The benefits of using free traffic sources are obvious. Without targeted traffic, a website will stagnate and an online business will die. However, not all traffic is created equal. There are viable sources of traffic, irrelevant traffic and downright scams. Purchasing traffic can be a minefield of expensive disappointment and is best avoided. There are enough reliable, quality sources of free traffic you can utilize to attract visitors to your website that you don't need to take unnecessary risks. These include:

Articles.

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories and to websites with a related audience and a lot of visitors can markedly increase the number of people visiting your website. If you write interesting, informative and original articles that provide genuine value to your readers, people will be inclined to click on the link to your website which you provide in your resource box.

When you offer your articles for free to article directories, your resource box and biographical information is included as a part of the deal. Websites can download your article and use it on their sites for free as long as they leave it totally in tact and include your contact information with a live link. You can negotiate to have the same arrangements yourself with individual websites.

Blogs.

Blogs can be time intensive, requiring regular updating, however interesting blogs can generate visitors interested in finding out more about you and what you offer. Your blog can link to your website's home page and also directly link to product sales pages. Blogs are very easy to set up. Google's Blogger is free of charge and very easy to use.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization refers to practices that maximize your website's position in search engine page results. This is done by creating valuable content, using popular keywords (but not too often), creating relevant one-way back links to your site, writing anchor text (hyperlink) that is relevant to the content and theme of your site without overdoing the use of keywords. As search engine algorithms become more sophisticated and able to detect formulas and strategies designed to appeal to search engines rather than to users, more and more websites are being penalized with falling page ranks.

Increasingly, the best SEO advice is to write naturally and grow your website organically. Don't use artificial means to please the search engines. Give users good value for money and make sure your links are relevant and your content is valuable and readable. High keyword densities usually create cluttered writing that is difficult to read.

Forums.

Participating in forums related to your niche can also attract visitors to your site. You need to be very careful when engaging with forums to understand the rules of the site. Often these are not as clear as the administrators might think and some site administrators can be quite nit-picky about what people write. Many forums do not allow self-promotion. Even if someone specifically asked a question about a problem that your product or service could solve, you wouldn't be able to answer it without having your post removed.

So how do you deal with these sorts of forum rules? The answer lies in taking advantage of your user signature. When you make a post in forums you can have a signature that provides your website link and what you do. This way if people like the quality of your posts they can click on the link and visit your site. Doing this also creates one-way back links to your site which helps with search engine positioning. There are however sites that will allow you to promote your services. Be prepared to take the time to locate the most suitable forums for your needs.

Ebooks.

It may surprise you to know that ebooks can also be a source of free traffic to your website. Offering a free ebook and taking the visitor to a subscriber page in order to download it, is an easy way to create an opt-in mail list that you can then use to create credibility with the subscriber and market to them over time. You can use article marketing to market the book and the book itself to create a data base of potential customers.

Press Releases.

Press releases can be an easy and effective way of generating free traffic to your website. Press releases are newsworthy stories about you or your business that are usually submitted to a media distribution outlet. They can be taken up by various media and turned into a news or special interest story which can create excellent and credible publicity for your business.

Any of these strategies will increase targeted traffic to your website, however a strategy using all of them will create a massive increase in visitors who are already predisposed to learning about your business opportunity.