The first thing I would like to point out is that the word “FREE” doesn’t exist in the game of Internet marketing. You either give up your time, or money… sometimes you give up both. You get both of these back in spades when you succeed, and you WILL succeed if you are dedicated and persevere through the tough times that we all inevitably face along the way.
If others have made this work in the past and continue to do so in the future, it just makes sense that you will too, unless you are incredibly lazy or just plain dumb. I’m not trying to offend, but the only reason why people fail at anything in life is because they give up too easy or don’t put in enough elbow grease to begin with.
Okay, let’s take a look at the best (in my opinion) free ways to increase your website traffic… the lifeblood of any business.
Guest Posting:
If you are not guest posting on popular blogs within your niche at the moment, you are making a very costly mistake. Guest posting is a very rewarding strategy to be using to drive traffic to your website. I have been writing for popular blogs for years now and even though I pay for a lot of my traffic through other advertising methods, guest posting is still one of the most effective… and it’s free.
Imagine having 2 -3 articles published every week on high traffic blogs within your niche? You would expect to get 500 – 1000 visitors. That’s a lot of traffic just from one free traffic generating methods. I honestly can’t think of an easier way to make sales or build an email list than guest posting. Other than paying for traffic, this is hands down the best free strategy in my opinion.
Gust posting is not only about getting articles published on high traffic websites though. You also have the add3ed advantage of being able to communicate with your potential prospects by participating and answering questions 0n the posts you write. This is powerful stuff. If you write a quality post that highlights your4 expertise in a particular area, you will inevitably have people willing to follow you back to your blog where they can get to know more about you.
The traffic from guest posting can be the most targeted traffic out there (depending on the blog you post on) and the relationships you can build can benefit you for months and years to come. I have had people follow me around reading my posts on different blogs and leaving great comments about my work. At one stage my girlfriend thought I had stalkers.
Anyway, this is a powerful strategy and you have no excuse now when it comes to getting visitors to your website. The trick is to be consistent though. Two guest posts every week will do wonders for you business. After a couple of weeks you will have no problem being able to bang out a guest post in an hour.
Article Marketing:
I have to admit, article marketing is not as popular as it used to be. If you’re looking to get backlinks from this strategy I’d honestly give it a miss. The thing that I like about article marketing is that you don’t have to write any additional content to publish on directories if you don’t want to. Personally I write often for my blog, so all I do is wait for my posts to be indexed by Google and then submit them to the top 5 directories with a link back to my squeeze page and website.
I have noticed that in order to get consistent traffic from article directories you have to submit a fair bit of content. Just throwing up a couple of articles is not going to cut it. As a long term strategy this can be a good one, but short term it ain’t. I have close to a hundred articles published on a few of the top directories and I gain quite a bit of traffic.
Another thing to keep in mind about article submissions is that if your articles are quality, they can be picked up by other webmasters and placed on their own website with all your links back to your website kept in tact. This is good for baclinks, but most importantly for more direct traffic.
Side Note: After you publish your articles onto directories, you can convert them into PDF and have them published on document sharing website also, thus, more traffic is inevitable over time. The idea is to have your content everywhere.
Forum Posting:
This strategy is one of my favourites to getting direct targeted traffic to my website. I won’t go into too much detail here because I have written an article about how this strategy is very effective for website promotion. You can find that article here… Using Forum Marketing To Advertise Your Business.
Suffice to say, I have been using forum marketing for free traffic generation for quite some time now and the results are brilliant. That may sound over the top, but let me tell you, forum posting, if done correctly, can bring the most targeted traffic to your website out there today. On forums there are many people searching for answers to the problems you can solve for them. This is very, VERY powerful and a method you MUST be implementing as soon as possible.
Blog Commenting:
Another strategy here that used to be used solely for backlinking purposes. I know how effective blog commenting can be for generating one way backlinks because I have used them extensively in the past for that very reason. But, that’s not how I use blog commenting anymore. I thing the relationship building and direct traffic aspect of this method is far more valuable than that of gaining backlinks.
If you comments are valuable to readers of that blog, people will click on your “name – link ” and go straight to your website. This is another one that you must be consistent with though. Making the odd comment here and there is not going to yield much results for you. Leaving low quality comments will not do much for you either.
Think of blog commenting as a way of communicating your expertise to the blog owner and their loyal readers. If you are an active participant on many blogs, you can build some great relationships and get you name out there in from of ways. Not only that, but this strategy is an excellent way for you to gain exposure so you can offer your services as a guest poster on those particular blogs. Once again, it’s all about building relationships and getting your name out there.
So, there you have 4 great ways to get free traffic back to your website. There are of course many more, but these are more than enough to get you started. If you are consistent with these and look to provide value above all else, you will definitely see some great results. Why not set up a 30 day plan to implement all of these strategies. After 30 days are up you will see which ones are working best for you and make necessary tweaks here and there to get the most out of each method.
To Your Success
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