Newsletters are a big thing in many websites nowadays. Websites ask people to subscribe to their free newsletters and keep sending out information every week or sometimes more frequently depending on the strategy that they follow. Whether this was a good idea in the first place or not, it really is a waste of time nowadays. Most email applications offer anti spam filters and most newsletters only end up in the junk mail folders.

You may think that even if a very small percentage of people to whom you send out the newsletters read them it is good because the cost of sending them out is low, you are only shooting yourself in the foot here. You will only be classifying your website as another pusher who is trying to push something, in everyone's minds and will therefore lose out on your brand image.

Give them the option

A better idea is to give the option to people to subscribe to an RSS feed. This gives them the option to either choose to subscribe or not which means that only genuinely interested people will. It will also give you a much more accurate idea of how popular your site is because most of those who subscribe will actually read what you have to say.

Give value

One of the best ways of generating interest in these posts is to give insider information. Don't just write rehashed information that is easily found in other places online. If you are recommending a particular software for a specific purpose give honest impressions that are not found elsewhere. You may think that this is too much to give away freely, but look at it this way. Open Source is catching on like blazes now, and there is a free alternative to almost everything, including Operating Systems. If you want to charge for your opinions as well as for the product that you sell, you will find that someone else is only charging for the product and is offering their opinions freely resulting in a movement away from your site.

If you are starting a website, chances are that there is already an online community on the niche that you want to start yours in. Make sure that you become involved and join them. Don't get so high and mighty that you think that everything that you write online should get you money. Write on other people's blogs and websites too. Just make sure that you link back to your site. Usually this is done in the signature and is one of the most effective ways of generating traffic to your site as long as what you write is worth reading. If the posting was good, people will come to your site just to read other articles written by you which is what you want.

Quote, but link

Another way is to quote from an article written elsewhere on the net. Usually nobody minds you quoting as long as you give them credit for it and link back to their site as well. Not only is this good etiquette, it will also improve your standing within the community which means that slowly, other more established people will start to link to your site.

Apart from the traffic that this linking generates, there is another more valuable reason for doing this. Most search engines do not index a website as soon as it is hosted. There are a number of people who create sites on free to use communities and then do not follow it up. Obviously no search engine wants any site like this in their results. One way that they identify if a site is in use and is genuine is by the number of links back to it. If these links are from sites in good standing with the search engines, the chances of your site getting indexer faster are greater.

Use article directories

Another very popular way of getting these links back is by posting articles on article directories and then linking it to your site. There are many such article directories that allow you to upload content free although they have certain criteria about the kind of articles that you can upload. Ezine is only one among them and there are a number of others that you can post to.

What this does is help you upload a lot of content in places other than your website and then back link to your website thus improving your standing with the search engines. This is where you use the SEO optimization that you hear about frequently. There are two goals to doing this, one is the already mentioned improving of ranking with search engines, and the other is that sometimes these articles will actually come up higher in the ranking than your site. If this happens you will be driving traffic to your site from there too.