Get Free Traffic

How many emails do you send each day? If you’re like the average person who uses a computer on a daily basis, you may send or receive up to 100 messages a day. That’s a lot of opportunities to share your website! If you haven’t added a direct link to your site in your email signature, you are missing out on a lot of free publicity.

You may think that the people you communicate with wouldn’t be interested in your site. Some people don’t include a link because they think it is the equivalent of spamming someone. This may at one time have been seen as so, but it is common now for business emails to have signatures with not only website addresses, but with addresses for social networking profiles and more!

Take advantage of the emails you send every day by taking the time to set up an email signature. It’s easy. With most email programs, you can input your information in the “settings” and you’re ready to go. Not all email platforms will allow HTML sigs, so in this case you may need a free signature program such as WiseStamp. These programs will automatically insert your email sigs each time you open your mail to compose a new message.

A great way to get your site noticed by people who are specifically looking for information relevant to your site is by listing the URL in a niche directory. A niche is a specific area of interest or demand. If you are selling a tangible product, different niches can include books, movies, cleaning supplies, food, and much more.

Your site’s area of interest may be very specific or extremely broad, but either way you are sure to find a niche directory where you can be listed. A simple search of your product type may bring up locations where you can list your website. More than likely however, you’ll just bring up competitor’s websites. Try a search using your product and “listing directory”.

The main advantage to using niche directories to add a listing is that you are already reaching your target market. Advertise your barbeque business in the “Memphis Area BBQ You Can’t Miss” directory, and you know your URL is going to be seen by people ready and wanting to try your barbeque.

It takes little time and no expense to list your website in directories, so there’s no reason not to take this simple step to free marketing. It’s like listing your business in the yellow pages–for free.

If you’re looking for a free and relatively easy way to draw free traffic to your website, offering goodies to your readers is always a good choice. Visitors love getting freebies–whether they’re a newsletter, a free report, a mini-series, or something of the like. Offering a free report is a common way to gain subscribers and get readers and one-time visitors to return to your site.

You can outsource the writing of the free report if you are better at running your site than writing. Many freelance writers can put together a quality report for you in as little as a few days, depending on the length, at a fairly inexpensive price. Once you have the report to offer, there are a couple ways you can distribute it in exchange for an increase in website traffic.

Perhaps the most popular way to use free reports is to offer it to your readers if they sign up or subscribe to a mailing list, through which you then try to sell your product or service. These mailing lists are managed through service such as AWeber. You solicit signups through the offer of this report, and you instantly add to your list of potential customers. Though readers may eventually opt out of the mailings, many find it too cumbersome, and you’ll most likely enjoy the benefit of a large mailing list for quite some time.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to draw traffic to your website is through the regular use of commenting on blogs. There are many good reasons to participate in the discussions on other blogs, and no apparent drawbacks except perhaps a small initial investment of time.

Taking advantage of other blog owner’s readership is simple. If you have a website about gourmet food, for example, you will want to find a handful of blogs that have to do with cooking, food preparation, or recipes. Those would be the most obvious topics, but you can think outside the box as well. A blog that focuses on family life or the life of a mom may have the type of readers who would love to find out more about gourmet foods.

Try subscribing to a few of these blogs, hopefully finding ones that already have a stream of steady blog comments. This way you know there are enough readers to make it worth your while, as it does take some time to leave a comment in response to a blog post.

Most importantly, do make your comments meaningful. Becoming a trusted blog visitor is important, and eventually the other visitors will be interested in what you do–and click through your signature to your site.

Profiles–they’re everywhere! From social networking sites, to niche groups, to professional networks… at any time the average person has ten or so online profiles at various websites. Think of the potential these profiles have to bring in free traffic to your website. With each link to your site you increase its visibility, but you also add to the power of the web working for you while you’re offline.

Whether you’re actively participating in these sites or not, your profile will almost always remain active and visible to anyone who stumbles across it. Advertising your website URL on any profile you set up makes sense. Of course, you may have a niche site that you don’t want associated with certain profiles. In that case, you may only want to share your URL when the network you are on is more generalized, or geared toward a larger audience.

If you use Gmail, you can now create a profile that Google creates as a webpage. When someone does a search for you or a site you are associated with, the profile will show up at the top of your search. This is a great way to advertise your site, as Google allows you to add unlimited links and references on this profile. Take advantage of this marketing tool to get traffic to your website.

One of the easiest ways to facilitate the sharing of your site URL is by providing links for readers or visitors to “share this site” with others (as the ones you can see below this post) usually in the form of little favicons or buttons–basically a recognizable image that is linked to a social network, a feed reader, or a link aggregating service. Examples of these types of sites include Stumble Upon, Delicious, or Google Reader.

