Freebies/Giveaways

I've found one thing that works very well, if you are a programmer: create small/simple utilities and give them away on your site.

I've found no better way (short of buying ads) of generating massive site traffic. I've put several free Windows utilities on my site, one of them caught on in January of 2006 - mentioned on digg.com, lifehacker.com, and dailycupoftech.com, to name but a few. This single item is now responsible for much of the traffic to my main corporate site right now (I'm taking steps to increase traffic to the other content, organically, so it'll take time.)

I should mention that I've just recently moved selected content from my old static HTML site, www. exodus-dev .com to the new site, http://exodusdev.com, and have implemented a partial 301 redirect scheme to route traffic to relocated pages on my new site. Even so, the new, drupal-powered site is responsible for generating significant new interest in and traffic to the utilities that had been somewhat stagnant on the old site - thus proving that a properly-configured drupal system (or perhaps any good CMS) does indeed play well with the search engines, the social bookmarking sites, etc. I'm completely amazed at how quickly new site content shows up on search engine results pages - many times on the first page of results, which almost never happened quickly with my old site.

In any case, offering free goodies to the public is a great way to generate site traffic.