You don't have to spend big dollars to get traffic to your blog. Especially when you are first starting out and want to test the waters. There are ways to generate blog traffic without spending what you can't afford. Some of the high cost methods such as bidding on keywords are not an exact science and if you don't have a good knowledge on how to approach using keywords, you can lose a lot of money in a short period of time.

Here are 3 very effective ways to generate free traffic to your blog. They work, they are risk free, and will get you the traffic you need quickly:

Exchange Backlinks

Many blogmasters and webmasters are willing to exchange links with you so you can both generate more public awareness of your blog and the resulting traffic. When you exchange links you soon see the evidence of how the backlinks help by the sudden upsurge of traffic coming in from the other sites.

Common sense would dictate that when you engage in exchanging links with other sites or blogs you have the same niche or content topic as the other site. This will insure that the traffic you get from the other site are people who are interested in the topic of your blog and therefore in your product(s).

So contact the site or blog owners of the sites that look promising and that you want to exchange links with. Exchanging links will also increase your chances of getting a higher ranking in search engine results. Search engines will give a higher ranking to blogs that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. And the good ranking position in the search engines will generate even more traffic to your blog, because you will be easier to find.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many article directories on the internet which provide free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save money on traffic generation, you can write the articles yourself or there are many article writers who will provide the articles for a very reasonable fee.

The topic of the articles of course are based on the topic or theme of your blog. Write on something related to your blog that you are knowledgeable about, and make it as interesting as possible.

If you are providing valuable information to your visitors, they will want to return on a regular basis.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This will require a fair amount of your time. Visit as many forums related to your blog theme as you can, and read comments or questions others are posting to the forums. In many cases you can comment and leave a link to your blog in your signature. Of course the people who like your comments will click on your address link.

Share your comments and let them see how knowledgeable you are. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your blog, turning it into a reputable business that could end up being trusted and frequented by many loyal visitors.