Learn How to Increase Your Website Traffic with These Simple Tricks

The main requirement for generating income for your website is a steady flow of traffic. No visitors means no sales. It takes money to make money, most will say, and you'll need to spend money if you want visitors to your site so you can make money. This is true, but not as expensive as you might think.

Most of those big hit sites you've seen-the ones with huge amounts of traffic daily-are paying big bucks to get that traffic sent to them. Through advertising, keyword optimization, and other gimmicks, they're able to pull huge numbers of visitors. But at a huge price to match. It's worth it for them, obviously, because being a highly visited site makes you a highly valuable one too.

You have options, though, that don't require you to spend huge amounts of money to have that same amount of traffic coming to your site. With a little work and diligence, you can match their traffic over time without spending huge bucks to get it. Don't spend what you can't afford and gamble that you won't lose it all.

Here, then, are the top five ways to generate traffic at low-cost. Combining these will maximize your potential traffic flow and create steady, long-term traffic to your site.

Link Exchanges

This is a proven method and one that gets used often and with great effect. Basically, you visit sites similar to yours and offer to exchange links with the site owner. He links to your site, you link to his and both of you gain in search popularity as a result. Do this several hundred or thousands of times and you can really climb the search result charts. This has the added benefit of often attracting visitors from similar sites to your own and can result in symbiotic relationships in which his customers can become yours and vice versa, assuming your products are complementary.

Traffic Exchanges

This one isn't totally free, but it's low cost and very profitable traffic-wise. It basically works like this: you join a program where traffic is sent to your site in return for your visiting other sites. You view other sites in the network, gaining credits, which are then used to purchase views from others in the network, who'll visit your site. It's all automated other than your participation in the site viewing, which you must do manually to earn credits.

Higher-end traffic exchanges also exchange content, allowing you to use the content from another site in the network and allowing other sites to use yours. This means you won't have to create a lot of new content to build up your site's search engine results, as that'll be done for you, and you'll get more visitors.

Newsletter Publishing

Publishing a newsletter on your site's subject matter and products can result in many return customers as those who visit your site can sign up for your newsletter and read what you send them on a regular basis. This also builds credibility and makes you seem to be an expert in the field you're in. This all ads to consumer confidence and return purchases. Often these newsletters get passed around outside of your network, gaining you new customers by word of mouth as well.

Article Writing

Writing articles about your subject to be submitted to other newsletters, online encyclopedias (wiki's), and other sites is similar to newsletter publishing, but spreads your name further. Writing quality articles (or having them written for you) builds your credibility and "brands" you to potential customers, making them more likely to recognize and purchase from you. This is a proven and worthwhile method of gaining new traffic and is one of the most proven of those on this list.

Joining Communities and Forums

This requires a lot of time, but pays off big in terms of traffic. Join forums centered around the subject you're marketing towards and the demographic you're aiming to hit. Then begin posting and answering other's questions, building your credibility and name branding as you go along. Make sure that each post has a "signature" at the bottom that features your name, a 10-15 word biography, and a link to your website. Over time, this tactic pays off big time.

There you go. Those are the five best low-cost or free ways to begin driving traffic to your site. They aren't as quick and easy as paying a lot of money, but they will have the same result over time. Good luck!