If you post regularly on a company blog, it makes sense to have these buttons automatically inserted at the ending of every post. If a reader likes what you have to say, they can choose the button that is appropriate, and send a link to your blog post to other via a tweet on Twitter, a link on Delicious, a Digg, or even by email.

There are almost unlimited sites through which you can share, though you need an account on whichever ones you personally want to share through. To post the buttons on your blog post, you do not need to have an account with each site.

If you use a self-hosted Wordpress site, consider adding a plug-in that will automatically add these sharing buttons to each post. Your readers can then easily share your site with the click of the mouse, and giving them this convenience helps bring in more consistent traffic, at no cost to you.

If you haven’t yet jumped on the social networking bandwagon, do so now! If you think that networking through being social and having fun isn’t beneficial to doing business–think again.

Social networking has quickly become one of the most efficient ways to get the word out about what businesses have to offer. Whether it’s through Twitter or Facebook, many are enjoying the benefits of a large audience centered in one small location–at the same time.

One of the newest trends in social networking is participation in parties that are hosted in real time on Twitter. A website’s equivalent to a “housewarming” party, these gatherings bring thousands of social networkers together in a chat room type atmosphere. For anywhere from one to several hours, the marketing hosts talk about and spread the benefits of your website, product, and/or services.

Another new trend is the creation of “fan pages” on Facebook. Individual companies are creating pages (the web’s equivalent to an individual website). As each user marks your page as a favorite, their entire list of contacts is notified. So essentially for each fan you gain of your website, you can receive up to thousands of free referrals to your page.

It’s not too late to use social networking to your advantage. Begin participating in these sites today and you’ll be on your way to driving free traffic to your website without much effort.

There are many ways to draw in traffic to your website through the use of multimedia, and photos are no exception. You may wonder how a photo can bring in visitors, but there are several ideas you may not have considered. And no–you don’t need to run a photography website or blog for this to work either!

If you have a free photo service account, or participate in any of the popular social networking programs–you have a way to entice potential customers to your sites.

Think of a photo as a marketing tool. A billboard in smaller form, pictures tell the story. If you run a website on restoring antique cars, you can try taking a photo of a restored vehicle and posting it on your networks, your profiles, or your blog.

Popular networks such as MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook even now allow the uploading of photos through mobile devices. Most will also allow you to leave a caption in case the photo doesn’t speak for itself. The photo itself will usually link back to your site, or a profile where you have your site URL located for readers to see.

This is just one great way to use photos to gain free website traffic. Get creative and find other uses for those relevant photos you have!

Bringing in free traffic to your website via online means such as forum posting, blog commenting, or social networking is fast and efficient. It serves another purpose though–bringing in traffic while you’re not even online.

When you leave a comment on a blog or forum, with your website address link in your signature line, you are allowing the power of the web to work for you. Each link you leave remains on that site permanently, and you by regularly participating in forum posting or commenting in this way, you continually add to your incoming traffic.

Social networking also brings in free traffic while you are offline, though in a slightly different way. The nature of Facebook and Twitter are that updates are continuous. If you post an update with a link to your site, it will eventually be buried and no longer as valuable for traffic. However, these social networking platforms allow generous opportunities for advertising your website links on your profile.

By taking the time to create an attractive and complete profile on Facebook or Twitter, you will draw the attention of potential visitors to your site. Remember to keep updating regularly though–it’s these updates that get readers to your profile, which is where your site links are located.

If you’re looking for a quick way to bring more traffic to your site than you’ve had in a long time, running contests is the way to go. You might think that you need an expensive item to give away, but people really are happy to get anything that’s free. Offer a book, a small gift basket, or a free sample of whatever product or service you sell through your website. Gift certificates work well too, and are cheap to mail to the winners.

Once you’ve decided what to give away, put up a post on your company blog with the parameters of the contest. Give yourself a few weeks before the deadline to enter if you want to maximize the number of entries. The longer the contest runs the more exposure you’ll get as readers pass the link along to others who may be interested in entering.

Besides the traditional “shout outs” through social networking, you can also now advertise your contest through websites such as Prizey. These contest-listing sites are usually free, and you reach thousands of people already interested in entering a contest. Of those, even if 3% of them visit your site and enter your contest, you’re doing quite well.

Remember, you’re marketing yourself just by running the contests, even if the product you are offering is unrelated to your site. It helps to offer a product or service that is relevant though, so that entrants will have a reason to return to your site–even when you aren’t having a giveaway.