It seems as though most website owners shell out big bucks to promote their websites using the same methods over and over again. In order to be effective you’ve got to think UNIQUE! So, here is my list of the top 10 most unusual but effective methods to increase your website traffic, and the estimated cost of each. USE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION- you have been warned!

1. Write your domain name all over your body and run around town in your underwear.

If you’ve ever heard of GoldenPalace.com, this is probably why.

COST: $0

2. Buy a police scanner.

Sit around listening to a police scanner all day. When you hear exciting news, drive yourself to the scene as fast as possible hoping that your local news station decides to broadcast a live feed. When they do, jump around in the background yelling the name of your website at the top of your lungs! Do this enough and you will start to gain a fan base! People will actually watch the news just to see if you did it again!

COST: $100

3. Buy some stickers

Stickers are cheap! Buy some small stickers with your website printed on them and stick them EVERYWHERE!

Above the urinals, on your car, on the speaker at the McDonald’s drive through… anywhere you can think of.

COST: $50

4. Set your website as the homepage on every computer you touch

Go to your favorite cyber cafe, electronics store or library and set the homepage on all of them as your website! Most people who use a computer don’t even know how to change it back if they wanted to.

Cost: $0

5. Write your domain name on the front page of every newspaper

Go to a popular newspaper stand first thing in the morning when it is full. Put your 50 cents in and take out all the papers. Using a nice thick Sharpie marker, write your domain name as large as it will fit on the front page of every paper. Alternatively, you can just stick a flyer inside every newspaper. Pay another 50 cents to open the newspaper stand back up and put all the papers back. Wait around to see the expression on everyone’s face when they grab a paper!

COST: $1

6. Write your domain name on every single dollar that you lay your hands on

By far, this is not the wisest thing to do- but it works. Every time you get paper money in your hands, write or stamp your domain name on it somewhere. Every person who comes in possession of that dollar will see your domain name. Ever hear of Where’s George? Their website is showing a Google PageRank of 6/10 right now, and TONS of people have heard of it.

Writing on money may not be something you want to get involved in, though. The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing has this to say:

Defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. Under this provision, currency defacement is generally defined as follows: Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

Websites such as Where’s George are still in existence because they claim that they are not defacing money to the point that it is unfit to be reissued.

COST: $0

7. Hire a human billboard

I originally pointed this option out in my article 10 Great Ways to Advertise Your Business for Under $100. Hire someone to stand at a busy street corner all day for $50. They can hold a sign or wear a placard advertising your website.

Everyone who travels through the intersection will be sure to spot it. If someone runs you off the street corner, you have another option. If you, a relative or a friend lives on a busy street, you can just stand out in the yard instead!

COST: $50

8. Sell your website on Ebay

Sell your website on Ebay for some ungodly amount, such as $20,000,000! It’s sure to spark the attention of all who see it, so their curiosity will probably get the best of them. 99.999% chance nobody will buy it (because you really don’t want to sell it), but hey- if somebody pays you 20 million for your site, I’m sure you would accept!

COST: $4.80 (Ebay insertion fee)

9. Go to a sports event with a large poster or banner advertising your website

Imagine if you were at the Super Bowl with tickets right behind the end zone. Every time someone attempted a field goal from that end zone, you hold up a huge poster with your website printed on it! Your website would be seen by millions of people all over the world!

OK. So maybe we all can’t go to the Super Bowl, but there are plenty of other televised sporting events you can try.

COST: Varies

10. Use other popular sites

Surf the net looking for some interesting videos. When you find them, use a video editing program to insert a screen that says something like “This video brought to you by www.yoursite.com” in the beginning of the video. Then, upload the videos to YouTube. If they become popular, you will get a lot of traffic to your site.

Use social networking sites such as Digg. Register and post in as many forums as humanly possible and insert your URL in your username, your signature line, your location and your avatar. Comment in as many blogs as you can being sure to use your URL. Make a MySpace profile and try to get as many friends as possible. Then, send a bulletin out to all of them talking about your website.

Cost: $0

That’s It!

You see? With just a little bit of creativity and just a few dollars, you can come up with some ideas that will drive massive traffic to your website. Have you tried any of these ideas in the past? If so, let us know how they worked for you!

Thanks to some members at DigitalPoint for inspiring me to write this article and helping with some of these ideas! Namely, populartemplate, rj2kix, Barre Tire, Noddegamra, jordanthegreat and Triexa.

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Here’s an interesting challenge we can all participate in so that everyone can accomplish the same goal: Increase your Technorati Authority By 300 In Only One Month! (It will also help you improve your backlinks as the new Google PageRank update is right around the corner) How will it be done?

Technorati authority is measured by how many different blogs have linked to your blog in the last six months. Of course, if one particular blog links to you 20 times, it will only count as +1 for your authority- which is good because the goal here is not to link farm your blog everywhere and penalize yourself in the search engines.

This works similarly to a blogroll, only easier. The list below starts with SiteFever.com linking to BlueJar.com. Add your site to the list and who you want to link to, then pass the list on. If you want to be extra nice, you can even link to more than one blog. Each blog that posts this list after your site has been added will increase your Technorati rating by +1 and help your backlinks in the search engines. You can track where this list travels throughout the blog world from your Technorati reactions.

The goal here is to reach an incredible record of +300 Technorati authority for the blogs who participate! Can it be done?

******BEGIN LIST******

SiteFever.com links to BlueJar.com
Craze4tech.com links to Work-Surf.info
TheDOGRBlog links to LorisWorld
TheDOGRBlog links to BusinessPhones
TheDOGRBlog links to WhatIt’sReallyAllAbout

******END LIST******

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I have researched a recent poll taken to find out the top five reasons a person would choose to not return to a website. Here is what I came up with:

1. Excessive Animation
Too much animation or flash objects can distract your visitor from the real “meat and potatoes” of your site and cause them to lose interest very quickly. Try to only use animation where it would add a specific value to the content of your site.

2. Too Many Colors & Fonts
Just because your monitor can display 5 million different colors doesn’t mean that you have to use every single one of them. The same goes for fonts. Try to use just 1 or 2 fonts within your website as well as only a few choices of colors to give your site a recognizable theme or style that looks professional and is easy on the eyes.

3. Poor Design & Maintenance
Be sure to update any links that do not work correctly. Dead links not only make for a poor user experience, but the search engines hate them as well. Also, it’s important to remember that Internet Explorer is not the only browser out there. Be sure that your website is designed to display and function properly with Mozilla, Opera and other popular Internet browsers.

4. Pop-ups
Pop-ups and pop-unders should only be used when you feel it to be absolutely necessary. First of all, many Internet users will be using a pop-up blocker, so chances are your message will not even be seen. Secondly, even if they are blocked, pop-ups and pop-unders are very annoying to visitors and really give a nonprofessional “spammy” appearance. Don’t give something to your visitors that they are not expecting. If you must use pop-ups, only have them execute if the visitor clicks on a link and be sure to make mention that the link will open in a new window.

5. Excessive Advertisements
Everyone wants to make money from their website- and rightfully so. Only, try to find a balance between content and advertising. Nobody wants to visit a website where you have to sift through 5 minutes of ads to find 5 seconds of quality content.

When creating a new website or redesigning an existing site, it may be a good idea to have your friends or family give their honest reviews of your site’s overall look and functionality. Another option is to join a webmasters forum and ask members to visit your site and give their reviews and opinions. This will help you broaden your horizons to design your site to be appealing to people of all different demographics instead of deigning it to be appealing only to you.

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If you know the importance of SEO, then you should know the importance of stats tracking- including conversions. But, what exactly is a conversion?

Many people have the misconception that a conversion means a completed sale for a physical product, but that is hardly the case. The truth of the matter is, a conversion is whatever you want it to be. Essentially, it’s when a visitor to your website accomplishes a specific action you want them to take. This can be anything from:

• Fill out a form
• Subscribe to a mailing list
• Register a new membership
• Drive to your store
• Read an ad

In my case, I’m managing a fairly new blog. So to me, a conversion would be for someone to subscribe to my full content RSS feed. I feel that if someone thought that my blog was helpful and interesting enough to subscribe to my RSS feed, I had accomplished my goal. So that’s my “conversion”. What’s yours?

Do you spend money on links or ads and work for hours on end trying to improve your search engine rankings? Remember- good ranks do not guarantee conversions! You can spend a million dollars on PPC (pay per click) ads or rank #1 in Google for your favorite keywords, but if you don’t do a good job of accomplishing your goal (conversion), all of your work has just been thrown out of the window!

Also, what you consider a conversion today may not be a conversion tomorrow. Since I want to build up the number of RSS feed subscribers to my blog, that’s my conversion. But when I have 10,000 subscribers, I may want to push for something else. I may decide that I need more of my visitors to make comments on my blog or to Digg my articles. Choosing what you consider a conversion is an ever-evolving process that you must re-evaluate on a frequent basis in order to get the most out of your visitors.

So remember: Before you start your next big SEO or advertising campaign, know what a conversion means to you and be sure to steer your visitors in the direction they need to go in order to accomplish your ultimate goal.

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In this article, I discuss my view on the heated debate of partial vs. full content RSS feeds, and why full content RSS feeds are my choice- no questions asked. I have also included a list of 25 websites and blogs which provide full content RSS syndication for you to use!

Brief Introduction to RSS

This article is geared more towards those who already know and probably use RSS feeds, so I will not go in to all the details of RSS, but here’s my short interpretation of what RSS is:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a group of web feed formats that notifies a subscriber of updated content on their subscribed feeds. RSS feeds are usually provided by websites such as news organizations and blogs, whose contents update frequently.

Hesitation to Change

I suppose there are two main reasons that people would prefer to offer partial feeds for their sites:

1. Plagiarism

Of course, it may not be uncommon to find your content on another site, mostly on an MFA (Made For Ads) blog if you hand out your entire post’s contents in your RSS feed. Well, before the world of RSS, millions of people still had to deal with the problem of plagiarism. From the time a third grader peeks over the shoulder of their fellow student to bestselling novelists and everybody in between, if you publish content, whether it be text, graphic or video, you will more than likely have to deal with plagiarism at one time or another.

In terms of full content RSS feed plagiarism, more often than not they will end up on an automated blog, which automatically pulls RSS feed content from a variety of sources and creates posts for each feed. This makes it look as if the website owner is busy writing content all day, when in reality, the blog is usually setup, automated and forgotten about. The website owners plug AdSense ads all over the site hoping to gain a few bucks per month from a website they never need to visit.

You can do a few things to help yourself in this manner. Simply inserting a copyright notice or a link back to your site in your post may be all that is needed. Of course, this would not prevent your feed from being fed to another site, but it will let anyone who happens to visit the other site know where the article came from. Chances are, they will visit your site and over time, they will notice that the original automated blog is nothing but delayed, duplicate content of yours, and they will just skip the middleman.

Many people are worried that they will be slammed by the search engines for having duplicate content if this happens, so to avoid the problem they offer partial content feeds. Well, the debate on this subject can get violent so I’m not going to go there, but from what I understand, there is not too much concrete evidence that duplicate content really hurts you all that much. On the same token, we go back to the discussion over who’s most important to write for- the search engines or your readers. But then, you may not get many readers without the search engines, so it’s up to you to decide. As for me, I decided to start a blog to provide readers with informative information (in my opinion, anyway), so I would rather write for them. If I find well written content that I enjoy reading on a PR0 site or worthless garbage on a PR8 site, you’ll find me at the PR0 site.

The bottom line is that if somebody wants to copy your content, they will. Even though trafficking drugs is illegal and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year to fight it, billions of dollars are made each year from people trafficking drugs. If somebody wants to do something bad enough, they will find a way to do it. If I have an article that I wrote and I want credit for, I would feel more comfortable knowing that somebody is duplicating my article via my full content RSS rather than directly from my website. At least I have some control over what I include in my RSS feed, and I know that the content in it will most likely not be modified before it goes online some place else. On the other hand, if somebody is taking the time to actually visit my site to copy my content, chances are they will also take the time to tweak it a little bit to be sure there are no references to me left before they reuse it. I would rather somebody reuse my full content RSS feed that has a copyright notice and link to my site in it than have them manually copy and paste the same information directly from my website.

2. Reduction in Website Visitors

This is another reason why website owners have been holding out on providing full content feeds. At first glance, it would seem like if you provide your entire article on your RSS feed, it would leave no reason for the subscriber to spend the time to visit your site.

