How To Drive Free Traffic To Your Website

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.

Starting a blog, whether on your own domain or even on a hosted site such as Blogger.com or Wordpress.com can give you a great advantage over just a regular website. The main thing that makes blogs great for getting traffic is that they have a built-in RSS feed. These RSS feeds allow search engines and several other directories or engines to index the content of blogs and do this very easily.

There are several social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us and other sites like this. You can “bookmark” your own blog posts and other pages to help them get ranked in the search engines. Often times these social bookmarking “tag” pages will get ranked as well. Although this isn’t a direct link, these pages can serve as bridge pages with links back to your site and these pages rank also rank very well with the search engines.

There are dozens of places on the internet that you can create mini-sites or individual pages. These sites typically will allow you to post whatever content you want to post including your own RSS feeds from your blog, other websites, articles, video or whatever else you’d like to create in these pages. The main key to success with these types of sites is to make sure that you’re posting links back to your website, especially the deep links. Those RSS feeds included in the mini-sites or pages are a great way to get links back to your site. Also, create an individual text links using html or even images.

Next to pay-per-click, articles are the best way to get your website ranked and get traffic back to your website. The main reason these article websites are so good is because the pages on which your article shows up are very relevant and the links that are allowed in the author profile or resource box. Many of the good article sites also have a lot of “authority” with the search engines and their article pages rank very well which also means that the link values passed along from these types of sites are very high.

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.

You can find that there are a lot of blogs that already get a lot of traffic. When you comment on these blogs, you’ll usually have an option to put in your name, email, url and your comment. If your comment is insightful and contributes to the value of the original post, you’ll have other readers of that same blog post find your comment and many times will click through to your blog. I’ve personally done this and also had visitors to my sites also from blogs for comments I’ve left.

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.

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