5 Free and Effective Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Driving targeted traffic to your website is essential to your success in internet marketing. And there are many ways of generating traffic. Some require you to pay for them while others are absolutely free. In this article, I will be touching on traffic generation methods that cost you nothing.

Article marketing

Article marketing involves writing articles that are related to your niche market and submitting them to various online ezine directories like EzineArticles, ArticleBase or Article Alley.

You shouldn't try to pitch your product in the body of the article itself. Rather, offer information that is of value to your reader. Also remember to optimize your articles with keywords related to your niche.

In the resource box at the bottom of your article, include a short write-up about yourself and your website. That is where you can add the URL of your website, providing a link back to it.

Forums

Participate actively in forums where people with similar interests gather to chat with each other. Visit those forums that the people you are marketing to visit. Post your opinions on any thread and even reply to the posts there.

Again, you should try to offer something of value in your comments, however short they are. Avoid spamming as you will lose the trust of the other forum members. Include a signature box where you can add a back link to your website and wait for the new friends you have made to visit.

Social media

A great way to build relationships is to participate actively in social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Friends, fans and followers can be excellent sources of traffic.

Press releases

Writing press releases is another effective way of driving traffic. Simply write newsworthy press releases about your product and submit them to online press release sites. These sites can be ranked highly in Google for a short time, helping you to get backlinks and increasing the search engine positions for your keywords.

Video marketing

Produce a short video that is optimized for keywords in your niche and submit them to video sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video. They offer another avenue for linking back to your website and for ranking high in search engines.

The above are some of the free methods you can use for generating traffic. The key to success is to do them consistently. With a constant stream of targeted visitors to your website, success in Internet marketing is just a click away.