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.

Then you have Jeff Johnson promoting his Traffic Voodoo which seems to be concentrating on the various Web 2.0 sites that you can leverage to get traffic and no longer rely on just Google. I can’t comment on what his product is like but I’ve watched a couple of the free videos here and here and the stuff he’s talking about seems really decent.

Finally there is another web traffic product that is being promoted called Traffic Siphon. A bit of an odd name but I guess all the good trafficXYZ.com’s were taken. This product is by a guy called Mark Barnard who I’ve not heard of before.

Traffic Siphon Review

The package looked good so I went ahead and purchased it. Here is what I’ve got to say about it…

The Price

At the end of the day the price is the most important deciding factor when it comes to buying these products. At $67 I think it’s reasonably priced for the content that you get inside (more on that later). However, they are very sneaky and underhanded by charging you a monthly $47 fee unless you cancel the subscription. I couldn’t find any mention of this on the sales page and I think it’s fairly unethical to do it.

I managed to grab TrafficSiphon.com on a special $1 5 day trial but they seem to have removed that option now. I still had to make sure I canceled the monthly subscription though!

The Content

The content is presented in a series of on-site videos loaded up via Amazon S3 cloud storage. There are some 20 videos in total, including some bonus ones and they are all between 5 and 20 minutes in length. I found the videos to be really slow loading even on a 2MB connection. I would have to open up several tabs and load the videos in the background for several hours so that I could watch them uninterrupted.

If you are not already aware, despite the claims of earning thousands of dollars from Clickbank as an affiliate, this is not an affiliate training guide, it’s 100% focused on how to get traffic to your site so your results will definitely vary!

For most people who have been building and promoting websites for several years a lot of the traffic generation methods should be well known to you – I mean honestly, who hasn’t heard of directory submissions, article submissions, press releases and social bookmarking – all of which are covered here.

There are a few golden nuggets to be found, for example I learned about a fantastic new technique to get my EzineArticle content viewed more often and get it ranked higher in the search engines.

A lot of the techniques are borderline blackhat (what us SEO’s like to call greyhat), such as using Yahoo Answers for traffic, getting your links / signatures on forums that don’t allow you to post these things, finding blogs for the sole purpose of commenting, finding the .edu and .gov links etc. A lot of them I already use anyway, but like I mentioned above, a few nuggets of information that helps refine my own techniques.

Summing Up: The Good

The $67 price point is very reasonable for the content you are getting, especially if SEO is still new to you. The videos are all very easy to follow and you can start implementing the strategies right away. Even as a person who has been promoting sites for over a decade I still learned some new techniques thanks to this course.

Summing Up: The Bad

Like all good Internet marketers, Mark Barnard has implemented an upsell once you have made a payment. Except he’s gone overboard and there are no less than 4 upsells and downsells trying to get you to buy products and information for up to 3x what you just paid. I didn’t find any of the up/downsells to be compelling enough and got a bit annoyed with that.

Also, the sneaky trick of charging you $47 per month to access the information is a bit unethical – I can’t even see how he’s justifying the ongoing cost unless he plans to add new content each month, but there is no mention of that.

Should You Buy Traffic Siphon?

If you are looking for new techniques and don’t mind being borderline blackhat with your SEO (I personally don’t have an issue with it) and promotion then I can recommend this course at $67. Even though I already knew most of what he teaches, I consider myself enlightened on a number of areas now.

Click here to buy TrafficSiphon now