Gaining Traffic

What is Traffic?
What exactly is traffic anyway? Also reffered to as "hits" or "pageviews", your site traffic is basically the amount of people that come visit your site in any given time frame (a hour, a week, a month, a year and so on). For most website owners, one of the main goals in their site is to gain as many visitors as possible. Many sites will only allow you to affiliate with a certain number of daily pageviews. Yes, this can be annoying, but it's life. Usually, traffic is divided into two groups: Unique Pageviews and Total Pageviews.

The Unique pageviews are the more interesting since they tell you how many different people look at your site. Total pageviews are just a collection of all pageviews, even if its the same person 5 times in a row.

Confused? Well, let's say Joey has a website. Joey works on his site a lot and spread over the day, visits it 10 times. Three other neopians visit Joey's site (let's call it "Braincells Reunited", shall we, Jen?) that day; each one time. Therefore, Braincells Reunited gets 13 total pageviews (10 from Joey and 3 from the other people), but only 4 unique pageviews (since only 4 different people viewed Braincells Reunited.

Sneak Advertising
In my book, this is just about the best way of getting your site known. What is sneak advertising? We all know it from TV - in the middle of that uber cool action scene the hero will take out a juicy fruit and go "mmm YUMMY" or one of the charactors is windex obsessive. What this does is it gets that product seen by all the people that watch the film and some kid might go "Omg that guy had a juicy fruit! I WANT ONE TOO!".

Of course, this doesn't work like that in the internet world. What you can do is choose about 5 active neopets related websites. Then, you can comment in guestbooks, shoutboxes or through a cutenews comment box. Always make sure your comment relates to the post (in the case of cutenews) or the website in general (in the case of guestbooks or shoutboxes) and that you do not repeat yourself. Also be sure not to break any of the website rules or start spamming. Posting on a regular basis and including your website URL will encourage others to have a peek. You might not believe this, but it works wonders :P.

Forums
Forums are another one of those awesome places to advertise. Simply sign up and add your site URL to your signature (provided that the forum rules allow it). If you post just twice a day, all the people that visit those forums will see your website URL. Do not PM or u2u others asking them to look at your site - just keep that subtle link in your signature. If you want, you can also use your own avatar or signature and offer to make requests on the forum. It's a very useful medium when it comes to spreading word of your website.

Affiliates & Sister Sites
Affiliates and sister sites are the same thing. The term "sister" is more commonly used in the celeb/blog area of personal websites since those are usually created by girls. Neopets sites usually refer to them as "affiliates". Either way, many websites offer an "Apply for Affiliates" (or "Affie") page. Simply follow the instructions on that page, apply for about 20 sites and hope to get accepted by as many as possible.

Afterword
I hope this has helped you increase the traffic to your site. Remember to link back to us if this tutorial has helped you ^^

~Kathrin