The answer might surprise you.

Even if you don’t use any of those “sketchy” ways to build your follower list automatically, you can produce real results on Twitter in as little as ten minutes per day.

What’s the trick?  Limit your self-promotion.  Instead of bombarding people with your links until they’re sick of you, try sharing quality information and insight in nine quick posts per day.  Feel free to link to one of your own pages with the tenth.

You can vary the time a little day to help get your message to different people.  That might help build the follower list faster.  Don’t worry, though, you’ll get followers.  People re-tweet quality posts and notice people who are there to give instead of just taking.

If you’re doing things the right way, though, you can get your numbers up and start using Twitter as a free source of traffic with very little time consumption involved.

You don’t need to tweet all day and night to make things happen!

Their evidence?  It usually involves their own little tests featuring content of questionable quality or the use of strategies that deviate from best practices.  And while some will buy the naysayers’ stories hook, line and sinker, many of us will just go quietly back to generating a consistent and impressive flow of traffic via the very practice everyone else is burying.

Article marketing will last.  That’s because it’s not based on a hole in the system, an algorithmic shortcoming or a new fad that Google hasn’t caught up with.  Article marketing is based on a solid, logical model.

Which is why thousands of people can use it every day to generate free traffic.

Even though it just died for the umpteenth time!

You can participate in blog carnivals by searching for sites that host blog carnivals or by hosting your own. Links are collected and then posted for blog readers to click through like a magazine. For readers, a blog carnival is a great way to find information and posts on a topic of interest. For bloggers, it’s a great way to get free traffic back to their site.

Whether you’re creating your own carnival or participating in someone else’s, a blog carnival is free. You must write a post that pertains to the theme (for instance, pet care) and then submit your link to the blog carnival host, by the deadline. You can choose to participate in as many carnivals as you like, each one will bring unique traffic to your blog.

Though blog carnivals can be published weekly or monthly, the link backs to your content can continue long after it’s over as others discover your content.

Unfortunately, reaching a mass audience can be rather tricky if you don’t know how to go about it. Writing articles and submitting them to various article sites and portals can be the answer you’ve been looking for.

Once you’ve written an article (or hired a professional writer to do it for you), submit the article to various free article sites. Your articles should be relevant to your website and keyword rich in order for it to rank well in search results. One of the benefits of article submitting is that after the article has been submitted, there is little else to do. There is no additional maintenance needed.

Make sure that your articles contain links back to your main website. This way, readers and people looking for more information can click through to your site. Your site can gain a great deal of exposure by submitting your articles to multiple sites. This will result in authentic traffic from those who read your articles and click through to your main site for more information.

For instance, if you are selling fishing bait, you can talk about fishing or how to fish. You can make as many lens as you want with a link back to your website attached to each one. Your resources are huge when you use a Squidoo lens. How to articles and lost articles make great lens and people are going to want to see more about what you have to say.

Drive free traffic to your website with a lens and see the difference in a few days or weeks. Remember to do some social networking with Twitter to showcase your Squidoo lens and bring readers to your website this way. You can display a short sentence and a website link in less than 140 characters with Twitter or even Facebook.

For instance, if you are selling a work at home product that you think can help everyone. You might write an article about working from home. You can then add your website URL to link back. What you have done is intrigued the readers curiosity. They are going to click your link just to see what it is you have to offer. Become an authority on your niche and make many hubs that link back to your website. Hubs are free to create and stay online forever.

Every good backlink to your website helps you get higher up on the search engines and more people will see your website before others. Use a catchy title and watch the traffic flow.

Not only can they use Twitter, but they can use other social networking sites as well. Digg, MySpace, Reggit and StumbleUpon can also be a way to get free traffic. People read your website or buy a product and do a little social bookmarking on your behalf while recommending your website with a short testimonial about the site to others. Now you have hundreds if not thousands of people seeing the testimonial from someone else and they have to check it out to see for themselves.

Testimonials are a great way to driver free traffic to your website and keep it going. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to increase traffic this way.

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.

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.

After you sign up with Wordpress, you will want to choose a blog name. Creating a blog is a lot like making an online newsletter that will share information about you, your company, or your product. You can post weekly updates–or daily if you have time–the choice is yours. The free Wordpress platform is exactly that–free.

You might consider paying a small amount to have a writer compose your blog posts for you, especially if you have trouble with grammar and spelling. In order to make the readers click through to your website from the blog, you will want to project a professional image. The free platform makes it easy to create a professional looking blog, but it’s up to you to make sure the content in the blog posts is relevant and accurate.