You've thought about using pay per click ads to get the ball rolling, but having to pay for traffic means your bank account takes a hard hit and then your profits are decreased every time a visitor clicks through to your website. How about if you could attract people to your site by using traffic generating techniques that don't cost a bean!



Free traffic is sometimes viewed as being less effective because you don't have the ability to fine-tune it like you can with an AdWords ad, honing in on specific keywords and phrases that are only shown to an audience that would care, but it is an avenue you should seriously consider, whether it is for your primary method of generating traffic or in addition to various other methods.

While free traffic options may not let you pick and choose the keywords in the same way as Adwords would, you can however still create content built around specific keywords and phrases so that the pages automatically get indexed for your target audience.

Take a Squidoo lens, as an example. Squidoo allows you to have several free accounts (so that your expertise isn't diluted) and an unlimited number of free lenses (pages) per account. Take full advantage of this opportunity and point every lens toward your own website and you have a frenzy of feeders that funnel visitors from Squidoo to your domain through text links and banner ads!

Article marketing allows you to do the same thing. Write an article based on keywords and phrases you want your website to be found for and then submit it to the various high-ranking article directories for inclusion.

A press release can achieve similar results. While many online press release sites charge a nominal fee for inclusion, some have free options - and they create RSS feeds so that interested publishers can find the content that is relevant to their niche.

Forum posting can also act as a conduit between your target audience and your domain. Join the forums for your topic and include a link to your website in your signature file. Don't give your web site obvious plugs in any posts you make, this is usually looked badly upon (unless it is relevant to a particular thread on the messageboard), but the inclusion of your web site url in your signature (i.e. The part that appears at the very bottom of each of your posts) is usually fine.

A spin-off benefit of the forums is that as you participate in group discussions not only will your traffic will steadily increase, but your reputation as an authority figure to your target audience will be given a massive boost too. Don't forget to add a link to your web site into your forum profile, too! Profiles are the perfect tool to help channel people to your domain.

The above are just a handful of ways that you can generate a stream of free traffic to your web site. Unlike paid for advertising, the response will not usually be immediate, but over time, and with sufficient effort, you will generate a constant flow of traffic to your site and it won't cost you a single cent.

Copyright (c) 2008 Paul Smithson