Top 10 Free Traffic Methods

1.     SEO – it stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you’re in the business of promoting your website, then you’ve most likely heard of this already. As the name suggests, its goal is to optimize your website’s content for search engines so that your site pops up in the search results for relevant keywords. Good SEO is essential for quality, long term traffic. 

2.     Article Marketing – sites like Ezine Articles allow users to open an account that will allow you to share information relevant to your website as well as provide a direct link to your site after the content. It’s easy to do because you’re writing about what you already know.

3.     Video Marketing – while most of the stuff promoted online comes in the form of reading material, websites like YouTube have provided users with an avenue to post promotional videos for free. They’re easily searched and can be indexed in search engines, thanks to tags and keywords, and they’re a friendlier way to promote your site since it’s visual.

4.     Social Networking – this one’s taken into by big and small companies alike. With so many people’s lives revolving around Facebook and Twitter, exposure to countless audiences worldwide is always guaranteed if your site has its own Facebook and Twitter page.

5.     Forum Posting – the good thing about forums is that they bring people of the same interests together in one place. All you have to do is to be part of a site that promotes an interest relevant to your website and regularly share your knowledge while promoting your site. Be careful not to SPAM, though – forum moderators are quite vigilant against their threads getting cluttered up with advertising more than relevant info. 

6.     Blog Commenting – this is just like forum posting, except that it’s much easier to do, since you just need to leave a comment on blog posts that are connected to your site. But you have to be careful about SPAM with this method as well. More often than not, blog authors who see any link on comments find this as a SPAM indicator, so be sure to leave comments relative to the topic so that you won’t fall under that category.

7.     Yahoo Answers – browse through the categories and answer questions that are related to your website. The goal is to build up enough credibility for yourself around the system so that people look to your responses often, and they’ll most likely follow websites that you recommend – including your own, and that will boost traffic.

8.     Create Backlinks – these are simply links that lead back to your site that are posted on other sites. You can do this on your own blog or blogs, or you can work with other blog authors. It's best to build links on high PageRank websites. They’re very easy to do and are essential for good SEO.

9.     Traffic Exchanges – also known as Hit Exchange, this is similar to a backlink, but involves a bigger community of users. You will most likely have to get a membership in a group where its members agree to drive traffic to each other’s websites. You will only need a couple of minutes each day to fulfill your end of the deal to benefit from the exchange.

10.    Social Bookmarking – sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are very easy and straightforward to use. You just need to share links through your account for other users to see.