Getting traffic to your website is a major key to getting sales and making money. You can either pay for traffic with time or you pay with money and many times it is both. Even with pay-per-click, you will usually spend a significant amount of time in addition to a cost for each click to get targeted traffic to your website. The following are a few ways that you can get free traffic. Some of these are going to produce more targeted traffic than others, but each of these methods can get traffic to your website.
Now, blogging can be like any other website that alone isn’t going to get any traffic. However, depending on which blogging platform you use, you’ll have an instant leveraged website or web platform you can use to get traffic assuming you use the right keywords in the right places on those blog posts. For instance, Blogger.com and WordPress.com tend to rank relatively well with the search engines, especially with Google.
Social bookmarking is a great way to get easy links back to your main website and depending on the type of social bookmark site you’re using, you’ll have the opportunity to get a lot of traffic back to your website. Digg.com is one of the examples of this type of site that has the capacity to drive a tremendous amount of traffic back to your site. If you are interested in looking more into the social bookmarking scene, do some research on the top 100 “diggers” or “stumblers”.
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.
What would probably be considered the original “Web 2.0″ would be forums. Anything where you can interact in a community type setting with something topical or niche specific. Many forums will allow you to add a signature to the end of each of your postings. Depending on the forum, you can put a link back to your website, usually using whatever keywords you want to. Depending on your contributions in the forums as well as the call to action in your signature, you’ll get visits to your site as well as the search engine benefit of having those keyword phrases linked back to your website.
There are a lot of blogs that you can add your comment to. These comments can be used for the search engine benefit by using your keyword phrase as the link back to your site. If the blog is a “popular” blog where many people add comments, the webmaster or blog owner may have a setting that prevent the search engine from giving credit for that link. In those cases, you can use the more popular blogs to link back to your site and simply get some clicks back to your site. This puts some of the pressure on to write comments that encourage the clicks.
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.
Brian is an internet business coach that specializes in Bluehost Coupons. Brian also coaches people on how to get started with an affordable web host.