The ultimate goal is to get lots of free traffic from Google and other search engines. But the thing is that the search engines will send you traffic based on the traffic you already have coming in. So if you don't have any traffic coming in, then the search engines will never pick you up and send you any traffic either.
So we need to get the traffic flowing and there are many ways to go about it, but it will take a tremendous amount of work to get it going. Unless of course you have a fat wallet, then you can just buy Google Adwords, or other ads, and they will send you all the traffic you want. But most likely that is not an option if you are just starting out online, and there are many other effective solutions.
The key is to build quality back links to your site. The more back links you have the more Google will like your site. Here are some of my ways to build those links and get that traffic flowing.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization. This is something you should keep in mind as you're putting your content together, everything else can be done after. You want to include as many keywords in your article as you can without it sounding spammy. The more keywords you have, the easier it will be for search engines to find you and send you quality traffic.
Social Marketing
Social Marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get the flow of traffic coming to your site. Sites like Stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and Propeller will allow you to generate a generous amount of traffic.
Social Marker is a free tool to help you to make this fast and easy for you. Simply enter your information into Social Marker and it will take you through the steps in a few minutes.
Article Marketing
Article Marketing is another great way to get back links and free traffic. Basically how it works is you write an article about 300-400 words in length and then submit it to article directories for other people to use on their sites. So you would get a link back to your site from the article directory itself, plus from anyone's site who uses your article.
Some of the online article directories are E-zine Articles, Go-Articles, Article Biz, Article City, Article Click, and Best Ezines.
Writing and submitting articles to all these directories can be very time consuming but well worth it.
Forums
Participating in forums related to your niche is another great and effective way to build traffic. Most forums will allow you to put links to your websites in your signature which appears underneath every post you make.
A good way to spend your time in the forums is to help others by answering their questions, and referring them to sites that you think might be of interest to them. This is a fast way to gain trust and build your credibility.
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers is another great way to show off your expertise in a market. The more questions you answer the more opportunities you will have to promote your site.
Blogging
Start a blog related to your site and just start blogging. If you don't want to start a blog of your own, then you could always be a guest writer on someone else's blog.
Also when you come across a blog that you like leave a comment along with a link back to your site. The trick is to get to the post before anyone else so that your comment will be the first one people will read.
You can have your blog hosted at Blogger or Wordpress for free, and both are excellent.
RSS Feed Directories
If you have a feed on your blog or on your site then you should submit the feed to online feed directories. DotSauce is a great directory to get you started with the submissions.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges work great if you are getting links from high quality sites. Simply contact the webmaster and request to do a link exchange.
E-mail Signatures
If you send out a lot of e-mails, then including a link to your site in your signature will also help you to get more free traffic.
Write an E-Book
Write an E-book and put your links and there and give it away for free. If you have more than one site within the same niche or market make sure to put all those links in there and your traffic will increase.
OpenOffice a free tool that you can use to create all your e-books.
Ping-O-Matic
Every time you add something new to your site you can ping it to the search engines using Ping-O-Matic.
Write
Last but not least you should write, write, and write some more. Sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Scribd, Gather, tumblr, and Knol are an excellent way to get some back links and free traffic. Start with one site and build a readership before moving on to the next. The more you write the more traffic you will get.
