There are basically two ways to get website traffic. You can buy it, or you can get it for free. I’ve tried both methods over the years, and although the easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to use Pay Per Click marketing, I don’t recommend it. That’s because if you’re not careful you can spend a fortune buying website traffic and end up with a bad website ROI. I mean why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? However if you prefer the easy way and you have spare money check out…

15 free traffic generation techniques that work:

1. Submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and to as many other search engines as you can. Before you do this however ensure your site has been properly SEO’d with relevant keywords/phrases.

2. Write 1-2 articles each week for 8 weeks and submit them to the free article directories. Be sure to include a link to your site after each article in the bio box with a link containing the main keyword used for your site. Each article should be optimized with the keywords your site is using.

3. Submit those same articles to email newsletter publishers in your niche. Even if you only get one or two of your articles printed a tremendous amount of traffic can be generated.

4. Find blogs related to your topic and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site.

5. Answer questions related to your site’s topic at answers.yahoo.com. Be sure to put a link to your site in each of your answers.

6. Join a handful of the most popular forums that deal with your site’s topic and become an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.

7. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.

8. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site.

9. Start a blog using WordPress, provide links to your site from each post. Submit the blog to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep the blog updated.

10. Post ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.org). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But don’t neglect the other ones. If your ad is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser. Off course you must post in the appropriate category.

11. Write an interesting email signature that includes a link to your site, and use it with every outgoing business email you send.

12. Start a page on facebook.com and on any other popular social media site you can find, always provide a link so visitors can go to your site. Building a fan base on Twitter is another good way to promote your business and gain traffic. Be sure to offer useful information to your followers and avoid blatant sales. Remember these are for socializing not selling.

13. Submit a video with useful information to YouTube.com, Squidoo.com, etc. You don’t really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job. Even short videos (3 minutes or less are best) captured with your cell phone camera can be submitted.

14. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.

15. Write an ebook or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free ebook directories you can find online.

While all this sounds like a full time job, remember, you don’t have to do this all at once. Just pick the traffic item you feel best with and take action. Invest an hour or two daily working that traffic item. Once finished with a traffic item move on to your next favorite technique. If you work diligently at this, over time you will increase the free traffic flow to your site that will dramatically boost your bottom line.

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Here’s a tip for article marketing. “Use the Resource Box to your advantage”. Most article posting sites will allow you to post 3 anchor text links within the resource box. A few only allow two links however. These anchor text links should be made up of the main keyword used for a given page of your site. Each text link should point to a different page on the site. This has two beneficial factors for your site.

1) A link to your page improves SEO and ultimately aids in boosting Page Rank for that page.

2) The link provides an instant direct link to your site for anyone reading the article.

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If you’re like most of us, you get emails from SEO Companies promising to get Top-10 Search Engine placement for your website. Consider for a moment, if these people could truly and honestly deliver on that promise, they wouldn’t have to advertise. Word would get out and website owners would come running with wallets open. But the fact is they are advertising for your business and people are not running to them for Top-10 placement.

Top SEO companies (if they were any good) should themselves be ranked very high for terms like “Search Engine Optimization”, “Internet SEO’ and “SEO”. Next time you get an email guaranteeing Top-10 placement; do a search for “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO to see how highly that company ranks for those terms. Chances are high that you won’t find them anywhere in the search results. No one can honestly deliver a Top-10 position for every site using legitimate SEO techniques. Any SEO company that makes such a bold guarantee typically will do a number of things designed to trick the search engines into ranking you higher for your keywords.

The problem with tricking search engines, especially Google, is that those techniques will work for a short while, but they will certainly stop working at some point. Deliberately tricking the search engines to gain search engine ranking is called ‘Black Hat” and is considered fraudulent and punishable by death (no just kidding on that).

When Google redesigns or updates their search algorithms (their formulas) for ranking websites — it’s called the “Google Dance” — millions of websites get new page rankings. The reason Google (or Yahoo or Bing) takes the time, energy and expense to redesign their algorithms is specifically to get rid of those websites who have managed to trick the system and rank well by using shady or underhanded tactics.

