Did you realize that there are easy ways to get free quality traffic to you website? Most webmasters do not realize that some of the best website traffic that they can receive won’t cost them a dime.

In fact, one of my websites receives hundreds of newsletter subscriptions a month without me having to spend a dime on advertising.

Most Internet marketers will tell you how to write good ads and pay the write amount per click at Google and Yahoo, but what they won’t tell you (usually because they don’t know) is how to get free traffic that will actually convert into more revenue than the paid traffic!

There is only one catch – these traffic generating techniques will cost you your time instead of your money. Now you could easily make it cost you money instead by hiring someone else to do it for you, but that is your prerogative.

If you apply these simple techniques you will get more target traffic to your website.

Here are six easy ways to get quality targeted traffic to your website free of charge.

1. Participate in popular online forums.

One of the easiest ways to gain exposure to your website for free is to become a member of a few popular forums that are related to your niche market. For example, if you run a website about making money from affiliate marketing, a good place to go might be a forum about affiliate marketing.

The key here is not to blatantly advertise, but instead actually participate in the discussions and become a respected member of the forums. You can place your website with a few keywords in your signature, or even post links to articles that you have created that might be of interest.

Basically the more you participate and help others with their problems on these forums the more respected you will become and the more people will follow the link to your website.

One of my first successful websites received close to 2000 visitors per day simply from a couple of forums that were in my market. All I had to do was participate. I then told them about my website that would help them as a free resource. Before I knew it I was receiving a ton of visitors and my traffic grew simply from this one technique.

However, do not openly advertise without first participating, as this will get you nowhere.

2. Submit your articles to article directories.

You should already have articles published on your website (and if don’t start writing some!). If all they are doing is sitting on your website then you are only using 1% of their potential!

You should visit the popular article directories (such as http://www.ezinearticles.com) and submit your articles to these directories.

When you submit your articles be sure to include a good resource box. It should contain three of four lines about yourself and a good call to action (such as “Get your free report on…” or “Find out more at…”). Resource boxes should always be written in the third-person.

3. Submit your articles to ezine publishers.

You should also start searching for other ezine publishers in your niche market. Do extensive Google searches and also pay attention on the forums where you are advertising.

Sign up first for these newsletters and then start a correspondence with the ezine list owner. Let them know that you have some articles that would interest their readers (and make sure that your articles would!). Ask if he or she would publish them along with the resource box.

You will be surprised at how many publishers will willingly agree to this. Webmasters spend a lot of time looking for good content for their websites and for their ezines. If you are able to provide them with this resource, and your articles are good quality and not just sales letters, they will gladly accept!

To be continued…

This is part one of two articles. You can look for the next article that will contain three other tips that will help you to create viral traffic that will spread like fire!

Matthew Glanfield is an Internet marketing veteran of 3 years. Receive his free email course on how to start your own Internet business by visiting http://www.internetbusinessformula.com.

The number one problem new website owners have is, “How do I drive targeted traffic to my website?”

A significant amount of time and energy is spent on this single task. A webmaster will commonly focus on:

• Ranking well in the search engines
• Pay Per Click (PPC) programs
• Pay Per View (Banner) programs
• Link Exchanges
• Directory Submissions
• etc.

All of these methods are viable means of getting traffic. In fact, if you’re lucky or competent enough to rank well for your keywords in the search engines, you’ll find that you get a very large portion of traffic to your website.

What do you do, however, if you rank poorly or, even worse, don’t even show up in the first 1000 results on any of the search engines? What do you do if you don’t have a budget set aside for marketing?

This is where people often turn to traffic exchanges. Quite simply, a traffic exchange is a program where you sign up and agree to surf sites in exchange for some credits. These credits are then used when other members of the exchange surf to your site.

Now, I’ll be quite honest with you, this traffic is not highly targeted traffic. In fact, if this were your only method of advertising your website, you’d probably fail. BUT it is a great method of getting traffic to your site in addition to the other methods listed above.

So, why do people use traffic exchanges? Here are a few of the benefits:

• Increase your Alexa rating! Did you know that some search engines factor your Alexa rating into their algorithms? More traffic means higher search engine placement!
• Increase your branding awareness. Any marketing expert worth his salt will tell you that branding is extremely important to stand out amongst the billions of websites out there.
• More traffic equals more sales. A percentage of people surfing will be enticed by your ads and click on them to find out more information.
• Another source of revenue. Many traffic exchanges will actually pay you money to surf. More importantly, as you refer other people to the network, you’ll earn a percentage of the money that they earn! It may be small amounts but if you work the system it could amount to a lot of money.

Now, before you head over to Google and search for Traffic Exchange, I’d recommend knowing a few facts:

1. Some traffic exchanges are simply out to get money from you and will refer very little traffic to you.
2. Some traffic exchanges have poor systems in place to stop cheaters from running programs to increase their credits faster.
3. Finally, some traffic exchanges will allow popups, activex controls, site rotators, etc. in their network. Any of these can stop your autosurfing from working, or even worse, allow your computer to be infected with a virus.

The best part about Traffic Exchanges is that you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The worst thing that could happen to you is you get a little bit of traffic which increases your Alexa rankings and you don’t get any money.

Of course, for the system to work, you’ve got to make sure that you do some surfing yourself. The makers of the exchange programs realize this and some of them even have an autosurf feature where you get a reduced number of credits while your browser happily loads page after page every 10 seconds or so.

Geoffrey Faivre-Malloy is a published author, speaker and owner of Make Money at Home Based Business Opportunities, one of the most popular home based business sites on the internet. His favorite traffic exchange is the InfoWizards Traffic Exchange.

