Getting website traffic is one of the most important tasks you must do if you have an “online business.”

Interestingly, you cannot just get traffic with few weeks worth of work and then reap the rewards. Just like every other things in life, getting traffic is an “ongoing process.” You must be doing it consistently in order to keep the traffic flowing to your site.

Well, I am not an internet marketing “guru” that knows how to get tons of traffic to my site, but over the past 3 years, these simple yet powerful traffic building methods have worked for me very well, as it continuous to do for many others I believe.

Here are few simple yet effective tips to bring MORE traffic to your website, without spending a penny:

1) Optimize Your Site

For many, search engines have been the “major” source of (organic) free traffic. This is the single biggest reason why you need to optimize (on-page SEO) your site and content on it for ALL major keywords in your industry/niche.

When it comes to driving more traffic to your website for free, search engine optimization (SEO) is still the way to go.

SEO is NOT as difficult as many Internet Marketers make it to be!

If you want to get familiar with the basics of SEO, check out our articles on SEO.

Related article: How NOT to do SEO

Update your site content, regularly

If you were expecting some shocking “secrets,” this tip probably made you disappointed, didn’t it?

But the truth remains the same: create great content and frequently update it on your site/blog to bring more traffic to your website.

Have you heard of the saying, “Content is King?”

Begin creating “good” content that are useful, original, and engaging to your audience, and regularly post them on your blog. This simple act will not only build a “loyal” audience of recurring visitors, but search engines will also start to notice this and LOVE your site!

Use Social Bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, LinkedIn, Delicious, and StumbleUpon are popular and free methods of brining tons of organic traffic to your website.

Use Social Networking Sites

Another free way to get tons of traffic to your site is to get active on Social Network sites.

If you become popular on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, the traffic you can get from there can easily surpass “free traffic” from search engines such as Google.

Yes, it is true that it takes a lot of time and effort to build a large network of “targeted” fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, but generally, the result is worth every effort.

Related article: Facebook vs. Twitter – Which is better

Get Backlinks from other “relevant” sites in your niche

The next popular and free method of brining more traffic to your site is getting backlinks from external sites, particularly those in your own niche.

If you can get backlinks to your site without the famous “no follow” attribute, often known as “do follow” links, you will not only get free traffic to your site, but it will also be very good for SEO. You website pages should rank higher in search engine results and bring a flood of traffic to you.

Even though the links are “no follow” (useless for SEO), they can still bring you tons of free traffic to your site.

For example, if you manage to insert a link in a visible place on a site having high volumes of traffic, you will likely get tens of thousands of hits from this one link alone.

Get backlinks from sites within your own niche by reading the article below.

Related article: 5 Unlikely Sources to Generate HIGH PR Backlinks

BUT be careful while exchanging links from bad sites as they can get your site penalized by Google.

Use every chance to promote your site

Do not sigh away from promoting your business, especially if it can be done free. There are several ways to promote your site/blog for free to bring more traffic to your website, including listings, classified ads, directory submissions, etc.

It is true that not all of these free ways of promoting your site is going to work equally well, but if you choose few places wisely where you could bring more traffic to your website for free, you would not care about those traffic sources that do not perform for you.

Create a ‘free offer’ and give it away

Free content (product or service) drives more traffic, particularly if they are useful for your target audience. There are wide varieties of ‘useful’ content you can create.

For example, you can publish many guides like “how to” articles and tips on your blog to bring more traffic to your website, free. But it’s even more effective if you could create a free product or service and give it away to your visitors.

When this product or services starts to become more popular and more people start visiting your site/blog, chances are they will visit other sections of your site too.

Use viral content

Just like free goodies can bring more traffic for your site, viral content can do that too.

Viral content distributes like a virus – i.e. when your visitors like your content, they will share it with their friends, talk about it on their sites, and promote it for you on their social media sites.

Viral content distributes like crazy on its own too. You only have to create and submit it to several different popular sites and you will be done. After that, your users pick it and do all the rest for you – i.e. distribute it for you.

Viral content can be a video production, a presentation, a good article, or an infographics.

Use offline marketing

Many people have forgotten the offline method of promotion, but that is how most internet marketers bring a flood of traffic to their site for free. Although many business owners spend most of their time on computers, nonetheless, life still has not moved completely on the web too.

Offline promotion is still powerful today as it used to be before the advent of the Internet. Yes, it can bring you more traffic to your website for free. There are several “traditional” ways to promote your online business, like including a URL on your business card or stickers or souvenirs, etc.

Likewise, you can also sell T-shirts or any other merchandise with your logo on it to make your brand even more popular.

Use URL in your signature

There are popular forums that get millions of visitors a day regularly and if you are popular user on such forums, you will bring more traffic to your site for free. Simply use URL in the forum signatures to build powerful backlinks to your site, and hence, bring more traffic.

If people who visit these forums like your posts, they can click on the link in your signature and visit your site.

Tip: Instead of always linking to your homepage, you can also post a “deep” link (a link to an internal page of your site) to put more focus to a particular page on your site.

Bringing more traffic to your website is a on-going process. If you just pick few of these favorite traffic generation methods, we can guarantee that you will be able to bring more traffic to your website for free, starting this week.

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