PROMOTION: 10 free ways to increase website traffic

Generating traffic requires that we consider two aspects: Money and Time. Either you invest the money and save yourself a lot of time or, you invest a lot of time and save yourself a lot of money.

Buying traffic is the easiest way to generate traffic. But if you are starting as an Internet marketer, you probably do not have much money to spend on traffic to begin with.

So that leaves you with the need to invest your time.

Free traffic techniques can be time consuming. The good news is that they are 100% free and will get you a fair amount of targeted traffic. It helps a lot to have your site properly optimized for monetization, that way you can start earning enough money to invest in buying traffic, and save your valuable time.

Here is a list of some free traffic techniques you can start using right away:

1. First of all, submit your site to the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo) and to as many other search engines as you can. Last time I checked, there were about 105 good ones.

2. Write 5 articles to start and submit them to the free website and article directories. Remind yourself of Including a link to your site in the article itself or in your bio box. Optimized you article for a keyword your site is targeting.




3. Look for blogs or websites related to your topic and leave useful, quality comments that have a backlink to your site. A way of doing this is to go to answers.yahoo.com, and start answering questions related to your site's subject.

Another very common action is to join the most popular forums that deal with your site's topic and becoming an active poster but keep in mind, do not spam them or you will not last long. Every forum has a signature file unless it has been disabled by the administrator.

And of course, include a link to your site in your signature.

4. Now pay attention to this as it can be very powerful. Write a press release about your site and submit it to popular press release sites prweb.com is one of several. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research.

Keep in mind that a press release is written differently from an article. Learn how to write one. It's fairly simple, but you need to know how to write one. Some of them are free and others charge you for their services. Start with the free ones and as you generate income, you can add the paid services to your promotional efforts.

5. If you have purchased a product or service and you are happy with it, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a back link to your site.

6. One quick way to get extra free traffic is to add a link to your site in your email signature.

7. Start a page on myspace.com, digg.com, stumbleupon.com and on any other high page rank social bookmarking site you can find.

In the same way, go to Squidoo.com, open a few accounts, create a few lenses and link them to your site.

9. Submit a video to youtube.com. Use youtube powerful viral capabilities.You don't really need to be a video producing wizard at all. A simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job with no problems.

10. This last tip is not free, but is worth the extra dosh. Check out the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors. If you find a good available domain, grab it and redirect the traffic to your site. This trick has been done for many years by the informed ones.

Now if all this looks like a full time job is because it can be! These techniques work, but you don't have to use them all at the same time. Just pick the one you feel the best with and act now.

Invest 30 minutes to an hour daily in building your free traffic. Then go to your next technique and within several weeks you should be earning enough money to afford to buy traffic and concentrate your time and efforts on building your online business they way you always dreamed of.