What is a better way to get traffic rather than winning a web
site award?

Give the award away yourself!

Using this strategy, you offer a web site award and before you
know it, you will have many webmasters applying for it and the
winners displaying *your* award banner (linked back to your web
site) on their web site.

For some award web sites, giving away an award is really just a
disguise for a link exchange.

This is a great marketing strategy that can result in hundreds
of web sites linking to your own web site and literally
hundreds of other sites applying for an award.

Both parties come out as the winners.

The winner of the award benefits because their site is
recognized and gets a prominent placement on the award site and
the award site gets a link back to their web site.

It works well because after you give away a few awards,
everything else is pretty much automatic.

You don't even have to announce that you are giving away an
award because the web sites you have already given an award to
will be doing all the promotion.

For example, if you give away five web site awards and they all
add your award banner to their web site, this could result in
twenty more sites applying for your web award.  Out of these
twenty sites, you could select ten winners who will also
display your award banner on their site.

This could go on and on and on and before you know it you will
have hundreds of web sites applying for your web award not to
mention the traffic that you will get from casual surfers.

With all the additional traffic, you can pitch your product and
services and generate more sales.

Here are a few places where you can get free award scripts that
can be installed on your web site.  You can literally start
giving out awards in minutes:

Fastaward
http://www.amusive.com/scripts/

AwardMail
http://www.codebrain.com/perl/awardmail/index.html

Midmart Award Site
http://www.midmart.com/scripts/awards/