9 Great Ways to Get Free Traffic to Your Website

As a beginner, you might think there are only a few ways to generating traffic to your website. Beginners would usually think of offline ways to generate traffic online. A few of them might include telling your friends verbally, advertise on newspapers, put advertisements on TV and even giving out namecards and flyers on the streets. Some of these ways often cost some money so how can we look for avenues where we can generate traffic that does not need any startup capital?

Here is a nearly complete list of how you can do so:

1. Similar Sites
Visiting and commenting of similiar sites can drive traffic back to your own website well. This is especially so because visitors to those similar websites are looking for a particular type of information that you most probably would have. Traffic from backlinking from those websites are usually quality traffic.

2. Link Exchanges
There are a swarth of link exchanges that allows you to post you links for visitors to visit. One example is EasyHits4U. The quality of traffic might not be so good as some of these link exchanges give credits or cash to registered surfers for visiting links. Most of the time, these visitors go to your website just to earn that credit or money and have little interest in your website unless they specify that it is their category of interest. TrafficSwarm allows such targeted category listings. For a more opinionated link exchange, LinkReferral gives reviews on sites from its huge reviewers base. Traffic might be lesser but benefits from the reviews can be priceless and you get pretty good quality traffic.

3. Article Writing
This is one of the most reliable and lasting way to drive traffic to your website. You can write articles and submit to places like Helium or Article Marketer. Articles with backlinks can drive good quality traffic back to your site because only interested parties usually read articles of a certain niche and click through.

4. Satellite Sites
Places like Hubpages and Squidoo allows you to create mini-sites to promote a certain topic or interest. Backlinking from these sites with high page ranks not only gives you traffic but it also boosts your website's pagerank, enabling it to be more searchable by seach engines like Google.

5. Social Bookmarking/Networking
Using Digg or Stumbleupon on your site can increase its exposure as people like to see recommended links from others. Whether you use Facebook or Friendster, a linkback from your profile or promoting it via the network can do wonders to your site traffic.

6. Forum Participation
By participating in forums that focuses around your niche area, people would want to see what you have got to offer if you post your website link as your signature. A favourite forum of mine is MyLot where not only it has many areas of topics discussed, your discussion posts are search-engine-optimised by tagging as well.

7. Site Aggregation
Submit your website to aggregators like Technorati and MyBlogLog. They help in website exposure and also allows you to build a community around a certain topic niche.

8. Free Directories
There are free directories online that allows you to post your website links. A great online version of Yellow-Pages is Dmoz where it is very well known for its directory.

9. Emailing your contact list
Last but not least, you can still always email the whole of your contact list by sending them your website link. Even better, you can do it subtly by adding a signature with the website link in there.