Traffic is the lifeblood of any Internet business. With a steady stream of targeted traffic, you’ll generate leads and make money. However, if your traffic dries up, you will have a hard time making money online. Traffic is essential to everything and this article provides an overview of some free methods available to you.
Before we start discussing the details, let’s go through some basics. Internet traffic is like a market and goes where there is demand. For this reason, you should choose a deep market where there is a lot of traffic. You’ll be able to see how much traffic is available by searching websites like Google or YouTube that show statistics of people searching for keyword phrases (Google) or the number of people watching videos (YouTube). Typically deep markets are things like weight loss, investment, health and nutrition. The advice is to check that the market is deep before jumping into anything. Traffic sources can also be both offline and online. This article is about free traffic methods that don’t cost money but do cost your time.
an initial thought
Free traffic is not strictly free. You usually have to spend some time and effort to get the rewards. We won’t cover all the free sources of traffic here, but some of the top ones follow now.
SEO
Search engine optimization (or SEO) is used to make web pages look good on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A web page that has good SEO will appear at the top of search engine rankings, allowing people searching to find the content easily. This gives you traffic. There are two parts to SEO, namely on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves making sure you have a good mix of appropriate keywords on your page, including but not limited to title, description, meta tags, photos, and videos. These keywords can be found using the Google Keyword Tool. Offline SEO is mostly about having backlinks to your site. These are links from other websites to your website. To rank for specific keywords, you must include the keywords in the anchor text of the link.
social networks
This includes outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Facebook and Twitter are primarily about building communities of like-minded people. On Facebook you have friends, groups and pages and on Twitter you can follow people and be followed. It’s not necessarily easy to sell directly through these outlets, but the social nature of the community is great for building trust and lists of people because of the traffic available. YouTube is the leading video broker and is a great source of traffic. If you make a video that is popular, you can quickly drive traffic to a website or subscription list. We found that making a video is easier than many people think and can definitely be accomplished with a home computer setup.
Merchandising of articles
This involves writing keyword-rich articles on niche topics and submitting them to websites like EzineArticles that rank well in search engines. Your traffic comes from search engines and you drive traffic to a website of your choice using a resource box at the bottom of the article. This contains the link of the site you also want to drive your traffic to.
blog
You can generate traffic by creating a blog and providing content to your readers. Your blog will become a central point to which your readers will return and a point where new readers can find your content. Posts within the blog can be optimized through SEO so that individual posts appear in search engines.
post comments
Many blogs and forums allow you to join and post comments on the pages. You can also set up your own profile, which will be published when your comment is accepted on the page. If you make sure that your profile has a link to your website, you can generate traffic. Be sure to post on popular blogs and forums that are appropriate for your niche to increase your chances of targeted traffic.
classified ads
You can post classified ads on sites like Craigslist. These will contain a link to your website and thus drive traffic to your web pages.