How do you drive traffic to your site?

Good Morning!

Down here in sunny Atlanta - soon to be rainy Atlanta and wanted to pick your brains on something.

What does everyone do to drive traffic to their site? For me, I try to post on our Atlanta Weather Reddit sub-community every now and then and then I utilize Twitter (@EastCobbWeather) as well.

I want to get the word out and drive more people to my site, but struggling to find good ideas / resources that really help. I’ve tried to search the forum and incorporate the ideas I’ve found, but honestly most previous posts seem to be pretty old.

Would love to know what everyone does.

Thanks!
Eric
http://www.ericboettner.com/weather/index.php

I would consider a more informative and easy to remember domain name, matching the twitter maybe.

Reduce the loading time of the page. It exceeds my limit for a page that I would visit often. I checked it with a couple of speedtest sites, pingdom and webpagetest.org and they confirm it’s slow so it’s not just my connection speed.

I see you are using cloudflare. I don’t know if that’s good for a live data website or whether you’ll have a stale data problem due to page caching, something to watch anyway.

Thanks @niko!

I think I am going to get a new domain, or at least use it to redirect to my main domain (while I work to update my scripts to reflect the change). I really should have done that a while ago…oh well, you live and learn

Now the page load speed is something I’ve been working with and not doing so well at. I think part of it is my host (Bluehost) but part is my coding. It’s been a struggle - any suggestions from the group?

So far cloudflare seems to be ok; not running into stale pages, but something I’m always looking for. Thanks!

Thanks again!
Eric

You may have done it already but those sites I mentioned (and other similar ones) will show you which elements are taking the most time to load.

I have in the past, but i’m going to do it again and get to the bottom of my issue. thanks!

Well I broke down and did it. I got a new domain name!

http://www.eastcobbweather.com

The weather won’t work very good to drive traffic to your site when the weather is calm and beautiful. So what really drives steady traffic to my site is my earthquake page at http://stillwaterweather.com/okareaearthquakes In the last two days it’s had 359 hits vs 82 for my home weather page. The only time home page rivals the earthquake page is when the weather acts up bad.

Writing guest articles for niche sites has the potential to send plenty of traffic and boost SEO rankings. Searching for your keyword or target area and something like “guest contributor” on Google can show you who accepts guest posts with relevant traffic.