subject: How to create a Torrent of Visitors to your website The Free Way [print this page] How to create a Torrent of Visitors to your website The Free Way
There are basically two ways to get traffic - paid and free. As you might guess, many marketers choose free traffic because, well, it's free.
Paid traffic
The non-free way to get traffic to your site is to pay for links to the site. The most common way to do this is by paying for Google ads. Google ads called AdWords and are those little four-line ads you see in the right margin of almost every page on Google.
Advertisers pay to have these Adwords ads put on the appropriate pages. Without getting into the complexities of Google advertising, suffice it to say that you bid on your page position. The more money you are willing to pay for an ad, the better a page position your ad will have. A total of eight Google puts no more than eight of these ads on a page. This means that if you want to be in ad placement 1 or 2, it will cost you much more then if you are willing to settle for position 7 or 8.
The good news is that you don't pay unless someone clicks on your ad and goes your website. You can also set a daily budget so that you don't end up logging on to your AdWords account only to find that you just spent hundreds
of dollars.
A second alternative is to buy ads on newsletters. This has fallen a bit out of favor in recent years but can still be a decent way to get traffic.
Third, there is a product called Three-way links. The idea behind this product, which costs $47 a month, is that you put links on your site to other sites and get links back in return. One of the ways that Google ranks your site is based on backlinks. So, the theory is that the more backlinks there are pointing to your site, the better Google will like it and the higher it will rank your site.
Free traffic
The most common way to get free traffic is by writing articles and placing them in article directories such as www.ezinearrticles.com and www.goarticles.com. These directories all allow you to have what's called a resource box in which you can put a couple of links to your website The downside of this strategy is that your articles usually stay on the EzineArticles or GoArticles front page only about a day. So, to get really good exposure, the article either has to be picked up by a third party newsletter and republished -- or people have to see the article, click on the link and go to your site almost immediately.
A second way to get free traffic is through social posting. Here, you post references to your site on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other social-type sites. If you choose to build your site using WordPress, you can get plug-ins that will automatically post to these sites for you every time you update your site. Third, you can find forums related to your site and post comments with a link in your "signature" back to the site. You can find these forums by searching Google on your keyword plus the word "forums." For example, if your site has to do with cures for hay fever, you can search Google on "hay fever plus forums." One word of caution -- and that is to make sure that when you comment on a forum, you add something of value. Otherwise, the forum leader won't allow your comment to be published and may even ban you from any further comments.
Traffic is to a website as blood is to your heart. Without it, you site can lapse into a coma. So if you want to succeed as an Internet marketer, it's important that you work hard to drive traffic to your site.