I try to use as many free traffic programs as I can to increase traffic to my web sites. But does this traffic actually make sales for me? Probably not directly but indirectly they can.

So what are the benefits of free traffic programs? Well the number 1 benefit is that it will boost your traffic. This is the most obvious benefit. But the biggest benefit of free traffic programs is that the more traffic you send to your site the more popular it looks to some search engines.

http://alexa.com actually ranks your site depending on how much traffic it receives. You can actually go to alexa and download traffic and stats buttons or logos to put on your site. This will show you and your users how much traffic you are getting and how many people link to you.

Other search engines such as Ask jeeves , Lycos , MSN , and others use the alexa traffic ranking from your site to help determine how high in their search results your site will be placed. It is also assumed that Go ogle also uses the alexa traffic ranking in its ranking algorithm.

The bottom line is that the more exposure you give to your site from free traffic programs the better your search engine rankings will be. And the higher your rankings in the search engines the more good quality targeted traffic you will get resulting in more sale’s and commissions.

There are literally 1,000s of free traffic programs you can join. And surfing all of them for traffic can be a bit of a chore. The Avant browser can help you surf multiple free traffic sites at the same time. It is a valuable tool and a must if you want to join and surf several traffic programs at the same time.

You can download the Avent browser and sign up for several of the free traffic programs that I use by clicking on the following link.

http://bigmoolla.com/traffic-programs.html

Another great use for free traffic programs is for inflating your rankings on top sites if you use them. Top sites are basically big advertising pages. You list your site with them then they give you a link code to put on your site somewhere. The more traffic you send through that link the higher your advertisement will be placed on the top site.

In the end FREE traffic programs may or my not work out for you. But they are free to join so give them a try. What do you have to loose except the time it takes you to join and surf for credits.

Tom Worsley is a successful work from home Internet marketer and independent representative for SFI. Owner and Webmaster for http://www.bigmoolla.com & http://kawarthapublishing.com This article may be re-published on your site or in your newsletter as long as this resource box is included.

To increase web site traffic, you first need determination, a goal, and a plan of action. Perserverance that comes through a grit your teeth kind of determination is an essential first step towards getting a flood of traffic to your website. Read on to discover how each element comes together to help drive traffic to your website.

Be determined to push through the pain

Learning anything new can be painful. It can also be a wonderful opportunity to explore a whole new world. How you choose to look at it can play a large role on how successful you ultimately become. As you increase web site traffic, a consistent application of your game plan will lead to success. Waiver in your determination to increase web site traffic and you take your eyes off your goal, and become sporadic in applying your action plan. This results in poor web site traffic results.

Have a goal, know where you want to go.

If you don’t have a goal you’re shooting for, how will you know how much effort you will need to exert in order to reach it? Having a specific numbers goal to increase web site traffic will focus your mind on how to achieve it. Just a vague “I want more visitors” will do little towards making your site a success. Don’t just make a goal for number of visitors though. If you are selling a product or service on your site, make sure at least one of your goals is to increase sales. Follow the thought from there to get to our next point…

Develop an action plan to achieve your goal

If you want to increase web site traffic on your site, you will need a plan to get you there. This plan needs to be specific and it needs to be measurable. One of the strengths of the Internet is that you can pretty much measure anything. Use that to your advantage.

When creating an action plan, you start with the goal in mind. Let’s say your goal is to sell 10 widgets in one month on your website. Follow this thought. How can you do that? You obviously want to get people to visit your site. Two main ways to get traffic to your site include Pay per click advertising on search engines and high traffic web sites, and getting high rankings for free on the search engines. From here, you can launch an action plan that will successfully increase web site traffic on your site.

Looking for more on this topic? Go to Screamertraffic.com. Joe Duchesne is the webmaster of ScreamerTraffic.com which offers free web traffic tips. Reprint freely as long as you keep the keyword rich link live in this resource box.

It’s no secret that submitting articles to article directories can generate traffic to a website. In fact, it seems that everybody and their dogs are up to it. But as is the way of the web, many seem to miss the point and don’t submit effective articles, or submit articles that have absolutely no relevance to their website.

For example; it is pointless writing an article on the uses of sand in the Sahara desert if your website is about deep sea fishing. Seems obvious eh? Well surprisingly not to some it would appear, because I have seen very similar mistakes in some of the top article directories.

Look at it this way: If somebody is interested enough to read an article about credit cards, why on earth would they then click a link in a resource box that leads to a site about notable ice cream parlours of the northern hemisphere?

With this in mind here are some tips toward writing the ‘perfect’ article.

• Think of a good title – Make it intriguing enough for people scanning the titles to read the whole article.
• Make it relevant – If the site you want to promote is about collecting 1950’s baseball cards then write about this and not sports cars.
• Use your keywords – You should know by now what the popular keywords are for your chosen subject, so include them in your article title and body.
• Check spelling – It’s a simple exercise, but one that many article writers neglect. You want to be taken seriously don’t you?
• Make it interesting – Don’t just waffle! Providing valuable information for your readers will encourage them to click through to your site.
• Be resourceful – Use your resource box wisely and make sure the link to your site works.

Submitting articles to article directories can be a great way to build up that all-important traffic to your website, but not just any old rubbish will do the trick. A little thought and planning when preparing your articles will not only provide interesting reading, but also drive targeted and eager visitors to your site.

Tony Williams is a musician, writer, and self-confessed eBay fanatic. Follow his ongoing quest for ways of making and saving money online at http://www.myrichpickings.co.uk.