This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. The first thing you want to do when attempting to drive traffic to a site is assess whether or not methods other than advertising will work on the site. For example, you can’t do article marketing successfully with an affiliate link.
2. The next thing you want to do if a site is viable, is determine which of the available methods will go with your site, prioritizing from the most compatible to the least.
3. Every business that has a web site, and many that don’t, can benefit from organic search or social media, usually both. The complicated part is how. When in doubt, rely on a plan with those two things at its center.
4. Make sure that at some point before proceeding, you have a goal for the project. You can’t evaluate whether you’ve been successful if you don’t know whether traffic has gone up, if sales are rising, if more people are subscribing etc. Choose a traffic goal that’s directly related to your business objectives.
5. Determine the desired path through your site to a sale – what is the money funnel, and is it sound? Do people come to the site, subscribe, buy? Should they see your ad and then call? If so, are they doing it? If not, why not?
6. Never rely on one traffic method – what happens if it fails or is suddenly obsolete?
7. Don’t try to do ALL the traffic methods you come across either, not unless you have a staff to execute on your behalf. Instead of attempting to do every traffic method you’ve heard of, add one at a time of up to five methods. Drop the ones that don’t work and replace them with new techniques.
8. In selecting the five core techniques you want to use, it helps if they play off each other. In other words, if part of your mission is to build links, then article marketing or forum posting might help you get there faster. Approaching them with a mind to maximize those particular strengths will be more effective than doing so as an after thought.
9. Test each traffic technique by isolating as much as you can. Try blocking a page from being indexed by search engines, and testing the method on only that page.
10. At the same time, don’t get so attached to testing and test results that you can’t proceed without 100% proof positive that the specific technique works the way you wanted it to – sometimes that gets in the way. For example, a tracking link in a resource box of an article will get much less traffic than a regular link.
11. Get help if you need it. No one expects you to be brilliant at your business And at marketing it. Even if you are, you only have two hands. Get a virtual assistant. Hire a marketing team or a search expert.
12. When you hire someone, or choose someone’s advice to follow, do your homework. Google their name, their site and their company, and pay attention to both compliments and complaints. Check if they’re respected by their peers – are they guest speakers or authors outside their own web site? Who are they affiliated with?

Update: You can now find links to the entire series of tips below.

I’m sure you’ve noticed some of the changes I’ve made to the site lately – design changes, topic changes… it’s all about course correction.

By that I mean that the things that this site has become known for aren’t necessarily the things that are helping you the most. At the same time, I don’t want to completely scrap all the other things you’ve grown to enjoy.

So I’m in the process of diverting some of my thought leadership discussions to other sites, but still finding a way to incorporate those headlines into the stream of information that comes from here. That way, each of the four major groups and the four major reasons for loving the site can all still converge in one location.

It’s the 68th day of the year. So to kick things off, today I’m going to do  68 traffic tips (or link to some of the tips I’ve given so far this year). After today, we’ll see how long I can keep up a daily traffic tip – or at least provide you with seven tips a week. No promises this time – you know about my schedule, health issues, and other extenuating circumstances – but I’ll do my best.

We’ll start shortly and the list will include:

• 8 Blog Traffic Tips
• 12 General Traffic Tips
• 21 Search Traffic Tips
• 8 RSS Traffic Tips
• 9 Social Media Traffic Tips
• 10 Article Marketing Traffic Tips

366 Ways to Get Web Visitors –

I have decided to release a list of 366 Traffic Methods all at once. So now, you can’t ask me how to get traffic for a WHOLE YEAR.

Go away!

Okay, I’m just kidding.

Really.

The great thing about this guide is that it’s rebrandable.

You can just put your own link on the front page, or you can do that AND join the free affiliate program and load affiliate links in it with the rebranding kit, a zip file you can find right here or on the last page of the guide. I have committed Mac treason and created a program that only runs on Windows, (XP or Vista). Please refrain from flogging me. I will do my best to help if you have a Mac that doesn’t run Windows, just reply below.

(And… btw… HOW DO YOU LIVE? I was without Windows on my MacBook Pro for two weeks and almost drown in my own tears. Anyway.)

(You can get your 366 Traffic Methods here if you are reading this via feed and can’t see the embed above. That’s a PDF link so don’t hurt yourself!)

If you own The Evergreen Traffic System or Traffic Reality and are signed up at my site, there’s an affiliate link in your member area that will give you an extra 10% bonus, so please use that one instead of signing up twice.

Oh, and of course I forgot to mention in the guide that the cookie the affiliate code drops is good for a Year.

That’s right, even if it takes a year for someone who signs up to our newsletter at the site to buy, or even if they don’t sign up but you were the first person to tell them, it will be a year before anyone else gets to make a sale through them.

So. Uh. You might want to grab the rebrand kit and get your copy out there before everyone else.

And if you need hints as to how you can do that?

It’s a guide to generating web traffic! So you can use the traffic generating guide to generate traffic to the traffic generating guide. Lots of the methods are free, too. (See what I did there?)