the stipulation that your contact information or URL remain in place, then continue to sell the report to others. You can also sell reports on various forums and sites similar to Fiverr. As long as the report contains interesting, non-duplicate content, people will be interested.

This is a way to further establish yourself as an authority in your niche, or in a sub-niche, and invite interested traffic. Traffic that is already interested converts better than traffic from visitors who don’t know you. The great thing about Fiverr and related sites is that you can ask for a review from satisfied buyers and use those as testimonials on your own website.

Quality Guest Posts, Videos and Comments

Contact other webmasters about posting content that will lead their readers back to your site. Make it clear to the webmaster that you know the audience when you pitch your idea to him or her. With both guest posts and video, do the best work you are capable of – the quality of your content should at least rival that of the website you wish to guest post on. Offer to guest post on blogs and websites that are high quality, because you want to attract engaged personalities and increase the number of active visitors to your own site.

Leaving comments on other blogs that are related to your own is another great strategy. If readers see you making an interesting comment about a topic they’re involved with, they will likely visit your site. Keep in mind that your comments should also be of high quality – don’t simply state that you agree or disagree. Raise a question, point out information that will enhance the article, or make a pertinent point that the author left out. Encourage discussion instead of just promoting your business or brand.

Use Forums and Directories

Web 2.0 sites are ones that provide visitors with outlets to have their voice heard and share information with each other. Place your articles in such forums and in active directories where people discuss topics related to your niche. Participate in discussions and link to your site when appropriate – such as when you have an article on your site that goes into great detail about a given topic.

Create a Landing Page for Interested Traffic

So you’re pulling in traffic from other websites, blogs, forums, and sites like Fiverr. What are the reasons those people chose to visit your site? Send your sources to landing pages related to the content that brought them to your site. Leave a simple greeting on the page with links to additional resources or research (some of those resources should be similar to the content that brought them to your page), offer a free report, and ask if they would like to sign up for your newsletter.

About the Author

Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy testing sites, generating traffic or writing content, he enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, watching TV, playing games or going camping.

Photo by Dan Kamminga.

I was doing a search in Google images and noticed advertisements for the first time.

Is this new? Or am I just the last person to notice?

Either way it looks like Google is finding new and interesting ways to advertise and make money.

And it’s another way that you can use pay-per-click to get traffic to your site.

I just came across this website that offers eyelashes for your car.  (I guess some people are just not getting enough attention!)

When I first saw it I couldn’t help but laugh and tell others about it.

What does this have to do with getting traffic?

This site is doing something that is funny and bizarre. And it’s getting people’s attention. I don’t have access to their traffic statistics but I’m guessing that their traffic has grown dramatically. People are talking about it on twitter and word is spreading about this funny concept.

This is the exact kind of thing that marketing guru Seth Godin talks about.

So what can you do that is funny or bizarre or outlandish to get people to talk about your website?

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff.

Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

This is a great example of marketing in a subway tunnel for a funeral service.

It’s a little morbid but it’s simple, gets your attention, memorable, and is something people will talk about (like I am talking about it here on my blog).

Tidying up my hard drive was an experience. Not just the hundreds – maybe thousands – of files generated over the past couple of years but also the incredible numbers of downloaded ebooks and free articles on generating traffic.

It made me think about traffic generators and how we all struggle to get to the top of the dog pile. Oh wait, bad choice – Dogpile being a search engine. Great name. But I digress. The struggle is to get to the top of the search engines. Hmm, getting to the top of the dog pile might be an appropriate reference after all.

There is a lesson to be learned in the Dogpile/Google comparison. Google became so popular that the word has been absorbed into the vernacular and even in movies and on television, actors say things like, “I googled that.” No one ever says, “I dogpiled that.” Or if they did, an entirely different connotation is conjured.

Every one of the ebooks and articles on my hard drive are on thousands of other hard drives. Every one of these bits of wisdom has been read (or at least available to be read) by all my competitors.

Imagine 1,000 marketers all implementing the same techniques according to the information in these ebooks. All our materials will be created equally so which one of us races to the top of Google first?

How do you get to stand out from the crowd? There are three immediate ways that come to mind that will make your efforts the better traffic generator:

• Absorb the information you read and before implementing the technique, think about it and think about added value. How can you take it one step farther than everyone else who is reading the same advice?For instance, when you hear that content is king, don’t just stuff your site with blather and think that you have content. Give your reader real meat not warmed over spun versions of weak badly written articles.
• Be original. When you read the advice, much of it comes from gurus and gurus in the making who are into selling tools and techniques on internet marketing. Being human, we try to pattern ourselves after winners. But what happens when we pattern ourselves after the advice of internet marketers? Oops, we try to be internet marketing gurus ourselves.While we have to understand how to market in the internet, what we are trying to market should be our personal area of expertise or interest. Putting it another way, what we need to take from the advice is how to sell online not how to sell internet marketing online.
• The third way is to actually read the advice that you have stashed on your hard drive.Seriously, how many of those ebooks have you really read? Or did you skim the headlines and set it aside for when you have time?