First of all, you need to decide whether you’re interested in buying traffic or working for it, or whether you want to combine the two.

What about free traffic. There’s really no such thing. All traffic will require some work, at least initially. Once set up right, it can appear on autopilot for years to come.

But that’ still not free because initially, it did take work and maybe even money.

1) Buying Traffic

If you want to buy traffic or pay for traffic in some way, you have a number of options. The most common one is adwords, which is the classic PPC method.

Still, there are other places that offer PPC, from Bing to Yahoo to… well, there are plenty of options.

Next, you can pay for traffic by way of renting advertising space in form of placing banner ads on other people’s websites. Or you can purchase solo ads in ezines. Or ad space on classified ads sites such as USFreeAds.com

2) Working for Traffic

If you’d rather put in some sweat equity, you can work for your traffic too. Again, you have lots of options:

The most common and one you should definitely include in your lineup is article marketing, whether you pay for traffic or not.

Article marketing basically means that you write articles that are designed to lure your readers to your website, with a resource box at the bottom that closes the deal and contains relevant links. You place these articles in article directories, and yes, ideally, you promote them for extra bang for the buck. And then you wash, rinse, and repeat

Forum marketing is a little different. You join relevant forums, set up a signature line that promotes your website, and then just participate in discussions and answer questions, especially questions that have to do with the subject matter of your website.

YouTube Marketing requires a bit more tech savvy. Instead of wriiting articles, you create videos and then upload them to YouTube. Make sure you include your link in the videos as well as in the descriptions, and then proceed as with articles.

There’s plenty more, but these should get you started. More in a future post, on social media marketing.

Meanwhile, you can get more information on how to get started with all that by requesting my free internet marketing step-by-step ecourse.

Or, if you’re ready to start blogging (another low cost way to promote your website), you can get a steal of a deal for my blogging course… IF you hurry.

Look for more tips next time.

Here goes:

1) Article Marketing

Okay, so it won’t cost you actual money, but you do have to put in the legwork. Still… if you do, this could pay off nicely.

Obviously, the premier place to publish your articles is Ezinearticles.com — but there are many other places to publish your articles.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Goarticles
Article Dashboard
Searchwarp
SelfGrowth
Website-articles.net (costs money but is excellent!)
iSnare (also costs money, but distributes your articles to tons of places)

2) Press Releases

Again, many of the press release sites cost money, but there are a few that are fairly inexpensive, specifically webwire.com, which for $19 can give you quite a bit of publicity.

BUT there ARE quite a few free sites as well. They keep changing, but free-press-release.com is a good one.

As all the free ones, it tries to get you to upgrade, and I do recommend to get their $1 upgrade. I mean, what’s a buck if it gives you greater visibility?

The free ones, if you really want to get some benefit from them, also require a bit of legwork. How? Well… you have to submit your press release to a whole bunch of them. And be prepared to do it with plenty of warning since most of the free ones will take their sweet time to post your free release.

3) Tweet your News

Works best in combination with articles, blog posts, and/or press releases, where you can send your tweeps. or followers.

Okay. This is just for starters.

I will post more tips for how to get website traffic soon, plus maybe a list of free places to submit your press releases as well…

Check back again soon.

Elisabeth

But how do you get traffic?  There are so many different ways, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start.  Maybe you’ve been working your fingers to stubs on the keyboard and still… the results aren’t always what we wish they were, especially once we consider all the work we’ve put into it.

Here are three power strategies on how to go about building that traffic the smart way along with resources that can help:

1)  Links bring traffic, and they help with Google rankings.  They help people find you out in the wild and wooly world of the World Wide Web, two ways: If people come across a link, they click on it, and presto: there’s your site. And ifyou have lots of links, Google will take notice and believe that your site is important, and it will start giving it higher and higher priority when it comes on where it’ll show up in search results. And the result of that: You knew it. Even more visitors.

So how do you get links?  You can build them yourself — a slow and tedious process. Or you could take an accelerated path: Check out this FREE e-training on linking to help you speed up your link building learning curve, activities and results.

2)  Too much work to build it all yourself?  Wish you had some help?  You can, and it’s not expensive at all (or rather, it doesn’t HAVE to be expensive).  Learn about how to get help with your traffic building projects right here, and yes, there’s some FREE e-training available as well.

3)  If you have heard about viral marketing — the ultimate in getting the word out about you — but never quite knew how to go about it, discover how it works right here — and yes, there’s also a freebie available.

Just don’t sign up for all of it at once, or all the free stuff will clutter up your inbox

Between the three — link building, i.e., getting more links that will bring visitors to your site both directly and by way of Google once the links have started to propel you up to the front pages of Google, outsourcing some of the grunt work so you can spend your own time on more valuable activities that only YOU can do, and viral marketing — the ultimate power tool, you’ll find that your traffic can increase substantially in a very short time.

And last but not least — if you don’t have a blog yet, you’re REALLY leaving money on the table.

In another blog post, I’ll tell you about Mike Paetzold’s WordPress Lessons (they’ll open again to a small but select audience). What makes Mike special is that he’s a total expert on how to set up your blog to optimize it for traffic, and he shares all his secrets right there on the webinars.

I’ll write more about him in an extra blog, but if you can’t wait, you can find Mike’s WordPress Lessons Here.