Building Internet Traffic: 10 Free Traffic Building Methods

Building internet traffic to your blog or website using free methods can be very easy. The concepts below give ideas and some of my experiences on how to increase web traffic.

These free methods can provide enough traffic to get your site established and growing if you work them.

And since you are here, get a free ebook with dozens of ways for building internet traffic, and sign up for my ezine right here.

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10 Free and Easy Ways for Building Internet Traffic

At each search engine, you can look up how to submit your information for free. Then, their software, called a spider, will look at your site and see what you have.

The better your information, the more people will talk about it and share it.

The biggest engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and Ask, by the way.

2. Submit to smaller search engines and/or to Blog aggregators

Blogs really do work well, but this works for sites, too. Submit you site to smaller search engines and blog engines.

You can find lists of these by searching for them as search engine listings, search engines, or blog listings and blog directories.

You can submit to these for free. Do 5 or 10 a day and build up a good set of links pointing to your site.



Just think, all of these people could be looking for your blog, and building internet traffic for you...

Quick Aside: What’s the difference between websites and blogs?

A regular site usually has separate pages and links to them from the home page.

Most blogs now have tagging installed, so that you can find related pages fairly easily.

Also, if you call it a blog, you need to add to it regularly, at a minimum once a week. If you can post daily, you will attract more attention and more readers.

You can have a function on a website called site blogging, which is a page with all of your additions, in chronological order. That way, you can list in a blog engine as well.

In terms of building internet traffic, they both work the same: you need visitors.

Why do we writers always mention forum posting? Because it is easy, free, and it works.

Let me tell you what happened to me. I wanted to build internet traffic to another site. I got into the forums that my hosting company offers, and started answering questions, helping other people.

The next day, I had a surge in my traffic for that site. Easy, and free.

You need to keep in mind the key: I was helpful, not pushy, not just spamming my link out there. People often visit forums to learn or get an answer. If you can provide some answers, then people will also check out your site.

Look for forums that relate to your business. For instance, don’t spend hours answering questions on investing tips when you really want to sell dog training.

A couple of forums that I like for building internet traffic:

Better Networker – network marketing business focused

Warrior Forum - internet marketing focused

Article Stars Forum - article marketing and internet marketing focused

4. Blog Commenting

This is an alternative to #3. You can make a comment at the end of many blog posts, and just add your two cents. Very handy, and it gets you a link back to your page. You can usually put in any url you want, so you can link to a new page on your site or blog, if you like.

It works best if you can be one of the first comments, say the first 5. After that, most people don’t read many of the comments. Some will see your witty or insightful note, and click through to your site, which is building internet traffic to your site.

You can go to Yaro Starak’s blog to see how Caroline Middlebrook used blog commenting to launch her business online successfully, building internet traffic at first only this way. Yaro also offers a free mp3 download of the interview, and it is worth your while.

Entrepreneur's Journey - Caroline Middlebrook Interview

5. Write an Article, or a hundred

Yes, just like this one I wrote that you are reading. You can write up a few ideas, about 500 words, and post it to a number of places.

If you search in Google, you’ll find thousands of article directories. Understand that any article on a directory will provide a link back to your site, but some will have more traffic than others.

When you write an article or make a video, as I’ll mention below, and you then upload it to a directory, you want to get some of their traffic to your site. Naturally, you want to post to the best places, right?

For articles, that would be Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Scribd, Associated Content, and more.

It depends on you. Ezinearticles gets tons of traffic. I have gotten over 12,000 views of my articles, and many many visitors to my sites, building internet traffic for me. And many more from Goarticles, too.

I also extensively use Article Marketer, a distributor of articles. I write, put my article into their service, and they distribute it.

For a free way to get traffic, very few ways beat article marketing. 6. Video Marketing

Okay, some would argue that if anything beats article marketing, its video marketing. In this method of building internet traffic, you will make a short video and upload it to several video services, or at least to YouTube, the biggest one.

Many more exist, of course, like Metacafe, Myspacetv, and about, oh, a million others. These are some of the big ones. And yes, myspacetv is part of myspace.com the social networking site.

If your ideas work well in video, great. If you just plan to put up words on a page with some music in the background, do it anyway. It isn’t much of a video, but it still is a video. You can use Camtasia (a software product) or you can go to Jingproject to make your video for free.

7. Social Networking Sites

These sites really represent worlds all by themselves. I read recently that Myspace, and Facebook would be similar, approximately be the 8th largest country by population. Wow! People love these sites.

Which means you can start building internet traffic from your profile on these sites. Most of them let you link to your own site, so put your link there.

On Facebook, I have my profile showing my latest blog posts. It’s easy, and it can generate traffic. Also, you can set up groups or join groups on these sites and that will also bring people to your profile and your website or blog.

I have mentioned the largest two in the US, but many others also have huge traffic numbers like Friendster, LinkedIn, Twitter (a microblogging platform), and who knows how many more.

Get started with this and see what it can do. The traffic on these sites is absolutely astounding, and build internet traffic for you, too.

8. Social Bookmarking Sites

You may think these would be the same sites as in #7. Not so. Social networking is for talking, keeping tabs on the friends, seeing what people are up to in general.

Social bookmarking sites keep track of your bookmarks so you don’t’ have to have your computer with you, and so you can also share your internet escapades with others.Of course, you can list all your bookmarks at your Facebook account. But you can also set up a Stumbleupon account, or Digg or Reddit account.

Other surfers – your future visitors – use these services to see if a site is worth visiting. If you post good sites, they will look at them.

Be careful! You can’t start building internet traffic by posting a bunch of links to your own sites! You need to link to other good sites. You can have a link to your own site in your profile.

If you link to just your own pages, surfers will ignore yo, may complain, and you may find your account deleted.

You can, of course, stumble sites that link to you.

9. Give away free reports.

Let’s say you write a 5 page report. You can give this away on a free PDF site. This works, you get visitors to see what else you have.

These are also called free ebook directories. I don’t have a favorite, but do a quick search.

10. Free Press releases

Many press release sites require a payment, but several are free. For instance, free-press-release will allow you to send out a free release.

A press release is like an article, but has a different format. Read several before you send one out – you want it to be a real press release.

By the way, you can do a press release on anything. On a new video, a new ebook, free or paid, on a special blog post or contest.

Traffic Strategies Abound

One hint: you don’t have to do all of them, and you don’t have to be great at all of them. Start with a few, and get better at those, then add a new method when you feel confident.

I have written over 100 articles – which I consider a drop in the bucket. Okay, maybe a few cups in the bucket. I still like article writing, but I have been branching out, and plan to add much more in the future.

The most important point, as always: try something. Fall on your face a few times. Publish an article with a mistake (I did last week – oops!) and get going.

Action is absolutely the most important factor in the whole process.

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