It’s not making a website which is the hard part about getting a new online business off the ground – anyone can do that. The hard part is getting visitors to the site; not to mention convincing them to buy something from you. What you’re going to have to do in order to start bringing in not only visitors, but paying customers is to start using the power of Web 2.0 to drive targeted web traffic to your site. A few ideas follow which you could get started using today, so let’s get right into it, shall we?

First things first: you are very likely wondering what Web 2.0 is. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer here; Web 2.0 is a set of ideas rather than a specific entity. It’s a collective term for dynamic, interactive sites like blogs, social media and social bookmarking platforms as well as social networking sites. All of these are easy to work with and can be used to generate targeted web traffic for your site.

The chances are that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are things you’re familiar with already. These kinds of sites tend to come and go, but these two are the most popular at present and are the top choices of website owners trying to drive targeted web traffic to their sites. These sites allow you to create a profile page which tells others about you and your site and why they may be interested in visiting.

In order to make sure that other users of the social networks stay interested in your page is to keep updating the content regularly. If someone comes to your page and sees you haven’t updated it in six months, they’re not nearly as likely to visit your site. Online, people are looking for the latest information, so you need to make sure that you stick to a regular daily, weekly or biweekly update schedule.

If you don’t have a profile on one of these social networks, the time to make one is now; since it only takes a couple of minutes, just go ahead and set one up right now. It’s not essential to install all of the many add-ons available or to decorate your page right now. You can do this later; and it is easier than you think to overdo it with the bells and whistles and actually lose potential customers. When you have your profiles set up on these two popular social networks, start searching for people you already know – there’s probably quite a few people in your life who use Facebook or MySpace already.

Twitter allows you to automatically update your MySpace and Facebook pages. From your Twitter account, click on “settings” in the upper right. In the Account tab, scroll down until you see “You can also add Twitter to your site here.” If you click on it, you’ll see options to add MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, and other sites. Once you choose them, copy and paste the code onto your other pages and Twitter updates will post there as well. This is a great timesaver.

Social bookmarking sites are sites like Digg.com that allow people to highlight web content that they like and share it with the rest of the world. Can you bookmark your own pages? Sure. Just set up an account at Digg and follow the directions for “Digging” a particular page. If other people have seen your page, or go to your page and like it, they can add their support to your Digg, which will encourage other people to check it out too. A page that gets a number of Diggs also gets increased targeted web traffic.

Blogs are something else which you probably have some degree of familiarity with already; many businesses already use them to increase their visibility. One of the chief advantages of having a blog for your site is that it’s easy to add new content, which interested readers can then subscribe to by using your RSS feed so that they’ll be notified when you add a post to your blog. You will have to keep posting regularly; however, this isn’t really as much work as you may think. A blog post can be very brief and does not need to be written using formal language. For example, you could make a short post to your blog to announce a new product or service and keep your readers updated about any new developments. You can also add a Twitter feed to your blog with ease to add even more content to this secondary site.

These are just a few of the things you can do to leverage Web 2.0 tactics to get targeted web traffic to your site. It would take a book to describe all the techniques available, but these can get you started.

All the best. B. L. Marlow

B. L. Marlow writes some cool stuff including an ebook on increasing targeted web traffic using Web 2.0 concepts. For a limited time, you can pick up a complimentary copy by visiting his internet marketing strategies site. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory