I was on the Marketing 101 seminar panel at the Phoenix Forum yesterday, along with Aly from The Best Porn, Kath from Klixxx, Sean from CCBill, Rainey from PrideBucks and Chad Belville from ChadKnowsLaw.com and we fielded a lot of questions from a packed room of both experienced webmasters and newbies and the most asked question was "What are the best ways to get traffic to my site?"

Why did I say it was the most asked question considering one would think that once it was asked and answered it wouldn't need to be asked again? Because there is no single answer to that question and the answer is probably different for everyone in the room. One attendee owned a site that did a wide variety of things including selling lingerie and sexy shoes, sexual aids, and an advice column. He said he's getting around 60,000 hits uniques a month but can't seem to find ways to get much more than that.

My first answer to him was to promote each section of the site independantly. He wrote that down because he hadn't thought of that one before. Next, I asked him how his advice column was set up and it was basically just a page where he answered questions but he made no attempt to monetize that actual section of the site on it's own. He thought it would just attract traffic and the surfer would look around the rest of his site once they got there. I suggested that he turn the advice column into an advice blog and everytime he talked about a product that would help spice up a couple's sex life he should link it directly to the page on his site where he sold that product. He wrote that one down too.

Now, obviously those answers should help him drive more traffic to his site, but wouldn't be the right answers for the others in the room that had pay sites or TGPs so the answer kept popping up. One lady in the audience said she had a pay site but couldn't get any traffic and didn't want to pay for it. Hello? I told her, no offense, but anyone that is running a pay site and has no budget for advertising has no business running a pay site. At that point a gentleman responded that he's very successful and has never paid for advertising, he pays people to post on the news groups for him. Now let me ask you this (and yes, I asked him too), what the heck would you call paying someone to post on newgroups if it wasn't marketing?

My point is that there is no one pat answer to how to get traffic to your websites. Yes, there are some common ways that would be good for everyone, like concentrating on optimizing your sites to get search engine traffic, but there are so many ways to get traffic and so many different types of web sites, that no one is going to be able to give a satisfactory answer to a room full of webmasters that works for all of them, unless we do a 24 hour seminar and answer each attendees question individually.

So, if you're wondering how to get more traffic and were hoping that I was going to answer your question here today I probably wasn't too helpful -- unless you have an advice column -- but what you need to do is analyze exactly what type of traffic you need and then start identifying ways to get that specific kind of traffic. If you ask another webmaster how he does it, make sure his sites are similar to yours, otherwise his answer probably won't be very helpful to you.