When I first started in internet marketing, I found it very difficult to get traffic to my website and without traffic, you can't make any money. I knew that I could get lots of traffic through things like pay par click search engines, buying advertising space and ezine advertising but I simply did not want to start forking out truck loads of cash without being absolutely positive that I would get a good return on investment, so I searched for every free method of generating traffic I could find and tried them all. I was very surprised. I had thought that using free methods would not bring great results and in order to get lots of traffic I would need to start spending lots of money but I was wrong. The methods that I will tell you about now not only work, but can work extremely well if done right.



1)Articles - Write articles about the subject of your site and submit them to directories. This can bring you in a nice amount of traffic and if you can write quality, original articles then you have the chance that other webmasters/marketers will pick up your article and publish it on their website or in their newsletter. Depending on the quality of your article, you could gain thousands of visitors from it.

2)Traffic exchanges - Many marketers and webmasters believe that traffic exchanges do not work as the visitors you get are only there to gain visitors themselves and it is like a continuous cycle but if you can learn how to use the exchanges effectively then you have a very profitable traffic source. When you use exchanges, you must remember that the visitor is only going to see your site for around 15 seconds unless you can entice them to stay. A catchy headline, one paragraph of interesting text and a call to action is all you need. Do not try to sell directly in the exchange but instead capture leads.

3)Free advertising forums - What do you think people that use free ad forums are normally there for? The answer is because it is free. When you post an advertisement on an ad forum, you should definitely give something for free. You could give people free tips in exchange for their email address or a free ebook that contains links to your website inside, just realise that they are there to use free methods of advertising so do not try to sell anything to them, instead gain them as a lead and sell later.

4)Blogging - You can start a blog for nothing at blogger and use it to drive traffic to your website. Blogs are excellent for search engine traffic I think, as they seem to favor them over a static website and they are very easy to maintain. You could have your blog up and running within ten minutes and then all you need to do is choose some keywords and phrases that you think you could rank well for and write up some posts around those phrases.

5)Link exchanging - This is more of a long term strategy but do not be disheartened by that as if you can stick at it and continue to exchange links then you could find yourself gaining a lot of traffic from these links after a while. Say you get just one visitor a week from each exchange, well if you do ten exchanges a week then there's ten visitors, by the end of the second week it will be twenty visitors and so on. Stick at it and you will reap the rewards.