We know basically two ways to get website traffic. You can buy it, or you can get it for free. I have tried both methods, and although the easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to just buy it, I do not like it. There is no guarantee that buying website traffic you will get great results even though you spend a fortune.
I begin to look the other way, free traffic. Why spend money buying website traffic when you can get traffic for free? It is more time consuming but there is no risk involved in this method and the quality of the traffic can be better in many cases because you can generate targeted traffic.
Oh, and since you'll be investing your time, a very precious commodity, I need to mention this... Make sure the website you're trying to drive traffic to be properly optimized to accept opt-in list signups and/or make sales. Otherwise you'll be wasting your time.
Free traffic techniques that work:
1. Submit your site to as many search engines you can, including the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
2. Write 2-3 articles each week and submit them to the free article directories. The link to your site must be in your bio box. The articles should be optimized for a keyword your site is targeting.
3. Submit those same articles to email newsletter publishers in your niche and add them in your site as well.
4. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site
5. Find blogs related to your niche and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site.
6. Answer questions related to your site's topic at answers.yahoo.com. Be sure to put a link to your site in each of your answers.
7. Join the most popular forums that deal with your site's topic and become an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.
8. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.
9. Start a blog on blogger.com and a blog on wordpress.com, link them to your site and submit them to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep your blogs updated.
10. Post ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.org, usfreeads.com). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But don't neglect the other ones. If your ad is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser.
11. Write an interesting email signature that includes a link to your site, and use it with every outgoing business email you send, I use a signature when I respond to eBay messages as well.
12. Start a page on myspace.com and on any other high page rank social bookmarking site you can find and link them to your site. Create squidoo lenses which are so easy to create and add your site URL in them.
13. Submit a viral video to youtube.com. You don't really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job.
14. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.
15. Write an e-book or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free e-book directories you can find online.
16. Give the free e-book or short report to your list as well or add it to a giveaway event.
It is a lot of work, but you don't have to use them all at once. Just pick one at a time, invest one hour today, pick other one tomorrow and so on and in a month you will build your free traffic. Regards
