One can create the greatest website and have the largest amount of content on this site, but if nobody sees it, it will never be a success. Johnny understands this and realizes that he needs to generate TRAFFIC to his website. After much research, Johnny discovers the best ways to generate traffic:

SEARCH ENGINES

Most people start off their internet sessions at popular search engines or directories like Altavista, Lycos, Excite or Yahoo. Search engine traffic is generally a webmaster's most valuable traffic because people reaching your site from a search engine were specifically looking for a certain subject and would thus be more likely to join your site. For example, someone searching for "mens health" on Altavista may come upon Johnny's website and would be more likely to view the site then, say, a surfer who comes across Johnny's site from a link on an unrelated site such as website devoted to music. Both surfers would be good prospects for Johnny's site but the search engine surfer would be a much better prospect. Search engine traffic is generally the highest converting traffic a webmaster can find.

Visit each search engine and add your URLs.

Pay special attention to the most popular engines/directories:

• Google
• Altavista
• Yahoo
• Excite
• Lycos
• Hotbot

To make the best use of search engines and directories, Johnny Webmaster covered the following basic steps:

1. Johnny searched the engines for all sites related to "magick" and "new age". Johnny saved many of these pages.
2. Studying the saved pages, Johnny developed 5 or 6 pages of his own, with good titles, keywords and META tags, based on the keywords and META tags from the saved pages.
3. Johnny downloads any one of many submission shareware programs off the net, which allowed him to quickly submit his site to over 500 search engines. Alternatively, Johnny could have used a submission service like: http//www.submit-it.com
4. So as not to get blacklisted by any search engine for 'spam-submitting', Johnny only submits one page per day. In 5 or 6 days, all of his pages are submitted to the various engines
5. Johnny got MKSTATS installed on his site. This program, or others similar, is a great resource for telling Johnny how many hits came from which engine for each page that he submitted to the various engines. Your host can usually recommend a good stats package, or you might even try www.hitbox.com
6. Each week, Johnny removes any pages from the engines which are not getting him enough hits. He creates 1 or 2 new pages each week, by doing a search and getting good keywords from other pages.

EXCHANGING LINKS

Link exchanging is another traffic generating tool to try after mastering search engines. Exchanging links is a very popular way to drive traffic to any site.

In Johnny's particular case, Johnny reasons that perhaps people who frequent other types of magick sites would be very interested in his own site. For that matter, people who frequent many types of magick websites may also be interested in his site.

Johnny surfs the net, using search engines and directories, to locate several hundred websites in the aforementioned categories. He makes a note of the email addresses for these sites. In general, since most sites are fairly small, sending an email to a generic address such as webmaster@website.com is good enough to ensure that his email will be read by the owner/operator of the website.

Johnny sends an email to the other webmasters asking to exchange links. Since this is a very popular method of generating traffic many webmasters agree to the proposition.

Johnny creates a 'links page' on his site, which contains links to all the other mens health sites, and those sites in turn put links on their site pointing to Johnny's mens health site. The end result is that Johnny now gets some good quality traffic from similar sites to his own.

While very effective, link exchanging does require a lot of constant, manual work. But there are also links pages and search sites which will accept links without requiring you to link back to them. Johnny was able to find such sites by searching for +link +exchange, or similar string, on most search engines.

POSTING TO NEWSGROUPS

Johnny posts some simple messages to the many magick and new age groups on the usenet. The posts are kept as simple as possible: a compelling subject line with a message that contains at most 10 lines along with the URL of the Magick and New Age URL.

TOP LISTS

There are many top lists, top25, top50, top100 and so on, which all basically work the same way. You put a link to the list on your site and send some of your traffic to the list. The more hits you send to the list, the higher up your site's URL appears on that list.

For top lists, Johnny was able to find some that were fairly new and growing. He avoided the more established top lists since those ones already had many experienced webmasters who were sending tens of thousands of hits to the list, making it difficult for Johnny to ever crack the top 20 position or higher.

Johnny was already able to generate a lot of traffic to his site from the search engines and from link exchanging so he in turn had a good deal of traffic that he was able to send to a top100 list. Since he was sending a lot of traffic to the top100 list, his site's URL moved up to the #5 position on the list, making his URL much more likely to get clicked on by users. Since the top list gets tons of hits from all the websites that are sending traffic to the list, Johnny's site ended up getting many tens of thousands of hits in return from this particular top100 list. Even though, top list traffic does not convert as easily to signups as does traffic from the engines or link exchanges, it is purely a numbers game - the more hits you get from any source, the more signups you are likely to get.

Good luck!