So how else can we get traffic if not from the search engines? Here are 3 simple ways of getting more traffic that doesn’t rely on the search engines:

Embrace The Community

Whichever niche you are in there is probably already an active discussion forum (or several) and several authoritative blogs. You need to be able to tap in to this by branding yourself and your website within the community. For the forum you need to be fairly active everyday joining in discussions and answering questions. For your username use your real name and if you are allowed to use a signature put a link to your site in that. For authority blogs, try to be the amongst the first people to comment on new posts, subscribe to the RSS feed if you can so you are alerted straight away when there is a new post. Use your real name and link it to your site. Don’t promote your site, but leave relevant comments, building up your visibility in this way gets you noticed in your niche. If your site provides valuable information or services then you might even start getting natural links and recommendations.

Get On The Twitter

You should view your Twitter followers the same way as an email list – assuming you are building an email list, which you should be if you are not. The more people you have the more people will be clicking through and if you are posting relevant interesting links then you can get a very high click through rate – be warned though: don’t make every Tweet promotional. Mix it up, and if you post a link make sure it really is valuable. If you are able to build up a big enough following, every time you make a new blog post you can get a flood of traffic from Twitter. It works far better than any social bookmarking tool can ever do.

Create Giveaway Viral Ebooks

Creating and giving away high quality eBooks serves two purposes: one it builds your list and two if the information in the ebook is of a high enough quality it will get other people giving it away too. The ebook includes many links back to your own sites which the readers can click. This is a fairly old method that seems to have gone out of fashion but still works extremely well in any niche.

These are just three methods to generate more traffic to your site without relying on the search engines. Of course there are many more such as using an affiliate programme to help sell your product or service or getting yourself published in offline magazines or becoming a guest writer on a number of industry blogs.

Now, if you are anything like Jeff Johnson, who had his AdSense accounts disabled back in 2004, it might be the best thing that ever happened to you. In Jeff’s case his ‘error’ was to have two accounts, one for him and one for his brother. However, as it turned out, once he was free from AdSense his online income exploded – so take it as a sign of things to come!

AdBrite – http://www.adbrite.com

This advertising network has been going since 2002 and is one of the biggest independent ad networks. It doesn’t have the contextual technology that Google has but you can choose the category you want to target and it will serve up ads based on that category. Obviously you need to use some common sense here as a website about gardening doesn’t need to have ads for forex trading! One problem some people might have is that they only pay out by cheque which is issued in USD.

LinkWorth – http://www.linkworth.com

If you have a site with good traffic and Google PageRank then you have the option of earning some good money with LinkWorth who specialize in link based advertising. Their advertisers want to place links on relevant websites to get traffic and boost their search engine rankings. As a publisher you have a wide range of options to make money from this site and it’s strongly recommended.

Amazon Associates – https://affiliate-program.amazon.com

Obviously it depends entirely on what sort of website you are running but many people have found that the Amazon Associates programme is even more profitable than AdSense under the right circumstances. Although Amazon only pays commission on products people have bought the great thing about Amazon is that people buy all kinds of products from it. So you might have a site about healthy dog food and link to some highly relevant dog food products on Amazon (another great thing about Amazon is the almost unlimited range of products they sell), this will make you a few dollars if you make a sale but often people end up buying books, DVD’s, computer games and all kinds of other things.

Amazon also have an option called Omakase which works a little bit like AdSense but it tries to automatically put relevant products infront of your customers based on the context of the page. It’s a little bit hit and miss at the moment though.

There are plenty of other alternatives like Bidvertiser and Kontera, but in our experience they don’t have enough advertisers to replace the income you might have been making on AdSense.

Do you think I’ve missed out any obvious AdSense alternatives? Let me know by leaving a comment in the form below.

This month both companies have released their May 2010 coupons which gives you some great discounts on your registrations for .com’s, .net’s and .org’s. These coupons are only valid for May 2010.

Namecheap coupon May 2010: MOTHERSLOVE – .com registration for $8.81
Name.com coupon May 2010: MAYHEM ($8.15 COM, NET, WS & ME)
Name.com renewal coupon May 2010: COMWHATMAY ($8.20 .COM and .NET renewals)

Unfortunately there are no renewal coupon codes for Namecheap although I have read somewhere that if you are a power user with Namecheap and have more than 50 domains with them they’ll send you a special renewal coupon code that only you can use.

One of the services I’ve been using for the past 8 months is StableHost. I found a 50% discount coupon and got annual hosting on a European server for around $21 – a bargain when you consider other larger companies charge $60 or more for the same service.

Of course, I don’t put my money sites on these cheaper hosts, but they are excellent for feeder sites to my money sites. For example, I have a PLR guide website on StableHost that points to my PLR Articles Site which is on HostGator. It doesn’t matter too much if the PLR guide site goes down for a hour or so.

Anyway, StableHost are having a bit of a bumper deal right now where you can get unlimited domain hosting for just $11 per year AND you are locked in to that price for a lifetime.

Just visit their site, www.stablehost.com and when you are on the checkout page, enter the following coupon for a massive 75% discount:

AREWECRAZY

This coupon is only available on the US servers and expires after the first 500 coupons, so you need to get in quick.

So far StableHost have lived up to their name for me and I’m happy to recommend their services.

This month I have got Namecheap coupon codes and Name.com coupon codes – these are only valid for April 2010 as they change them monthly and also only valid for new registrations. So here we go:

Namecheap coupon April 2010: APRILFUN – .com registration for $8.81
Name.com coupon April 2010: ALLABOUTU ($8.25 .ME coupon, still waiting for a .COM coupon)

Unfortunately there are no renewal coupon codes for Namecheap or Name.com although I have read somewhere that if you are a power user with Namecheap and have more than 50 domains with them they’ll send you a special renewal coupon code that only you can use.

Updated: 11th April

Virtually all my money sites have lost PageRank, with plrarticleshop.com going from a PR4 to PR2, however it still holds the same rankings and is getting more traffic than ever before – proof, perhaps, that the PageRank shown in the toolbar matters so little nowadays.

My feeder sites all have a PageRank now, either increasing from PR0 or 1 to PR1 or 2.

So how did you fare in the April 2010 PageRank update? (Not that it makes much difference but us Webmasters / Internet Marketers do like the validation of the little green bar!).

I have come across several domain registrars that are cheaper than Namecheap, for example name.com is as cheap as $8.09 with a coupon.

However, there is another little known registrar that I’ve found that has an astonishing $5.45 sale on all dot com’s! That’s the cheapest I’ve ever seen it, you don’t even need a coupon to get this special price. It also comes with free whois privacy, something many other sites charge $5 or more for.

The site is called Whiz.in and it’s owned by an Indian company which is why the prices are so cheap. I’ve been using them for over a year now and they are consistently amongst the lowest priced for any TLD or ccTLD domain registration. They accept PayPal (although there is a small fee) as well, which makes it great for us Internet marketers.