If you’re in a big hurry to rank high in the search engines, go try one of those Black Hat SEO companies. If they are at all effective, you will get ranked well quickly. But as soon as Google “Dances”, you’ll see your page rank fall like the 1929 stock market.

But that’s not even the bad part about using Black Hat tactics. The worst part is that Google will de-list any site from their index that they think intentionally used tricks to gain position or page ranking. That means that they aren’t going to list your site any more until you jump through a few Google hoops and prove you’re going to play by the rules.

People with high ranking, long lasting, successful sites, achieved that status by implementing “White Hat” or legitamate SEO techniques. These people would not dare touch a Black Hat technique. They have real businesses to run, with real employees and families to support, and they aren’t about to risk having the traffic to their website shut down for the sake of a quicker ride to the top. You should feel the same way. I hope you’re wearing a white hat, if not good luck.

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More and more people these days are using websites as a way to help pay their bills. Some people are even using them as their sole source of income! Creating a thriving, successful website isn’t easy and it takes a lot of hard work. One of the keys in making a website successful is to know how to execute SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization” properly.

What is search engine optimization? Simply put, it’s basically the process of increasing and improving the quality and volume of traffic to a specific web page. When someone types a specific search term into a search engine, that search engine begins scanning its internal database, looking for that specific phrase, or “keyword.” Then the search engine returns reference to the web pages that best match the search terms. The higher up in the search results a web page is, the more likely it is to improve its traffic flow.

Search engine optimization is a strategy web designers and SEO specialist use to ensure a web page is one of the first web pages returned on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). SEO really becomes important when the competition for a given product or service is high. You may have the best thing going for consumers but if your search engine placement is low your traffic will suffer. So to give a web page an edge, people employ SEO tactics to place keywords within the content of their pages to improve their chances of getting traffic.

Here are 7 essential tips to follow when deciding to implement SEO.

• First choose your keywords or key phrases carefully, keeping in mind that you should select only one, two or three at most for each page you decide to optimize. The keywords/phrase must be relevant to the page and must be terms that people will use to search for your product or service.
• SEO is done on a page by page basis. Each and every page of a website can be optimized but you should concentrate on 1 – 3 pages of your site (more if the site is large). No need to do SEO for an About Us or Contact Us type page.
• If possible select a URL for your site that contains the main keyword/phrase for the Home page of the site. It is difficult to find the perfect URL these days so consider being creative by using dashes (-) in the URL. I.E. ( my-site-is-the-best.com)
• Make full use of Meta Tags. There are three important Meta Tags (Keywords, Description and Title). Search engines use the information defined in these tags to help determine what the page is about. Place the most important keyword/phrase as close to the front of the Meta Tag definition as possible. Keep keywords/phrase to a minimum, using too many keywords will dilute the value.
• Use the keywords/phrases within the content of the page. When you place text on the page, be sure to use the main keyword/phrase often but without excess. Overuse of the keyword/phrase can be deemed spammy by the search engines and make the page hard to read by the visitor.
• Use the keyword/phrase in main headers, Alt Tags of images or graphics on the page and if possible as anchor text links from other pages within the site.
• Something called semantically related words and or synonyms to the keywords can be extremely effective to SERP. For instance, if your main key phrase is “wooden chairs”, words like stool or bench or seat will give additional value to the main keyword/phrase and will aid in boosting your SERP. A very good tool to assist you with the selection of semantically related words can be found at http://labs.google.com/sets. Once you find additional related words use those in the content often but again without excess. Strive to keep the written content on the page natural sounding.

SEO is an extremely powerful technique used for the sole purpose of getting available traffic for a given keyword/phrase to a web page. By careful selection of keywords/phrase and using those words appropriately on a web page, additional free traffic can be obtained.  SEO does not guarantee sales success, once a visitor makes it to the website it becomes the responsibility of the site content (text, graphics, layout, etc) to make a sale or conversion.

