Sunday, November 16, 2008

How To Drive Easy Free Traffic To Your Website

By Brian Armstrong

The holy grail of internet marketing seems to be getting "free" traffic. Even though you could do a lot with paid traffic, such as pay-per-click, free traffic is great. There are several ways you can get some free traffic to your main website.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get free traffic, but like any other website, you still have to get traffic to the main blog. However, blogs have a major advantage over regular websites because they have an RSS feed built in. Also, depending on which blogging platform you use, there are some instant advantages because if you use wordpress.com, the domain tends to rank very well with the search engines. Also, Google owns Blogger.com and has a tendency to "hang out" on their own properties looking for new updated content.

You can use social bookmarking sites to get both links back to your site for the search engines as well as direct traffic from people visiting these social bookmarking sites and clicking on the links in your bookmarks. You can use sites like socialmarker.com to get a list of social bookmarking sites that can be used to bookmark your blog posts, pages on the site and also use the profile options with several of these social bookmarking sites that allow you to put links in for your websites into the profiles.

In addition to blogging on sites like Wordpress.com or Blogger, or even a self-hosted blog, there are other sites you can use that may be considered mini-blogs. There are several sites that allow people to create their own pages. You may have heard of Squidoo.com or Hubpages.com. You can use existing articles, videos, and just about anything else to populate those pages with content. Just make sure to link back to your main site or the site where you have your affiliate link or your main source of revenue. You can use these types of sites as well to promote affiliate products.

The single best free traffic source is article marketing. In the eyes of the search engines these article websites have a very high authority and rank very well with the search engines. This also means that links from these article pages are usually very relevant. Because you are the one that writes the articles or at least controls the content of those articles, the links back to your pages on your site will be very relevant and the search engines will reward you with higher rankings.

Posting on forums is another great way to generate links back to you site. Find forums within your niche and start contributing to the conversations. Make sure that you're posting on forums that allow you to add a signature with a link. Also, whenever possible, view the source on forums and see if they add a "nofollow" attrib within the link code. If they do, that forum won't do much for your search engine optimization, but will work for getting clicks back to your website.

Many blogs get a lot of traffic and with the comments you can add on a lot these blogs, you'll get people clicking through to your website. There are also what are called "dofollow" blogs that will help you with your search engine optimization as well.

These are some great ways to get free traffic but each of these requires an investment of time. If you're willing to put in a consistent, dedicated amount of time each day or a few times per week. Consistency is a key part of success when it comes to getting traffic to your website. - 15359

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