There is one unquestioned prerequisite for generating income for your web site, and that is a steady flow of website traffic. If no one visits your site, what chance do you have of making any income from your web site. You will just spend months or years just having a hobby that takes your time, and brings you nothing in return.

It takes money to maintain an income generating site, and the saying is true, it takes money to make money. BUT, it doesn't have to take a whole lot of cash to generate website traffic to your site.

Ever wonder how do the popular sites get their traffic. Most of them are spending lots of money to bring home the traffic, by investing in advertising campaigns and all sorts of marketing schemes. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

If you don't really have their resources, you don't have to do this. There are sufficient ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you can't afford. So many people have dabbled in high cost methods and ended up losing their shirts.

What follows here, are the top six ways to generate low cost website traffic. And this should result in more revenue for you.

Publish a weekly or monthly Newsletter.

In my view, this is the most important feature to use. This may sound like hard work because of all the writing it becomes necessary to do to keep your readers up to date. Well, honestly it is a lot of work, but absolutely the most significant investment of your time.

Never the less, you can get help in obtaining free articles from other web site owners who want to advertise their site.

This will provide free advertising for them as long as their resource box is kept at the end of their articles.

But I must caution you, you are better off writing your own work, as it increases your credibility. And what is more important than that.

As your newsletter gets passed around and gets increased exposure, you will build an opt-in list of people who like your site, and your news.

Join Online Communities and Contribute to Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your web site. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche as your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are on different subjects. As you build your reputation, you also add respectability to your site, making it a reputable and honest business that will be frequented and trusted by more and more people.

Get Incoming Links to Your Site

This is a proven method that is very important. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one you so that they could produce more public awareness about their own sites. You'll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having a similar subject as the other site. If you are into Internet Marketing, or any of the sub fields like Affiliate Marketing, Niche Marketing etc, then it makes no sense to have links from sites outside of this arena.

The most important benefit of exchanging links, and preferably obtaining one-way links boosts your site's importance to Google. Depending of the amount of links, as well as the Page Rank of the links coming in to you, Google should eventually raise your page rank, and have your site appear higher up in search engine results made by surfers.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and submission sites on the internet who are anxious to accept your articles. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but if you need to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself. About the cheapest cost to buy articles written uniquely for you, is about $10. You can get quotations from companies such as Elance.com

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that after they read it, they can respect your knowledge about the subject and become eager to visit your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines relating to the subject or niche of your site.

Try to submit at least one article a week to submission sites. You will find that after you have submitted about 10 articles or more, you will start getting respectable traffic. Submit first to Ezinearticles.com and GoArticles.com. Then after a few days, submit to more sites.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that provides a link to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Fill Your Web Site with good quality Content

Here we go again asking you to do more writing. Why? Well just what do you think a typical surfer is looking for? Good information, well written and easy to understand. This is why you have a web site in the first place, to provide this benefit to your visitors.

Write good content for your site. Search engines track the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. Great quality here is mandatory. Include some links in some of your articles, to products that you are promoting as an affiliate marketer.

Traffic Exchanges

This is similar to exchanging links but on a different level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits by spending time surfing other people's sites.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another's site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so on. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your site's existence is boosted.

I have to caution you again here. The subject of traffic exchanges is very controversial. It is well documented that most of the traffic exchanges provide little or no benefit.

One that has earned a good reputation is Traffic Swarm and perhaps you should consider it.

So there you have it. Try these methods, and you will be glad you did.

Fred Farah