On the contrary, many website owners report little or no change in traffic volume after switching to full content RSS feeds. With more and more cell phone and PDA users browsing the web, they are looking for content that loads quickly without all the bells and whistles. A full content RSS feed is their solution. If they like your feed content well enough, chances are they will check out your site on their PC at a later time. By giving them a feed they can easily access on their mobile device, you will be easily accessible to people at work, who are traveling, etc. If you get them reading your feeds in the office, the content will be fresh in their minds and they may share what they read with their co-workers who will then go visit your site, and become another loyal subscriber.

In any event, the numbers speak for themselves. The majority of website owners who make the change to full content feeds do not notice a dramatic change in site traffic. I suppose this all depends on you, your content, and how attractive and easy to maneuver your website is. If a visitor likes what they see, they will eventually return.

Full Content Feeds? Here’s What to Do

Here are my suggestions that everyone who provides full content RSS feeds should follow (or at least consider):

Be sure to include your name and website in the feed. If the feed is duplicated somewhere else, it can always be traced back to you.

Use a service such as Feedburner. If you run all your feeds through Feedburner, you will be given very detailed stats on your feeds and subscribers. Feedburner tracks suspicious uses, including resyndication, which is a common warning sign that somebody may be misusing your feed.

Include the live number of comments to each post in your RSS feed, with a link to the comments posted on your blog. This will give an incentive for the reader to click through to your site in order to read and leave comments on the post.

In your RSS feed, be sure to post a notice to your subscribers that the RSS feed is delayed and in order to read everything in real-time, they should check out your website.

Most importantly, syndication aside, build a fan base. Build visitor loyalty. By writing for your visitors, communicating with them and providing high quality original content, you will build loyal visitors who will be with you for the long haul.

Conclusion

Whatever you do, don’t forget the purpose of providing feeds in the first place- as a method for your visitors to easily receive updated content from your website. It’s like offering take-out food- a method to easily receive what you want, where you want it. If you call-in an extra large pizza, you don’t expect to receive a breadstick with a note telling you ‘if you want more, you’ve got to come in to our restaurant’. Give them what they want, or they’ll go someplace else.

What you choose to do and what is best for your feed all depends on its content and your purpose, and in the end, the decision is yours to make.

Below are some syndication links from a few websites that have successfully implemented full content feeds. Feel free to use them. If you provide full content feeds, feel free to post your link and share it with others.

Full Content RSS Feeds

http://feeds.feedburner.com/sitefever
This lovely blog! SiteFever.com- Improve Your Online Presence

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Elearning Technology

http://feeds.feedburner.com/bbcnewsfrontpagefullfeed
BBC News Font Page News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/bbcnewshealthfullfeed
BBC News Health News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed
BBC News Technology News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/bbcnewsworldfullfeed
BBC News World News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/bluejar
Bluejar.com - The Webmasters Guide to the Galaxy

http://feeds.feedburner.com/browie
A personal blog by Browie. Read about Internet discussion and other random things.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConsumingExperienceFull
Consuming Experience

http://feeds.feedburner.com/RolePlayGateway
Gaming & Writing

http://feeds.feedburner.com/targetlifeblog
Targetlife Computech Tips n Tricks

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thinkingphp
Thinking PHP and Beyond

http://feeds.feedburner.com/tw3o
The WWW Observer

http://feeds.feedburner.com/webd360
Blogging Blog

http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/huffingtonpost/raw_feed
HuffingtonPost.com

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mma-videos
MMA Videos

http://loanconsolidation1.info/feed/
Loan Consolidation

http://feeds.feedburner.com/lern2play
MMO Gaming

http://freepresaleinfo.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Presale News

http://techmake.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Blogging Tips, Internet & Technology Blog

http://www.appdev.info/?q=rss.xml
Software development news, notes and tips by David Lambert

http://www.photosales.co.nz/rss.php
Photos From New Zealand

http://www.tw3o.com/feed/
SEO Blog

http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhatJapanThinks
Understand the real Japan through surveys and public opinion polls

http://feeds.feedburner.com/RealityWired
Perception Is Reality! Musings from a Dot Com Tycoon

And submit your useful RSS Feed to RSS Directory.

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