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I recently encountered a website that has peeked my interest in it’s chosen marketing strategy. You see this site spent zero time, zip, nada, on On-Page SEO. If you look at the page source you’ll find that the title tag contains the site Domain Name. No other meta tag related to SEO is used. If you look at the site content for a possible keyword or phrase you’ll find nothing that makes sense to the relevancy of the sites service or subject. There are no H1 tags or alt tags that use anything other than the Domain Name. The ironic thing is that the home page has a PR of 3 while other pages have a rank of 2 and the site is only 6 week old.    

Being an Internet Marketer I found this unusual. I mean to have a PR of 3 in six weeks without any regard for On-Page SEO is just crazy. So how did they do it? As it turns out the subject or niche of the site is article marketing. That got me thinking that maybe they wrote articles to promote the site. Sure enough, a Google search for the domain name pulled up scores of links to articles. Also a Google link:(Domain Name Here) query verified that at least Google is aware of the site.  

I found this of such interest that someone could ignore On-Page SEO but yet have the where-with-all to write articles that I just had to track down and call the site owners.  It turns out that the site owners are quite new (6 weeks) to the world of internet web design. They are still learning about SEO and to their own admission blissfully disregarded any SEO effort. However they are quite busy with the traffic generated by the written articles that they are in no hurry to do anything about SEO. Oh, and by-the-way, they have not spent a nickle on PPC advertising nor do they spend anytime analysing web traffic. Customers are coming to their site and they are busy writing articles for others.    

This case stands as a testiment to the power of article writing. Not only does article writing help with PR, it  provides direct links to your site by creatively developing a resource box with multiple links to your pages. So will this work for everyone, probably not. But I’d say if article writing is not part of your marketing strategy you are missing out on a lot of free traffic. Well it won’t be free if you have to hire a writer but if you are a writer, Cha-Ching, Freebe!

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Here’s a link building tip for article writers. In the resource box of articles you write, always add as many links as allowable (typically its three).  Each link should be targeted to a different page of your website. By doing this, you are creating one-way, back-links to multiple pages of a website. This is a great SEO link building technique that not only helps the Home page but inner pages as well. When you create the link be sure to use the main keyword of the given page as the anchor text. This adds additional SEO link juice to the link.   Here’s an example: Sorry it’s a bit self serving but not intentional, just don’t have time to create something new.

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In this example each of the links use the main keyword for the respective page as the link anchor text.

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People go into business for themselves all the time for many different reasons. Some people get sick of being stuck in an office. Some people prefer to be their own boss. Some people are victims of a down turn in the economy and see it as the perfect opportunity to realize their dreams. While there are many reasons to have your own business, there are also many ways to start a business. One of the easiest and most popular ways is to own and operate a website. In fact, people in record numbers are creating products and offering services over the internet for the first time.

No matter your reason, when you start a website, the first and most important fact you will discover is your site has little to no traffic. It is generally thought by novice internet entrepreneurs that all you need is a good website with a good product or service and you’re on your way to instant riches. Well this is somewhat true but the other important ingredient you need for success is “traffic that converts to sales”. This is where reality of owning and operating a successful website begins.   

Web traffic (potential customers) is the key to your internet success, without targeted traffic your site will not become the financial success you hope for.  New websites begin their existence by hanging out at the back of some very long and dark corridors somewhere in cyberspace. No one knows your new site exists, and no matter how hard a cyber-pilot tries, your site will never be known until some extra effort is put forth to give your site a name and place. 

To bring your site into the light of cyberspace here are five Internet Marketing Strategies that you can use, must use, to get the valuable web traffic you’ll need to be successful.

On Page SEO
SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic from search engines. The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. When your site is properly SEO’d you can expect a boost in organic (free) traffic to your site. However don’t expect complete success with On Page SEO alone.    

