Increasing the number of visitors your website receives doesn't have to be expensive. Below are 5 ideas for increasing website traffic for free:
Start a Blog
Blogs are a great way to boost traffic to your sites. Search engines love blogs because they contain regularly updated, current content (or at least they should do!) and thus they tend to rank well in search results. Blogs are also a great way of demonstrating your knowledge and if you can build up a loyal following they can be an excellent source of free traffic. You can place links within your blog posts or include banners or adverts down the side, on your resources page or about' page, etc.
Recruit Affiliates
Imagine having an army of people all working to drive traffic to your website. Well, that's exactly what affiliates can do for you! Let other people do all the hard work for you and in return you pay them a commission when someone buys something from your website through their affiliate link.
Start a Mailing List
Your own mailing list gives you the ability to drive traffic on tap and is one of the best ways of increasing website traffic for free. If you have a decent sized list you can simply send out a broadcast email and get an instant surge of clicks, or you can set up an autoresponder series and have it drive traffic for you on autopilot.
Arrange Adswaps
Having a mailing list gives you access to this wonderful method. Adswaps have become increasingly popular in recent years and they can be a highly effective traffic generation strategy. Basically you find another marketer with a mailing list and arrange for them to tell their subscribers about your website in exchange for you emailing your subscribers about their website. If you can find someone suitable to swap with (they must be in a similar market) adswaps can provide an instant surge of traffic to your site. The drawback, of course, is that you need to regularly arrange adswaps in order to keep the traffic coming.
Write and Submit Articles
Writing and submitting articles is one of the oldest traffic generation strategies. Basically you write unique articles and at the end you include a resources box with a link back to your website. Doing this generates you backlinks which will improve the ranking of your site, together with generating direct traffic from people who view your articles. Simply submit them to article sites such as EzineArticles.com or use them to create a content site.