Off Page SEO
To complement On Page SEO, an activity that goes hand in hand, is Off Page SEO. This is basically an action to obtain links from other sites. This is a crucial factor for SEO. Links from other sites serve two purposes. 1. Quality links say to the search engines that others think your site is useful so the search engines in turn boost your page ranking, boosting your page ranking results in better free traffic flow to your site. 2. Each link that exists in cyberspace to your site is a direct path to your site. The more links you acquire the higher your traffic flow becomes.

PPC
PPC or “Pay Per Click” is a web marketing technique that can quickly and easily generate the flow of targeted traffic to your site. As the name implies (Pay Per Click) is a method that costs money. Most search engines offer PPC programs, the biggest and best respectively are Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. While there is a cost to a PPC program there is no better or quicker way to generate traffic. If your site is new, it is wise to begin a PPC program while other free methods of generating traffic are developed. Once other free methods begin to bear traffic, dependency on a PPC program can be reduced or eliminated.     

eMail Marketing
As the name implies this is a technique of marketing your site by means of sending emails to potential clients. Your foremost issue with email marketing is that of obtaining a legal and targeted list of email addresses belonging to interested persons. If your site is new you probably don’t have a list. No problem however, a list can be bought. Do your homework, make sure a purchased list has valid names and addresses and is targeted to people interested in your product or service.     

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a technique that involves others in the sale of your product or service. The concept is that you solicit other websites that are relevant to your web business to advertise and drive traffic to your site. Of course to get others to do this there has to be compensation. You will simply share your profit with affiliate sales sites for their effort of sending traffic to your site. While you may not like the idea of splitting your profit, Affiliate Marketing can make you much more successful.

The internet marketing strategies listed above fall way short of complete explanation and detail. For successful implementation of these strategies you are urged to educate yourself completely with each idea. The key to your success is to not stop marketing once your site is active. By continually applying internet marketing effort you will continue to improve the traffic flow to your site and make that dream of instant success a reality!

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You may already know, implementing Internet marketing and advertising that generates quality traffic is a difficult task. If not careful you can burn through your advertising budget in a hurry with little or NO ROI. You can spend a lot of valuable time chasing link-backs or writing articles with little to show for your effort. This is what is happening to many website owners and it sucks, is there a better way?

• Search Engines can bring lots of targeted traffic, but despite what many SEO Providers or other marketing service vendors may say, it’s not easy to get free search engine traffic. There’s 157,000,000 competitors with great page ranks that you gotta out SEO. 
• Oh but wait there’s PPC (pay per click) advertising; yeah right go ahead, hope you have lots-o-money that you don’t need. PPC does work if you take the time to do it right and keep up with the rising cost and effort. But to be successful with PPC your gonna have to work your butt off with no guarantee, and guess what folks, you may spend a lot of effort and money only to find out that the ROI is not there.
• Email advertising is one of the most effective site marketing techniques you can implement. However it takes a long time to build an opt-in email list. Oh and by the way you gotta have mucho traffic to build an email list. If you don’t your list is gonna fit on a piece of toilet paper.
• Banner ads are effective for some but yeild the lowest click-thru rate of the various site marketing techniques. Banner ads can cost a sizeable sum as well so real care needs to be taken to get your banners in front of an audience looking for your product or service.
• You can spend a lot of time exchanging links with those standard traffic exchange systems (link farms) but they generate poor results and in many cases don’t work properly. Have you ever tried exchanging links with webmasters of sites you think would make a good link partner. You do the research, find an email address, compose a great (your site is so good) email then wait for a response. Still waiting aren’t you?  
• E-Zine advertising can be a great source of new sales prospects but many people get so many email ads these days that response levels can drop before an ROI is achieved.

These Internet marketing techniques are generally thought of as the “better” ways to promote your web site. If this is the case, and our effort, time and money is not producing profitable results then how is a website owner going to succeed? Let’s face it, advertising online just isn’t as easy as some would have you believe. You can spend months and even years promoting a site and have little to show for it. Getting web traffic sucks!

What do you think? Leave a comment especially if you have some sure fire methods of generating traffic that have tangible and worthy results of time and or money.

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